NAACP Says Police Need Help Solving Murders;...

The local NAACP says Raleigh police need county, state and federal help to successfully solve a string of slayings in Raleigh last year, which the group implied might be the work of a serial killer.

President of the Raleigh-Apex chapter of the organization, H.B. Pickett, had some suggestions for police.

Police insist they are making progress. Officers arrested Leman Evans Wednesday in connection with one of six unsolved slayings of poor, black women last year.

In a related development Thursday, police finally identified the woman whose badly decomposed body was found more than four months ago at a south Raleigh construction site.

Cynthia Louise Brown, 32, was the fifth of six black women mysteriously slain last year. Investigators had not been able to determine who she was even though police had arrested her more than two dozen times over the past 14 years.

Maj. Otis Hinton said Brown's body had decomposed badly in the two weeks before she was discovered. He said she was identified through her fingerprints.

Brown's strangled body was found Aug. 22. She had an extensive record of drug, theft and prostitution arrests, and may have been killed within days of her release from state prison Aug. 3.

At a news conference Thursday afternoon, NAACP officials asked police not to refer to the slain women as prostitutes unless they had been convicted of the crime.

- From staff and wire reports