Kansas City, Mo. ? When six bodies turned up on vacant property in an impoverished inner city neighborhood, the community repeatedly told officers to look at one man: Terry Blair, an ex-convict from a violent background and with a criminal history of his own.

Arrested last week on a parole violation, Blair had been released just seven months earlier after serving 21 years of a 25-year sentence for killing his pregnant ex-girlfriend — whom he was angry with because she was working as a prostitute.

Blair’s mother killed a man but received probation. One of his brothers was executed for another killing, and a half-brother was sentenced to life in prison for kidnapping and other charges.

The terrorized neighborhood spent last weekend wondering whether Terry Blair would be charged in the killings of the six women whose bodies were found in an 18-block area east of downtown.

Many in the community expressed relief after Blair was charged Tuesday with one count of first-degree murder. The charge was filed after police determined semen found on the body of 38-year-old Sheliah McKinzie was Blair’s. Police have asked prosecutors to charge Blair in three assault/rape cases, as well as the deaths of the five other women.

Police had earlier said that they believed the six homicides were the work of one killer.

Jackson County Prosecutor Mike Sanders said Blair, the fourth oldest of 10 children, is eligible for the death penalty because of his prior conviction for the 1982 murder of Angela Monroe, the mother of two of his children.

Mother

Blair’s mother, Janice Blair, went no further in school than ninth grade and suffered from mental illness, court records show. She raised the children in what Terry Blair later described to a parole officer as poverty.

On Aug. 16, 1978, prosecutors said she shot and killed Elton E. Gray with a .38 caliber revolver. She entered an Alford plea to a charge of second-degree murder, in which she did not admit wrongdoing but acknowledged that prosecutors had enough evidence to convict her.

She was sentenced to five years’ probation. As a condition of parole, she was directed to receive outpatient counseling, therapy and psychiatric treatment.

Fougere called the sentence unusually light. Court records offered no explanation, and Tom Cox, the attorney who represented her, couldn’t recall the case.

Brother

The next year, one of her children, Walter Blair Jr., was charged in a murder-for-hire scheme.

Police said a rape suspect Walter Blair met in jail offered to pay him $6,000 to kill Katherine Jo Allen before she could testify at trial. Allen, 21, was the alleged victim in the rape case.

According to court records, Walter Blair confessed to abducting the art student from her apartment, taking her to a vacant lot and shooting her as she begged for her life.

Walter Blair later recanted, and his clemency request raised questions about the credibility of the state’s chief witness. He was executed in 1993.

Half-brother

Another of Janice Blair’s children, Clifford Miller, was sentenced the next year to two life terms, plus 240 years.

The sentence stemmed from the June 1992 abduction of a woman from a bar. After shooting the woman in the arm, prosecutors said Miller drove her to an abandoned house where he ordered her to perform oral sex on him at gunpoint and beat her until she passed out.

She was hospitalized for more than two months, recovering from the gunshot wound in her arm, a fractured skull, a broken jaw and smashed cheekbones.

Almost a year later, a friend persuaded the victim to go to a bar, where she saw her attacker. Miller was arrested and later charged with counts that included kidnapping and forcible sodomy.