Baton Rouge, La. ? Someone has posted a stark reminder for the thousands of Louisiana State University students returning next week for the fall semester: “Killer on the loose!!! Please be careful. Love, Mom.”

It’s not clear who put up the signs along a tree-lined path near a popular campus lake. But with no arrest in the serial slayings of three women and growing fear in Louisiana’s capital, many parents are repeating the same message.

A jogger runs by a sign stapled to a telephone pole that reads: Killer

Joan Wallace reminded her 21-year-old daughter, Dana, of a few rules: Don’t go to the gas station late at night. Be more aware of strange cars. Keep your pepper spray in your hand, not just on your key chain.

“I’m probably more conscious of (safety) now. I mean you’re always nervous anyhow sending them off to school,” Joan Wallace said from her home in Mandeville, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans. “They just have to be careful. We are making her call if she’s going to be coming home late from work.”

Since the slayings began last September, merchants report higher sales of guns and pepper spray to women. And women say they refuse to walk alone in the city of 230,000. A task force has been set up to find the serial killer and determine whether any of the city’s 37 unsolved murders of women over the past decade are linked.

More than 30,000 students are expected to begin returning to LSU next week. Campus orientation begins Monday, dorms open Thursday and classes begin Aug. 26.

“For my night classes, I don’t want to drive there alone,” said Hillary Golden, a 22-year-old senior. “I’m making deals with my guy friends, that one of them will drop me off to my night classes and one will pick me up.”

Golden also bought pepper spray, signed up for a self-defense class and refuses to answer the door if she doesn’t know who’s on the other side. Friends must call before they visit.

“I made sure my roommate and I were both home for when the cable guy came over,” she said.

Several botched kidnapping attempts in Baton Rouge and two neighboring parishes have added to the fear. Police said they were checking to see whether the crimes were connected to each other or the murders.

The murder victims Pam Kinamore, Gina Wilson Green and Charlotte Murray Pace shared few similarities. Police said the only real links were the lack of any sign of forced entry in the women’s homes and DNA evidence showing the same man stabbed Pace, strangled Green and slit Kinamore’s throat.

Pace, 22, and Green, 41, lived near the university and Pace had just graduated from LSU. The bodies of Pace, who died in May, and Green, killed last September, were found in their homes.

Kinamore, 44, lived farther away and was the most recent victim. She was abducted July 12, and her body was found days later, dumped 30 miles outside Baton Rouge.

The murders were linked to the same killer by DNA evidence last month. When that happened, Golden drove to her parents’ house in New Orleans each night after work.

She stays at her own place now, but she’s nervous.

“Even when I sit outside on my porch to smoke a cigarette, I think, ‘What if someone’s watching me go back into my apartment?”‘ she said.

The university is increasing police patrols, adding safety seminars, improving campus lighting and starting a safety information Web page. Dormitories also will start using a 24-hour swipe card system developed before the serial killings occurred, and LSU police have added frequent bike patrols around the lake.