St. Louis ? Homicides were up in St. Louis this year and held steady in Kansas City, officials with police departments in both cities said Thursday.

With one day to go in 2004, St. Louis recorded 114 homicides, compared with 73 in 2003. Police Chief Joe Mokwa said the 2003 number was uncharacteristically low and the 2004 total was still the third-lowest in nearly four decades. The city had 113 killings in 2002, 148 in 2001 and 123 in 2000.

“The focus was the same. It just didn’t go as effectively as we wanted,” Mokwa said. “It’s still a pretty good number historically for this city, but I think we can do better.”

In Kansas City, 90 homicides were reported this year, compared with 92 in 2003. Many of this year’s killings allegedly came at the hands of one serial killer.

Terry A. Blair, 43, of Kansas City, Mo., is charged in the deaths of eight women. Police said seven of the bodies were found this year, one in 2003. Jackson County Prosecutor Mike Sanders has called Blair “one of the most prolific alleged serial killers in this community’s history.”

Both cities saw the number of homicides peak in 1993 — St. Louis with 267, Kansas City with 153 — at the height of gang activity in both communities.

Since then, the homicide rate has gradually declined on both sides of the state.

In St. Louis, police reported more acquaintance and relationship homicides this year.

“It seemed like we had several instances of boyfriend-girlfriend relationships, people who had personal disputes,” Mokwa said. And many of those killings involved people with long criminal records.

Drugs were also a factor in many of the crimes.

“It’s sad, but I think three-fourths of our homicides are drug-related,” said Darin Snapp, public information officer for the Kansas City Police Department.

The 2004 statistics reflect only crimes that happened this year. Kansas City officers also solved several crimes from previous years this year.

Lorenzo Gilyard, 53, was arrested in April and charged with strangling a dozen women, all but one of them prostitutes, between 1977 and 1993. He pleaded not guilty.

Gilyard was arrested after police used money from a federal grant to begin DNA testing of evidence in the city’s cold case files.

DNA evidence also paid off in June when Jackson County prosecutors charged Clifton L. Ray Jr., 44, with killings from 1987 and 1990. Ray was already in prison for strangling Bobby J. Robertson, 68, in 1994. If not for the additional charges, he was due to be paroled June 27.

Associated Press Writer Heather Hollingsworth contributed to this story from Kansas City.