Suspect Kills Himself After Murder of Us Sex Offenders

A Canadian man wanted in the US in connection with the murder of two registered sex offenders shot himself on a crowded bus, police said yesterday.

As a web register carrying the names, addresses and photographs of 2,200 sex offenders in the state of Maine remained offline yesterday, investigators tried to establish a connection between the two men shot dead in their homes on Easter Day and the young Canadian, who had been in the state visiting his father.

Joseph Gray, 57, was shot at about 3am at his home in Corinth in central Maine. Five hours later and 80 miles away, there was a knock at the door of William Elliott, 24, in the town of Milo. Elliott, like Gray, was a registered sex offender, and had served four months for abuse in 2002.

"He went to the door, opened it up, and the guy just started shooting," the man's father, Wayne Elliott, told the Bangor Daily News yesterday. "He kept shooting after he fell to the floor."

Late that evening, aboard a Boston-bound bus, Stephen Marshall, 20, shot himself in the head, splattering his fellow passengers with blood. He killed himself as police boarded the vehicle, just outside the bus station in Boston.

Police had described Marshall, 20, from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, as a person of interest in the case after a witness to one of the shootings supplied the authorities with the registration number of a vehicle that was traced to his father, who lives in Maine. The silver-coloured pick-up truck was later found abandoned in the state capital, Bangor, where Marshall boarded a bus for Boston

Stephen McCausland, a spokesman for the Maine state police, said it was not known whether Marshall, or his father, knew the two men. It was also not known whether Marshall had ever been a victim of abuse. "We don't have a conclusion. We don't have a link. We don't have a connection," Mr McCausland said. "We have a team of detectives following up on the case, but still no definitive answer on what sparked this violence."

The Easter bloodshed was the second recent case linked to public directories of sex offenders. Last year a man in Washington state, Michael Anthony Mullen, admitted killing two convicted child rapists. He told the court he had traced the offenders using an online register. He was sentenced to more than 40 years in prison.