KALAMAZOO (AP) — A woman whose close friend was slain 29
years ago has started a petition drive to keep the victim’s
suspected killer behind bars.

Hazel Brophy’s petition will urge Texas Gov. Rick Perry to
do what he can to prevent Coral Eugene Watts from being released
from prison in 2006 — although Perry’s hands are tied
by Texas’ mandatory-release laws.

Watts confessed to 13 slayings in Michigan and elsewhere, and
police suspect he killed dozens of other women, including several
in Ann Arbor. That would make him one of the most prolific serial
killers in U.S. history.

Watts was born in Texas and moved to the Detroit suburb of
Inkster after his parents divorced.

Following his arrest in Texas in 1982, he agreed to plead guilty
to a charge of burglary with intent to commit murder in exchange
for receiving immunity from prosecution for the confessed
killings.

Watts admitted to killing 11 Texans and one Michigan woman
— Detroit News reporter Jeanne Clyne, 35, who was stabbed to
death with a woodworking tool in 1979 as she walked home from a
doctor’s appointment. He also confessed to strangling a
14-year-old Texas girl.

Although he did not receive immunity in the teen’s death,
prosecutors lacked the evidence to go after him.

At the time of the plea deal, authorities thought the 60-year
prison sentence Watts received would keep him behind bars until he
was in his 80s. So did the victims’ relatives who gave their
approval.

But mandatory-release laws aimed at relieving prison crowding in
Texas require Watts to be discharged on May 8, 2006, at age 52,
unless he loses good-behavior credits.

Brophy and other survivors of Watts’ alleged victims are
collecting signatures to send to Perry.

But the only apparent way to keep Watts in prison would be to
convict him of a crime unrelated to the plea deal.

Lt. Bill Hanger of the Michigan State Police Southeast Criminal
Investigation Division in Livonia leads a task force looking into
about 150 unsolved cases from the Detroit area and another 75 from
the rest of the state.

Watts is “a strong suspect in about 20 or so” of
those cases, Hanger recently told the Kalamazoo Gazette.

He said some had physical evidence “that’s in
various stages of being tested for DNA.”

Brophy, a 48-year-old Portage resident, began working to keep
Watts behind bars when she learned police were investigating the
possibility that his first victim was her close friend.