Prosecutors: Inmate confessed to killing 4 women in 1990

By JIM SALTER
Associated Press

CLAYTON, Mo. (AP) — St. Louis-area prosecutors say a convicted murderer serving a life sentence for killing a man in 1995 has confessed to strangling four women five years earlier. Prosecutors from Lincoln, St. Charles and St. Louis counties, which was where the victims’ bodies were found, said Monday that Gary Muehlberg, a 73-year-old inmate at the Potosi Correctional Center in southeastern Missouri, confessed to the 1990 killings. They say he did so after O’Fallon police Detective Jodi Weber reopened one of the cases and linked the woman’s death to Muehlberg through DNA testing. Muehlberg was sentenced to life in prison in 1995 for the killing of Kenneth Atchison. Prosecutors say Muehlberg agreed to cooperate in exchange for them not pursuing the death penalty.