An inmate serving life in Florida has confessed to killing six people in Pennsylvania in the 1970s, state police said Wednesday.
Pennsylvania State Police investigators obtained the confessions in March from Edward A. Surratt at a state prison in Raiford, Florida, the agency announced.
Surratt, now 79, a truck driver and former resident of Aliquippa, implicated himself in four cases — the 1977 slayings of William and Nancy Adams in Beaver County, Guy and Laura Mills near Bedford and Joel Krueger near McConnellsburg and the 1978 death of John Shelkons in Beaver County.
State police said county prosecutors do not plan to prosecute Surratt, who is serving two life sentences in Florida and was convicted of murder in South Carolina.
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State police made contact with Surratt in 2018, leading to new information about the six Pennsylvania deaths.
In 2007, Surratt told an interviewer he was involved in Pennsylvania and Ohio killings dating to the 1970s. Surratt has been incarcerated since October 1978.
Surratt once faced charges in Shelkons' death, but a judge dismissed them in 1980, citing Surratt's other convictions and the security risk of transporting him to Pennsylvania for trial, according to a contemporaneous account in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
