The Killing Cousins David Allen Gore and Fred Waterfield

On the eve of his death penalty trial for the 1983 abduction, rape and murder of a Vero Beach High School senior, David Alan Gore told authorities what they had long suspected: Lynn Elliott, 17, wasn’t his first killing.

She was his sixth, Gore, then 29, confessed to prosecutors in November 1983.

Gore, 58, admitted killing six women in Indian River County between 1981 and 1983. Most were sexually assaulted, some were tortured and others were dismembered and buried in hidden graves in citrus groves west of Vero Beach.

Through police investigations, interviews with Gore and his cousin and co-defendant Fred Waterfield, 59, authorities uncovered evidence the one-time Indian River County sheriff’s auxiliary deputy targeted at least a dozen women for kidnap and rape beginning in 1976, often with Waterfield’s participation.

In his initial sworn statements, Gore fingered Waterfield as the killer, but after a jailhouse religious “awakening,” Gore renounced his lies, changed his confession and in October 1984 took responsibility for the six murders.

Waterfield, he said, was his accomplice.