On this day, June 26, in 1957, local jazz musician Melvin Rees shot and killed a woman on a country road near Annapolis, leading to a case known as the Sex Beast killings.

Margaret Harold had been shot then raped. Nearby, police found an abandoned building full of violent pornography and autopsy photos of murdered women.

Two years later, the bodies of Carroll Jackson and his wife, Mildred, and their two small children were found near Apple Grove, Va.

Tips led to Rees in Arkansas. Inside his saxophone case, they found a gun and a newspaper clipping about the Jacksons' slaying with a note, "Now the mother and daughter were mine."

Rees was convicted of killing Harold and the Jackson family. He confessed to two other murders. He died in prison in 1995.