Kansas City, Mo. ? A man who is serving 20 years for second-degree murder has been linked by DNA evidence to at least two other killings and may have once worked with a man charged with strangling a dozen women, authorities told The Kansas City Star.

The man is identified only as a 45-year-old who was convicted in 1995 of strangling a 68-year-old man in an apartment complex. Authorities said he also was charged in a 1993 stabbing death of another tenant of that apartment building, but the charge was dismissed.

Police at one time also believed he was involved in two other mysterious deaths at or near the same building. He earlier had been charged with a 1979 rape and 1987 killing, but those cases were dismissed for lack of evidence.

Authorities said Friday the man apparently knew Lorenzo Gilyard and at one point may have worked with him. Gilyard was charged last month with killing 12 women and girls, the most slayings by one person in Missouri history.

“We are investigating any possibility that the two may have acted together,” said Jackson County Prosecutor Mike Sanders.

The suspect is in prison and poses no threat as the investigation continues, Sanders said. He is scheduled for a parole hearing on the 1995 murder conviction June 21. He was denied parole in 1999.

The new investigation is part of an effort by Kansas City police to match DNA left at crime scenes with DNA in a database of convicted felons to solve old crimes. Two other Kansas City men have been charged recently with killings based on DNA evidence.

Daniel O. Jones, who is serving a life-without-parole sentence for stabbing a woman to death, pleaded guilty this year in the stabbing deaths of three other women because of DNA evidence against him. He was given an extra 20-year sentence for those killings.

All were killed between 1998 and 2001 after Jones was paroled in 1996 for raping a teacher at a high school.

Authorities also used DNA evidence to charge Dawud Abdelmalik, a paroled rapist, with murder after evidence linked him to a 1980 killing. In that case, a woman was bound, sexually assaulted and strangled — the same pattern by which nine women in Kansas City were killed in the early 1980s.

Gilyard was charged with one of those killings, but authorities said they now are looking for evidence that Abdelmalik might be responsible for the others, The Star reported.

It may not be that unusual to have multiple serial killers in the same city, experts said, but more are being brought to justice by DNA and society’s growing awareness of them.

There still are more than 30 unsolved deaths of women or girls from 1977 to 1993 with patterns that suggest possible serial killings.

An additional 40 killings of girls and women in Kansas City between 1994 and 2002 also remain unsolved, police said.