By MALCOLM GAY

ST. LOUIS — Even for the hardest of ring-hardened wrestling fans on hand here for the $2 beers and homegrown grappling action, Gary Jackson’s recent Saturday night victory was a particular outrage.

Mr. Jackson’s rivals had clawed his eyes. They had drubbed him from behind, hurled him on his back and gouged his face with the soles of their boots. All in a night’s work for a man like Mr. Jackson, until, that is, his opponents were disqualified for kicking the referee in the head.

Dressed in shiny yellow briefs and matching kneepads, Mr. Jackson, who wrestles under the name Gorgeous Gary, grabbed a beer from a nearby fan as he descended the ring to join his wrestling partner and demand a rematch. “We don’t want no win by no stinking disqualification,” Mr. Jackson yelled into a microphone after pouring the half-drunk beer over his head. “We want the 1-2-3!”

Virginia Lee Hunter for The New York Times

And so went another night at the South Broadway Athletic Club, where for more than a century wrestling fans have watched an evolving crew of local heroes slug it out in the beery St. Louis night.

Just south of the city’s downtown, the athletic club, known locally as the South Broadway, has been host to such midcentury luminaries as Pat O’Connor, and many of its current wrestlers are quick to point out that the World Wrestling Entertainment star Randy Orton got his start here.

Still, in the steamy upstairs locker room of pea green walls, communal showers and wheezing floor fans, the legends that once rose from the club’s mat seem like distant, if closely held, memories.

Many of the younger men still dream of the big time, but the older hands in this motley collection of gasoline station attendants and truck drivers recognize their dim prospects of making it in W.W.E.’s army of beefcakes.

These are men (and a few women) who watched wrestling as children, maybe played a little high school football and now come out a few times a month to wrestle for hometown honor, a touch of fame and maybe a few dollars. While some work out with weights, many carry several extra pounds into the ring, which they conceal under costumes of modified flannel pajamas, hand-cut muscle shirts and Lycra pants.

Virginia Lee Hunter for The New York Times

“These guys aren’t making any money, maybe 35 bucks a night,” said Larry Matysik, a former wrestling announcer, promoter and author of “Wrestling at the Chase,” a history of wrestling in St. Louis. “Even in the heyday of St. Louis wrestling, the South Broadway Athletic Club was the rookie league — A League tops, sometimes dropping as low as beer league softball compared to Major League Baseball.”

Humble, yes, but when the wrestling world consolidated in the 1980s and many of the city’s larger wrestling promotions folded, the South Broadway endured. Today, wrestling at the club remains largely unchanged thanks to Tony Casta and Herbert Simmons, the promoters who usually put on two shows a month: one at the South Broadway, and another at a community center in East Carondelet, Ill.

“It’s like being a dope addict,” said Mr. Casta, 69, a retired pipe fitter who wrestled as Little Dynamite Tony Casta. “I’m not a dope addict, I’m not an alcoholic, but I want that wrestling — so I got to stick with it.”

Mr. Casta, a small man with forearm tattoos and a few crushed fingers — souvenirs from his days in the ring — helps train his wrestlers at a nearby gym. Mr. Simmons, the mayor of tiny East Carondelet and known as Big Herb, acts as a play-by-play announcer for the shows, which are broadcast on two public access television stations.

Their homegrown productions may be several rungs beneath mainstream wrestling, but the promoters insist that their shows, which attract a mix of beer-swilling wrestling fans and families with young children, offer something that is absent in the big television productions: heart.

“Our guys will go in there and they’ll go 20-25 minutes and it will be nonstop action,” Mr. Simmons said. “Because these guys have the intestinal fortitude — they want to entertain. We have the mystique to it. We throw different angles in there.”

One of those angles comes in the form of Paul McKnight, a truck driver who wrestles under the name Moondog Rover. A clear crowd favorite, Mr. McKnight, 42, carries a bone and barks like a dog as he enters the ring. He has a bushy blond beard that reaches past his sternum, and he wrestles in a pair of cut-off blue jeans held up by a piece of rope.

“I’ve done everything from your standard matches all the way up to your hardcore stuff with barbed wire, chairs and ladders,” said Mr. McKnight, adding that his wrestling career “might have gotten in the way of one or two relationships.”

“I’m up front with them,” he said. “This is what I do for fun, so you’re going to have to live with it, and like I said: some like it, some don’t.”

Another crowd favorite is Jeremy Jones, who wrestles under the name Jeremy Lightfoot. An 11-year veteran of the ring, Mr. Jones, 26, trained his wife, Jennifer, to wrestle. Three years ago, Ms. Jones, also 26, began wrestling under the name Alexis but stopped when she discovered she was pregnant.

Virginia Lee Hunter for The New York Times

The couple now perform occasional tag team matches together, and Mr. Jones says they enjoy their local celebrity, confiding, “We enter Six Flags through the back.” But while they are teaching their son some wrestling moves and hope that he will become a wrestler, they also worry about how their lives in the ring may be affecting him.

“When we tell him that I’m going to a show, he constantly asks, ‘Is Daddy going to get bloody?’ ” Mr. Jones said. “I’m trying to explain to him that what Daddy does in the ring is a job. It’s a show. It’s work, you know. Don’t go out and find a barbed wire fence and throw your friends into it.”

Like so many wrestlers here, Mr. Jones clearly relishes his role as a hero to his son and the throngs of children that come to see him perform.

“Lightfoot’s not just about wrestling, he’s about standing up for what you believe in,” Mr. Jones said.

Others, like Gorgeous Gary Jackson, say they occasionally use their wrestling skills outside the ring.

“Every now and then, yes, I have to use a little wrestling to maintain order,” said Mr. Jackson, a deputy for the city sheriff’s department. “I try to do everything possible to avoid it, but every now and then I got to earn that money.”

Like many wrestlers here, Mr. Jackson, who in his 24-year wrestling career had a brief stint on the national circuit, said he no longer had the taste for the big leagues.

“I’m just going to do this till the body can’t take it no more,” Mr. Jackson said, “or Father Time says, ‘Hey, it’s over with you.’ ”

Originally published with an accompanying slideshow in The New York Times.

By MALCOLM GAY

APPLE CREEK CONSERVATION AREA, Mo. — Mist clung to the oaks here as Arron Hendershott, a spear in one hand and a Stone Age weapon known as an atlatl in the other, stalked his prey.

Mr. Hendershott, who could hear but not see his quarry, engaged the six-foot spear into a hook at the end of his atlatl, an ancient throwing device that uses leverage to sharply increase the speed and distance a spear can travel.

Early humans used the weapon to kill mastodons. Seventeen thousand years later, Mr. Hendershott had more modest plans. He was hunting a two-pound squirrel.

“This really is overkill,” said Mr. Hendershott, who works for the Missouri Department of Conservation. Like other primitive-weapons enthusiasts, Mr. Hendershott has been brushing up on his atlatl skills ever since Missouri announced this year that it would allow the weapon for hunting deer.

“You can send one of these things through a garage door — don’t ask me how I know that,” said Mr. Hendershott, who is preparing for the season by throwing spears down from his porch to mimic the perspective of a deer blind.

For decades, weapons buffs have quietly taught themselves ancient hunting techniques by making atlatls, bows, slings and spears out of crude materials. But in an era of high-velocity bullets and infrared scopes, which some say leach the challenge from hunting, atlatl and spear proponents have been lobbying state wildlife agencies to allow them to hunt big game with Stone Age weapons, a practice now explicitly legal only here in Missouri and in Alabama.

“It’s part of our heritage,” said Ron Mertz, president of the 30-member Missouri Atlatl Association, which lobbied for the new hunting season. “There’s a romance about it.”

The word “atlatl” comes from the Aztec. The mechanism, still used by a handful of Inuit fisherman to kill seals, allows a skilled thrower to launch a spear roughly 100 yards. Anthropologists say the weapon, an early complex tool, gave Homo sapiens a critical evolutionary edge.

“It’s one of the first mechanical inventions, maybe the first, to augment human power,” said John Whittaker, an anthropologist at Grinnell College in Iowa. “You don’t have to get close to big animals.”

One driving force behind the lobbying campaigns is Gene Morris, 77, who, at his museum in Summerdale, Ala., displays some of the 548 big game animals he says he has killed with spears. Many primitive weapons enthusiasts, he says, follow a familiar pattern: from rifle to muzzleloader to bow to atlatl to spear alone.

“It got too easy,” said Mr. Morris, who says that he has — on 43 separate occasions — killed two animals at once by throwing a spear from each hand. “I’m actively working on throwing three spears at once,” he said.

Some state wildlife agencies have balked at allowing atlatls for large game seasons, fearing that a poorly thrown spear, or “dart,” would cause an animal unnecessary suffering. In 2006, the Pennsylvania Game Commission denied an effort to legalize atlatl deer hunting.

But enthusiasts say they are proficient with their weapons and would hurl spears only at animals they knew they could kill cleanly.

“You owe it to the deer to practice,” said Mr. Hendershott, who after hours of searching for squirrels and carp never laid eyes on either.

The secret to killing small game with an atlatl is to throw at thousands of them, said Ray Madden of Joplin, Mo., who is on record as having been the first person in the state to kill a squirrel with the weapon — a feat he accomplished while en route to his mailbox.

“I would really like to kill a deer with an atlatl before I die,” said Mr. Madden, 74. “But I’m going to have to hurry.”

Originally published in The New York Times.

ST. LOUIS — They call this the Gateway to the West, but for the past six decades that gateway has more resembled an exit, as this city, once the nation’s fourth largest, has lost roughly half a million people.

Though recent estimates had given city officials reason to believe the downward trend had finally stalled, those hopes were dashed Thursday when the Census Bureau released new data showing that the city’s population had shrunk by 29,000 over the last decade — an 8.3 percent decline that brings the population to 319,000, its lowest level since 1870.

Census figures report a similar decline in Birmingham, Ala., which hemorrhaged 30,000 people since 2000, a loss of nearly 13 percent. The losses in St. Louis and Birmingham — as measured as a percentage of the population — are outstripped only by that in New Orleans, which had a 29 percent decline caused in part by Hurricane Katrina.

“This is absolutely bad news. We had thought, given many of the other positive trends, that 50 years of population losses had finally reversed direction,” Mayor Francis G. Slay of St. Louis wrote on his blog. “I believe that this will require an urgent and thorough rethinking of how we do almost everything.”

The losses in St. Louis are but the latest disappointing growth figures for Missouri, which is set to lose a Congressional seat after Census figures that showed, for the first time, larger growth in the West than in the Midwest.

Demographers said they had expected gentrification to buoy the city’s population, but instead St. Louis posted a decline of 14,000 white residents, compounded by a loss of 21,000 black residents. By contrast, St. Louis County, which rings the city, noted an increase in its black population of 39,000, though that gain was overshadowed by a loss of 84,000 whites, for an overall population loss.

“There seems to be some black suburbanization going on in some of these counties,” said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. “Whites appear to be going further out.”

Meanwhile, the region experienced a greater dispersion of minorities, with many surrounding counties registering growth among Asians, blacks and Hispanics.

Census figures show a similar change has unfolded in Birmingham, a once-thriving town of steel mills whose flagship industries in recent decades have been health care and banking. With its population now at 212,237, the city counts only about 6,000 more residents than Montgomery, the state’s capital.

But while Birmingham has shrunk, its suburbs continue to undergo explosive growth. Neighboring Shelby County has grown by more than a third since 2000. While such growth may at one time have been attributable to white flight, it is no longer so simple. Shelby is still 80 percent white, but the county’s black population has doubled and its Hispanic population has grown by nearly 300 percent over the past decade.

“Cities are no longer the whole engine of the metropolitan area,” said Mr. Frey. “A lot of the jobs have gone to the suburbs, so you really have to look at the region as a whole.”

He added, “I wouldn’t look at it as doomsday.”

State and federal agents staged raids in several states, picking up individuals in Arkansas, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas.

In Missouri, prosecutors said members of a multistate ring routinely destroyed injured dogs by shooting them “in the head, throwing the dogs into the river or burning the dogs in a barrel.”

The arrests stem from the same investigation, but officials said the rings were not necessarily connected, and United States attorneys in four districts — the Eastern District of Missouri, the Western District of Missouri, the Southern District of Illinois and the Eastern District of Texas — will try the cases separately.

“The allegation is not that this was one concentrated, organized conspiracy,” said Don Ledford, a spokesman for the acting United States attorney for the Western District of Missouri, Matt Whitworth. “This was not one big ring.”

In Missouri, the authorities charged 12 people; in Texas federal prosecutors charged nine men; and in Illinois the authorities charged five men with, among other things, buying, selling and breeding animals for dogfighting.

“This is the largest coordinated rescue in U.S. history,” said Kathy Warnick, president of the Humane Society of Missouri, whose organization is caring for more than 300 of the dogs. “This is going to send a vehement message that dogfighting will not be tolerated in the civilized society.”

The investigation, which began 18 months ago after a tip from the Humane Society of Missouri, included investigators from the Humane Society, the F.B.I., the federal Department of Agriculture and various state agencies.

It is the most recent in a series of investigations that have taken place since President George W. Bush signed into law the 2007 Animal Fighting Prohibition Enforcement Act, which makes dogfighting a felony. Under the law, each of the counts could result in a maximum of five years imprisonment and a fine of up to $250,000.

Originally published in The New York Times.

ST. LOUIS

ONE telling measure of this city’s past glories and present challenges is this: The United States Census of 1950 reported roughly 850,000 people living in St. Louis; today the number is around 350,000. Or there’s this: In 1988, when Jonathan Franzen published “The Twenty-Seventh City,” a novel about real and fictional tribulations afflicting St. Louis, his title referred to the city’s plunge in rank to 27th largest in America from 4th in less than a century. If he wrote the book now, just two decades later, he would have to call it “The Fifty-Second City.”

Signs of the depleted population are everywhere, from the boarded-up houses that dot the city’s north side to the stubbornly vacant office buildings downtown.

Over the last 10 years, however, civic groups, private developers and city leaders have been trying to nurse downtown St. Louis back to life. Taking cues from revitalization drives in other midsize cities, they have created thousands of residential loft units. There is now a bookstore in the area, and next month a local grocery chain plans to open its first downtown branch.

But perhaps the most original — and conspicuous — step in the campaign is Citygarden, a 2.9-acre sculpture park that opened Wednesday on two blocks of the city’s central corridor, known as the Gateway Mall.

Financed by the Gateway Foundation, a nonprofit organization that installs public art in the St. Louis area, the park cost between $25 million and $30 million — which does not include the collection of 24 works by artists including Fernand Léger, Tony Smith, Jim Dine and Bernar Venet. (The foundation, which has a longstanding policy of not commenting to the news media, declined to disclose the collection’s value.)

Within walking distance of the Gateway Arch, the park is intended to bring tourists and art fans to the mall and to draw office workers and loft dwellers outside with an array of amenities. “It’s really a hybrid landscape,” said Warren Byrd, a principal of Nelson Byrd Woltz, the landscape architecture firm in Charlottesville, Va., that designed Citygarden. “It’s some combination of a city park and a sculpture garden.”

The sculpture collection, which includes both modern and contemporary works, is cosmopolitan in flavor, ranging from Mr. Dine’s whimsical treatment of Pinocchio in “Big White Gloves, Big Four Wheels” to the mysterious, egglike form of the Japanese sculptor Kan Yasudas’s “Door of Return.” Visitors can call up an Acoustiguide-style audio tour, read by prominent St. Louisians, by dialing a dedicated number on their cell phones.

The park’s other features include a cafe, a massive “spray plaza” and a split-level pool whose two parts are joined by a waterfall. A granite-capped “meander wall” snakes through the park’s southern portion, offering seating and spatial definition, while a complementary wall of Missouri limestone arcs diagonally through the northern section. The walls, Mr. Byrd said, were “our way of marking several territories in the site” — which was previously two empty squares of grass — and of linking the two blocks.

The park, shown below in a rendering by Nelson Byrd Woltz, has no formal entrances or barriers to segregate its manicured paths and quiet spaces from the streets around it.

“It has no limits,” said Mr. Byrd, whose firm also designed the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pa. “We wanted to make this site accessible to everybody.”

He added that the landscape included several “design gestures” — rows of Ginkgo trees, native plants, wide sidewalks — that could be extended to other portions of the Gateway Mall.

City planners say they share that vision, but for now they are looking to these two blocks to spur economic development on their own.

“There are several development opportunities right in the vicinity, and as the economy recovers, I think Citygarden will make those sites a lot more attractive,” said Barbara Geisman, the city’s executive director of development. “This is probably one of the best things that’s happened downtown in the last couple of decades.”

By MALCOLM GAY

ST. LOUIS — Zookeepers here feared the worst when they noticed that Jade, a 2-year-old elephant calf, was acting sluggish this month.

The calf was limping slightly, her appetite was down, and the keepers, wary of a deadly herpes virus prevalent in the country’s Asian elephant population, sent a blood sample to a laboratory for analysis.

“That’s pretty much the first thing we do when we see something amiss with our Asian elephant calves,” said Martha Fischer, curator of mammals at the St. Louis Zoo. “It’s such a mysterious disease, and it has presented itself in so many different ways — anything could be a symptom.”

Veterinarians began monitoring the 1,100-pound calf around the clock. They fed her fluids intravenously and started her on antiviral drugs. Still, her condition worsened.

Her head became swollen at the jaw and forehead, and her tongue, normally bubble-gum pink, became pale and speckled by an intricate pattern of red bruises. Results from the National Elephant Herpesvirus Laboratory at the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington soon revealed that Jade was fighting a previously unknown strain of the virus.

Researchers say the disease, elephant endotheliotropic herpesvirus, has killed one of five Asian elephant calves born in North American zoos since 2000. It accounts for more than half of all deaths of juvenile elephants in North America, and researchers, working with available tissue samples, estimate that it has killed some 24 elephants since 1983.

Still, the researchers know little about the disease, including how it is transmitted. Nor can they say whether it will remain dormant after its initial assault only to re-emerge, like some herpes viruses in humans.

The disease cannot be detected in the blood unless symptoms are evident, researchers say, and they are unsure what percentage of elephants carry any of the five known strains.

“We’re still trying to figure out the epidemiology,” said Laura Richman, the research associate who heads the Smithsonian laboratory that analyzed Jade’s blood sample. “We’re still trying to figure out how it’s transmitted, and why certain elephants die and others don’t.”

Ms. Richman, who first identified the virus in 1995, says that many mature elephants may carry a latent form of the disease but that calves may be more susceptible because their immune systems are not fully developed.

The virus exists in captive and wild elephant populations, Ms. Richman said, and often affects only one elephant at a time. “There aren’t big outbreaks where you’ll see whole herds of elephants coming down with the virus,” she said. “It’s probably just a matter of which elephants are shedding at what time, but we don’t know — whether it is a secretion of saliva or something else — we just don’t know how it’s transmitted.”

The virus infects the cells that line the body’s blood vessels, causing hemorrhaging. The subsequent vascular collapse often kills its victims within weeks or even days.

Antiviral drugs have been successful in six North American cases, but about twice as many calves have died from the virus even after receiving the drugs, leaving researchers uncertain about how best to fight it.

“We’re not sure that the drugs we’re using are effective against EEHV,” Ms. Fischer said. “We’re not sure what the dose should be. It’s a little bit of a shot in the dark.”

The St. Louis case is shaping up as a trove of information. Jade’s symptoms have largely subsided, Ms. Fischer said, and she appears to be recovering. Blood tests on the zoo’s seven other elephants revealed that another calf, Maliha, carried a very low level of the virus, and researchers say they believe the antiviral drugs she is receiving have stopped its progression.

“I’m not about to say Jade’s out of the woods, but we’re really pleased with her condition,” Ms. Fischer said. “We’re hoping to be able to go back and determine whether the drugs were effective.”

Asian elephants have been listed as an endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature since the mid-1980s. The organization further reports that a combination of ivory poaching and a loss of natural habitat have caused wild elephant numbers to plunge by about 50 percent in the past 75 years to 40,000 to 50,000.

Although experts say the elephant herpesvirus has evolved over millions of years, the dwindling population puts the species at greater risk from the disease.

There are a lot of unanswered questions about the disease, said Mike Keele, deputy director of the Oregon Zoo: “What’s the prevalence of it in the wild population, and how does it affect survivability?”

Mr. Keele said that his zoo’s elephant population had not suffered a herpes outbreak, but that zookeepers were training a 6-month-old male calf to take medications and allow daily inspections of his tongue to guard against an attack.

“There’s no reason why it couldn’t happen here,” Mr. Keele said. “We don’t know how long this virus has been in our population, but no one ever thought to look for it.”

By MALCOLM GAY

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — The Illinois Senate removed Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich from office Thursday, convicting him on an article of impeachment that alleged a pattern of abuse of power.

The vote, 59 to 0, ended nearly two months of political spectacle in which Mr. Blagojevich, a second-term Democrat who rose from the ranks of Chicago ward politics on the strength of his charisma and the connections of his wife’s family, sought to salvage his career and reputation.

The conviction followed a four-day trial, Mr. Blagojevich’s dramatic address of some 45 minutes to the senators Thursday in which he declared his innocence, and then about two hours of deliberation.

After the first vote, the Senate held a second, deciding again by 59 to 0 to bar Mr. Blagojevich from ever holding public office again in Illinois.

Under state law, Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn, a 60-year-old Democrat, assumed the power of chief executive immediately upon Mr. Blagojevich’s conviction. To a boisterous ovation, Mr. Quinn took the oath of office about an hour afterward in the House chamber across the hall, where he gave a short speech.

“If all of us are cheerful, earnest, frank and honest,” he said, “we can achieve great things for the land of Lincoln.”

Mr. Quinn’s upbeat tone was in marked contrast to the somber one on the Senate floor as each lawmaker was called in alphabetical order to vote on whether Mr. Blagojevich was guilty. When the process was over, it began again, on the question of barring him permanently from state office.

Afterward, the Senate president, John J. Cullerton, said, “Today we mark a shameful low in the proud tradition of our state.”

“Our decision,” said Mr. Cullerton, a Democrat, “recognizes that for too long the trust of the people in the state of Illinois that they placed in their governor has been severely abused.”

Not long after the vote, Mr. Blagojevich appeared outside his home on the North Side of Chicago. “I’m not looking for any pity,” he told a large crowd of reporters, friendly neighbors and at least one heckler. “I’ll be just fine.”

The governor had skipped the first three days of the trial in favor of visiting New York to make his case to the public, on a tour of national news organizations, that the process was being unfair to him. He denounced Senate rules that would not permit him to call witnesses who, it was determined, might compromise the federal criminal investigation being conducted against him.

But he flew here Thursday morning to make a last-minute plea before the senators. At some points in his speech, he struck the tone of a beggar asking for compassion and acquittal. At others, he was like a showman, proud and defiant.

“I’m appealing to your sense of fairness, your sense of responsibility,” the 52-year-old Mr. Blagojevich said. “You haven’t proved a crime — and you can’t, because it hasn’t happened. How can you throw a governor out of office with incomplete or insufficient evidence?”

He portrayed himself as a hard-working pragmatist who had often ruffled feathers in trying to get his work done but who, he insisted, had done nothing criminally or morally wrong.

In fact, “I did a lot of things that were mostly right,” he said.

“Impeachments are very rare,” he told the senators, “and they’re designed to be that way. That’s why I stand before you in a very unique and lonely place. You’re not supposed to just throw the will of the people out unless you show wrongdoing. You haven’t shown wrongdoing in this trial.”

But in the subsequent deliberations on the floor, Senator Kwame Raoul, a Democrat from Chicago, echoed the sentiments of the chamber as a whole in saying he had been persuaded by the impeachment prosecution’s “overwhelming evidence.”

“Had the governor either himself or through a lawyer challenged the sufficiency of the evidence — because of some of its hearsay nature and some of it was direct evidence — he may have raised questions,” Mr. Raoul said. “But he didn’t. He had the opportunity, and it’s a lie for him to say that he did not have the opportunity.”

Mr. Blagojevich still faces a variety of criminal charges, the spark that led lawmakers to call for impeachment. He was arrested by federal agents on Dec. 9, whenPatrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney in Chicago, charged that among other things, the governor had sought to barter for personal gain his appointment power over the United States Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama.

In a statement issued Thursday night, President Obama said: “Today ends a painful episode for Illinois. For months, the state had been crippled by a crisis of leadership. Now that cloud has lifted. I wish Governor Quinn the best and pledge my full cooperation as he undertakes his new responsibilities.”

The prosecutor in the Senate trial, David Ellis, based his case partly on the federal criminal complaint. But he also argued that Mr. Blagojevich had abused his power in the ordinary work of government. In his opening statement Monday, Mr. Ellis said the governor had tried not only to obtain campaign donations in return for state contracts and jobs but also to ignore laws and legislators in adopting policies on prescription drugs, health care and flu vaccines.

By Thursday’s end, Mr. Quinn, who has two years remaining in what is now his term, was issuing a plea for unity.

“It’s extremely important that the people of Illinois come together,” he said at a news conference. “I’m going to be working on that night and day.”

“My mission here in the next 700 days,” he said, “is to work as hard as I can for those who don’t have lobbyists in Springfield.”

Even before Mr. Blagojevich’s removal, the state’s top elected officials had begun meeting with Mr. Quinn to prepare a transition. Such officials rarely if ever met with Mr. Blagojevich.

“With the Senate’s vote today,” Attorney General Lisa Madigan said, “the destructive tenure of Rod Blagojevich has ended.”

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — After boycotting his impeachment trial for three days, Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich announced Wednesday that he wanted to address the State Senate on Thursday before legislators begin deliberations on whether to remove him from office.

“He wants to make a closing argument,” said Lucio Guerrero, the governor’s spokesman. Mr. Guerrero said he was uncertain when or precisely why Mr. Blagojevich had chosen now to attend the trial, which he has repeatedly denounced as unfair and fixed.

The governor will not give sworn testimony or be subject to cross-examination by prosecutors or legislators. Rather, he will address the Senate only to respond to the prosecution’s closing argument.

Mr. Blagojevich’s announcement, which came about an hour before the prosecution rested its case, brought negative reactions from lawmakers. Many had previously lamented the governor’s absence from the proceedings and had repeatedly requested he testify.

“It’s somewhat cowardly that he won’t take questions,” said Senator Dan Cronin, a Republican. “If he had something to say, he should have come down here like a man and faced the music.”

Since he will not be giving testimony, senators said his appearance would not be included as evidence in their deliberations.

“All the testimony was heard, so the things that we will consider, all that has taken place,” said Senator James F. Clayborne Jr., a Democrat. “I’m waiting to hear the closing argument tomorrow.”

During a publicity tour this week, Mr. Blagojevich, a Democrat who was arrested Dec. 9 on federal corruption charges, repeatedly professed his innocence, complaining bitterly that many of the damning statements attributed to him had been taken out of context and saying the impeachment trial was unfair.

Senators here have denounced the publicity campaign. Earlier in the day, the Senate president, John Cullerton, a Democrat, challenged Mr. Blagojevich to appear. “If he wants to come down here, instead of hiding out in New York and having Larry King asking questions instead of the senators — I think he’s making a mistake.”

Still, Mr. Blagojevich’s charges seemed to rattle some senators, who worried the trial might appear politically motivated after the prosecution announced that it wanted to avoid redundant testimony and would call only 6 of its 13 scheduled witnesses.

“If you eliminate half the witnesses and you speed up the process, does that send the wrong signal?” asked Senator Dave Syverson, a Republican. “Everything is being done very much above board, in fact, we’re going overboard to make sure everything is done fair. It’s just the perception.”

Other senators said that even if the additional testimony was redundant, they would rather hear it out of an abundance of caution.

“I don’t know who has a cruise or vacation to go to, but we ought to take our time,” Senator Kirk Dillard, a Republican, told a crush of reporters in an early morning break from the trial. “I’ll sit here on Super Bowl Sunday if I have to.”

Amid the tumult of the proceedings on Wednesday, prosecutors painstakingly presented their final witness, William Holland, the state’s auditor general. He testified that starting in 2004 the Blagojevich administration endeavored to buy roughly 773,000 doses of a European flu vaccine that the Food and Drug Administration had prohibited.

“The drugs were never going to come in to the U.S. because they’d been prohibited by the F.D.A.,” Mr. Holland said under questioning. “The vaccines were shipped to Pakistan, where the last we heard they were destroyed.”

With the prosecution at rest, senators have only to hear closing arguments before casting votes on two issues. The first will be whether to remove the governor from office. The second will be to determine whether Mr. Blagojevich should be barred from holding office in the future.

While many senators said they were still waiting to hear the closing arguments before making their final decision, it seemed unlikely that Mr. Blagojevich, who is scheduled to speak for 90 minutes after arriving here on Thursday morning by plane, would be able to sway many to his side.

“This is typical of his style, the grand slam, the P.R. flourish,” said Senator Christine Radogno, the Republican minority leader. “It’s too bad he wasn’t here earlier in the week, I wish he had been.” She added, “I hope he has a ride home.”

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — An investigative committee of the Illinois House voted unanimously Thursday to recommend the impeachment of Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich.

The action by the 21-member bipartisan committee, which began hearings last month, cleared the way for an impeachment vote by the full House, expected Friday. A majority vote there would send the matter to the State Senate for trial, where two-thirds approval would remove the governor.

Lucio Guerrero, a spokesman for Mr. Blagojevich, called the committee’s vote “a foregone conclusion.”

“The governor believes that the proceedings were flawed, biased and did not follow the rules of law,” said Mr. Guerrero, who noted that Mr. Blagojevich’s lawyers had not been allowed to examine the committee’s witnesses or call witnesses of their own. This, he said, impinged on the governor’s right to due process.

The vote by the investigative panel, which found an abuse of power by Mr. Blagojevich in the ordinary work of government, followed testimony before the lawmakers earlier in the day by the leading figure in another drama swirling around him.

That witness, Roland W. Burris, named by Mr. Blagojevich to succeed President-elect Barack Obama in the United States Senate, once again said that he had made no deals nor given any promises to Mr. Blagojevich in exchange for the appointment. Mr. Blagojevich, a second-term Democrat, announced his selection of Mr. Burris last week, widely seen as a defiant gesture by the governor, who only three weeks earlier had been charged by federal prosecutors with scheming to sell Mr. Obama’s seat and engaging in other corruption.

Mr. Burris was in no small part fighting for his job in his appearance before the committee. At the Capitol in Washington, Senate Democrats refused to seat him on Tuesday when new lawmakers were sworn in, having said earlier that no one appointed by Mr. Blagojevich could be credible or effective.

Democratic leaders had softened since then in their resistance to the appointment but had nonetheless waited for Mr. Burris to testify under oath that there had been no quid pro quo. After that testimony Thursday, a spokesman for Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said it would be reviewed as discussions continued about how to move forward.

Mr. Burris, a 71-year-old former state attorney general, seemed by turn defiant, humorous and blasé. Asked by one committee member if he had read the federal criminal complaint against the governor, he breezily replied that he had not.

But he assured the panel, “I would not participate in anybody’s quid pro quo.” At another point he added: “The appointment was legal. There’s no cloud. The appointment was according to law.”

At a news conference afterward, he said: “I passed the test with flying colors. I have nothing to hide. I am a hard-working public servant.”

The committee’s vote to push for impeachment came as little surprise, as it had released a draft report of its conclusions earlier Thursday.

In addition, legislators had suggested that they were determined to remove Mr. Blagojevich no matter the obstacles. When Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney in Chicago, who brought the complaint last month, politely refused to offer evidence and witnesses from his continuing investigation, the committee shifted its focus to whether Mr. Blagojevich had more broadly abused his powers in the ordinary work of government.

It found he had, by often tying official actions to campaign donations and by expanding a state health care program without legal authority, among other things.

“The totality of the evidence warrants the impeachment of the governor for cause,” the panel’s report said. “The committee, therefore, recommends that the House consider an article of impeachment against the governor.”

Before casting his vote in favor of the recommendation, Representative Jack D. Franks, a Democrat, said of Mr. Blagojevich: “He’s mortally wounded politically and cannot lead our state. His political life is over. I believe this is a great day. Today is the day we begin to give back the democracy and the government back to the citizens of the state of Illinois.”

Another Democrat, Representative Barbara Flynn Currie, the committee’s chairwoman, said the panel’s mission had never been to determine the governor’s guilt or innocence in relation to any crimes. But Ms. Currie said transcripts of wiretapped telephone conversations that were included in the criminal complaint against Mr. Blagojevich and read before the committee had been persuasive. They pointed, she said, to a willingness to pursue corruption.

The report itself stated: “His principal concern in making an appointment to the Senate seat was not the people of the state of Illinois, but rather his own personal agenda. The governor was selling his appointment of a United States Senate seat to the highest bidder.”

CHICAGO — Federal prosecutors who recorded the telephone conversations of Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich as part of a criminal investigation are asking a judge whether they may turn over four recordings to state lawmakers who are conducting an impeachment inquiry against him.

The recordings, parts of which prosecutors described in an affidavit made public on Dec. 9 when Mr. Blagojevich was arrested on federal corruption charges, have emerged as a focal point in the problems surrounding him.

The Illinois House committee conducting the impeachment inquiry wants to hear them, as do Mr. Blagojevich’s lawyers. The parts already publicly described are packed with salty language and crass demands.

In a legal motion filed on Monday, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney who is pursuing the criminal case, sought to provide four of the recorded calls. More than a month of conversations were recorded, and lawmakers had asked to hear everything.

The four calls, the motion indicated, dealt with efforts that prosecutors say Mr. Blagojevich made to raise money from donors before a new ethics law came into effect in January, and to raise some of it from those waiting for him to sign a bill they supported. That bill directs some casino revenues to the horse racing industry.

The simultaneous criminal and impeachment investigations against Mr. Blagojevich, a two-term Democrat, have seemed to collide repeatedly. But the release of those four recordings, the prosecutor’s office said, would not interfere with the continuing criminal investigation. The office did say the four calls should be edited to omit elements “not material” to the fund-raising episode. A judge is expected to hear the request next week.

In Springfield, where the House impeachment committee was meeting, lawmakers seemed pleased with the possibility that they might get to hear at least parts of some recordings.

The committee had hoped to bring a report swiftly on Mr. Blagojevich, who has said he has no intention of resigning, to the full House, which could then vote to send the impeachment case to the Senate for a trial.

Before the impeachment committee on Monday, Edward Genson, Mr. Blagojevich’s lawyer, attacked the criminal complaint against Mr. Blagojevich and denounced any use of claims from it as reasons to impeach him.

“These are shadows,” Mr. Genson said of the claims. “We’re not told who’s doing the talking other than saying Rod Blagojevich. There is nothing in that complaint that we know that we are able to either refute or establish without knowing the names of the people, and then, if we know the names of the people that are involved, we are told that we can’t subpoena to see if in fact what those words meant.”

Mr. Genson said the panel should recommend that the impeachment proceedings continue only if it found “clear and convincing” evidence that the governor had engaged in criminal activity or noncriminal actions that were of a “magnitude and gravity” of a crime.

His remarks seemed less than convincing to committee members, who are still weighing whether to bring forth more witnesses before making their recommendation on whether to impeach, a rarely tested act in this state and one defined by statute in only broad terms.

“This is far more than shadows,” said Representative Lou Lang, a Skokie Democrat. “We’ve got affidavits. We’ve got witnesses. The issue is not simply did the governor break the law. The issue is has the governor violated his constitutional oath.”

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — An inquiry here into the impeachment of Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich met resistance on Tuesday, with federal prosecutors indicating that it might interfere with the criminal case against him and a lawyer for Mr. Blagojevich requesting that the proceedings not move forward without the lawyer in attendance.

Members of the newly appointed House impeachment committee met for less than two hours before adjourning until Wednesday so the lawyer, Ed Genson, could arrive from Chicago and an agreement with prosecutors could be considered about how to proceed.

“We’re prepared, we’re here,” said Representative Barbara Flynn Currie, a Chicago Democrat who is the chairwoman of the committee. “We’ll be ready to have at it all the way through, but whether as a matter of practical logistics — whether we can — depends very much on when we hear from the United States attorney.”

Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney who a week ago charged Mr. Blagojevich with conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud and bribery, has expressed reservations about the prospect that lawmakers may hear testimony from witnesses in the criminal case before a jury does, Ms. Currie said.

At Mr. Fitzgerald’s request, Ms. Currie prepared a letter detailing what information her committee hoped to learn from federal prosecutors and which sorts of witnesses might be called. It was uncertain when Mr. Fitzgerald would answer; his spokesman declined to comment.

Lawmakers were scheduled to continue their hearing on Wednesday morning, when Mr. Genson arrives, and could choose to focus their inquiry exclusively on matters related to Mr. Blagojevich’s governing to avoid clashing with the criminal case.

Mr. Blagojevich, committee members said, was also invited to attend, but declined, remaining in Chicago. His spokesman, Lucio Guerrero, said the governor, a two-term Democrat, was looking at bills and clemency cases.

Before adjourning, committee members one by one expressed their sadness over the scandal and their discomfort with the state’s finding itself in such a dismal circumstance.

No Illinois governor has been impeached, but State Representative Monique D. Davis, a Chicago Democrat, said the impeachment inquiry needed to move forward to remove the cloud over the state.

“It’s the Land of Lincoln,” Ms. Davis said. “It’s the land of Barack Obama.”

Still, Republicans here said that despite all the calls for reform, the Democratic-controlled House and Senate were showing few signs that Illinois politics would change. The new impeachment committee includes more Democrats than Republicans (12 to 9), a circumstance that might allow Democrats to control what evidence was examined and what witnesses were called.

And legislation to hold a special election to fill President-elect Obama’s now-empty Senate seat (rather than have that person picked by the governor, who, prosecutors say, was seeking money or a job in exchange for his selection) was never brought to a vote in the Senate on Tuesday. The House also did not take up the proposal before it adjourned on Monday night.

Though some Democrats had joined Republicans last week in calling for a special election to remove all taint from the Senate succession, Democratic lawmakers grew leery of the idea because it raised the possibility that a Republican could win the seat.

“It’s another shameful display that we’ve seen down here,” said Senator Matt Murphy, a Palatine Republican. “The question that voters have to ask — that the people of Illinois have to ask — is, ‘Do the guys running this state ever tire of disillusioning and disappointing them?’ ”

Democrats said they were still trying to sort out how best to select a new senator. They complained that a special election would be expensive. Many seemed hopeful that Pat Quinn, the lieutenant governor and a Democrat, would soon become governor — through Mr. Blagojevich’s impeachment, resignation, criminal conviction or removal by the State Supreme Court — and could make the Senate appointment.

By MALCOLM GAY

ST. LOUIS — For decades, the vaulting curve of stainless steel known as the Gateway Arch has risen above the Mississippi River here as a monument to the country’s westward expansion. It is the city’s most visited tourist site and its most treasured landmark.

The 91-acre park around the arch, however, is another matter.

Between the city’s riverfront and its downtown, parts of the park, formally known as the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, include undulating ponds and gently curving walkways that mirror the curvature of Eero Saarinen’s arch.

But a concrete belt of sunken highway and busy streets also traverses the grounds. The park does not comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act, amenities are rare and on most days few people tour anything but the arch itself.

Long maligned as an obstacle that severs the city from its riverfront, the grounds around the arch are at the center of a dispute between a group of prominent residents who want to develop parts of the park, including construction of a cultural attraction, most likely a museum, and the National Park Service, which administers the site and is cool to some of the group’s proposals.

“We’ve got two great assets, the Mississippi River and the arch, and we’re not really utilizing either of them,” said a former senator, John C. Danforth, who leads the group in calling for an international design competition to reinvigorate the park and better integrate it into the environment. “What we have proposed is a world-class cultural attraction that is on the arch grounds.”

Mr. Danforth has pledged $50 million for the project through his family’s charity, the Danforth Foundation, which at the request of the city’s mayor, Francis G. Slay, spent two years and $2 million studying the park’s problems. He has also promised to help raise $100 million more.

Mr. Danforth’s attitude rankles officials of the National Park Service, who maintain that any development must respect the memorial’s National Historic Landmark status. While the officials have expressed interest in working with Mr. Danforth, they have resisted his call for a prominently placed museum.

“We all believe that we need to provide better connections between the park and the city,” the chief of planning and compliance for the Park Service’s Midwest Region, Sandra Washington, said. “But the vision we’ve gotten from the Danforth Foundation is that it needs to be an above-ground museum in a particular location.

“We have some concerns about the degree to which the structure would draw attention to itself and away from the Gateway Arch.”

Park Service officials plan to make public four plans in January, among them a “preferred” one that includes a design competition to “revitalize the memorial grounds,” Ms. Washington said. But that plan, which states that the grounds may be changed but that their “essential character-defining elements” must be kept, may stop short of Mr. Danforth’s vision, she said.

City leaders fear that any Park Service plan will entail a lengthy bureaucratic process and that it is unclear whether the agency will authorize the scale of development they see as necessary to revitalize the memorial grounds.

“What is the government asking us to do?” Mr. Danforth asked in a telephone interview. “Is it asking us to write a series of checks for tens of millions of dollars that they can spend on kiosks and plaques? Or is it asking us to do something that is world-class?”

“Nobody,” he said, “is going to be writing checks to Uncle Sam and say just do whatever you darn well want.”

Last month, Mr. Danforth sent a letter to Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne stating that his foundation’s assets had been diminished by the faltering economy and that he may not be able to fulfill the $50 million pledge. In an effort to assist Mr. Danforth, three prominent allies have formed the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Trust, which was named in a bill introduced in October by Representative William Lacy Clay, Democrat of Missouri.

The bill seeks to downgrade the status of the grounds, which would be on the National Register of Historic Places. The arch would retain National Historic Landmark status.

The legislation would authorize the secretary of the interior to allow the private trust to “facilitate the planning, construction and operation of a cultural facility” on the memorial grounds.

“The bill allows for a lease arrangement that would allow the Park Service to take the Danforth Foundation’s money,” Mr. Clay said. “The Park Service will have to sign off on the terms and conditions of that relationship — those are my parameters.”

He cautioned, though, that the current bill could change “drastically.” But Mr. Clay’s reassurances have not quelled the fears of many in the preservation world, who object to the prospect of Congress’s clearing the way for a private trust to develop federally protected land.

“The Park Service can enter into private partnerships to benefit a National Park site. They don’t need an act of Congress,” the Midwest regional director of the National Parks Conservation Association, Lynn McClure, said. “There are proper, nonlegislative avenues to do that. This would set up a precedent where any of our historic landmarks could be changed by acts of Congress.”

Other opponents note that the grounds, designed by the landscape architect Dan Kiley, belong not just to the people of St. Louis but to all Americans. The relationship between the arch and the grounds, about two-thirds of which have landmark status, is of such historical significance that any development should leave the Kiley design largely intact.

“This is where it all begins,” said Charles Birnbaum, president of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, a nonprofit group in Washington.

“Here are two of the most important place makers of the 20th century, and this is one of their most important commissions,” he said of Kiley and Saarinen. “You start putting in buildings, and it changes the geometry significantly.”

Valid though the preservationists’ concerns may be, say the St. Louisans who want to develop the park, they must be balanced against the city’s need for cultural and economic growth.

“The arch grounds is probably the most important piece of real estate in St. Louis,” said the Missouri Historical Society’s president, Robert Archibald, a founding member of the new trust. “To wall it off and call it sacrosanct and not acknowledge that it is both a national monument and an urban park does St. Louis a great disservice.”

Mr. Danforth said he wanted to move forward with a plan acceptable to all parties but his patience and money were not infinite.

“If there’s a lot of opposition from the Park Service, then it’s not going to happen,” he said. “The Park Service is in total control on this. If they don’t want to do anything worth doing, fine, we’ve got other fish to fry.”

By MALCOLM GAY

ST. LOUIS — Walking the halls of Normandy High School between classes, Mya McLemore, a senior, pays close attention these days to the faces of her fellow students. She keeps an eye out for those who avert their gaze, whose lips quiver or who allow a telltale tear to roll down their cheeks.

“I’ve been observing people, trying to see who’s acting different,” said Mya, 16. “Of course, you can’t tell by the way someone looks, but when you walk around and speak to people, you normally wouldn’t think that the person you’re talking to may have H.I.V.”

Life, however, has been far from normal for students at this struggling high school in suburban St. Louis since they learned last month that as many as 50 of their classmates may have been exposed to H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.

The news went out in a letter Normandy High officials sent home to parents and guardians on Oct. 13. The letter stated simply that while investigating an H.I.V. case, epidemiologists with the St. Louis County Department of Health had learned that there was reason to believe that the virus might have been transmitted “among some Normandy Senior High School students.”

Health department investigators normally pursue such leads quietly and confidentially. But the superintendent of the Normandy School District, Stanton Lawrence, said the potential scope of the exposure prompted his district to inform all of the school’s roughly 1,300 students, in grades 9 through 12, of the investigation, and of the fact that all students would be offered free, confidential H.I.V. testing. Ninety-seven percent of the students chose to be tested. Results are expected this week.

“We weren’t trying to create mass hysteria and panic,” said Mr. Lawrence, who became superintendent in July. “We didn’t want to initiate an environment of fear.”

“We didn’t have a playbook,” he added.

H.I.V. can be transmitted by unprotected sex with someone who has the disease, sharing needles or syringes with someone who is infected, or from an infected mother to a child either during pregnancy, childbirth or breastfeeding, health experts say.

Other than ruling out tattoos, health department officials have not specified how the virus may have been transmitted in this case, and though officials confirm that one person has tested positive for H.I.V., they have not disclosed whether that person is a student.

“We’re very limited in what we can release,” said a spokesman for the county health department, Craig LeFebvre. “We don’t feel like we can release anything that would indicate who it was. We don’t want witch hunts going on.”

But despite efforts to avoid the spread of misinformation, rumors flew through the halls of Normandy High, as students awaited their test results and tried to guess how it was that this deadly virus intruded on their high school years.

“It’s the only thing we talk about,” said Jamar McKinney, a junior. “Who could have H.I.V., who started it, how many people may have it. We always agree on who we think has it.”

Mr. McKinney, 17, said the episode had frayed his feelings for other students.

“I don’t trust nobody until I see the results,” he said, adding that he plans to display his negative test results on a T-shirt. “Nobody wants to walk around and say they’ve got H.I.V. because of how they’re going to be treated. Everybody’s just going to think they’re a walking disease.”

As the news spread, officials from a rival school called Normandy to say they were being bombarded by parents wondering if it was safe to play a scheduled football game. Normandy’s principal, Carl Hudson, said he had assured them that it was. Normandy won, advancing to the district championship with a 9-0 record.

But that was little consolation for Stephen Perkins, 16, a Normandy junior who said that whenever he meets girls at the mall, “the first thing they ask is, ‘What school do you go to?’ ”

“After I say Normandy,” Mr. Perkins continued, he was told, “ ‘The H.I.V. School? AIDS High?’ Normandy’s got a bad name.”

Students and teachers also complain that the school — whose student population is 99 percent black and which is in danger of a state takeover if student performance does not improve within three years — has been further stigmatized by inaccurate and sensational news coverage, which they say portrays the potential exposure as an outbreak.

“A lot of students felt like they were ambushed, that we were being watched and that the media blew the situation way out of proportion,” said Pamela Hughes-Watson, a science teacher. “The kids are really upset about that.”

Mr. Lawrence, the schools superintendent, said school officials knew they were risking a lot of negative attention when they decided to send the letters.

“Anytime you send 1,300 letters to parents, you can expect there’s going to be a call to the media,” he said. “There’s been some shameless sensationalism that’s gone with this story, but given the choice between spurious headlines and meeting these kids’ needs, I’m going to try to the meet these kids’ needs.”

As the glare of publicity fades and students anxiously await their test results, many are grappling with the lessons they have learned and the impact the episode may have on the rest of their high school years, and perhaps the rest of their lives.

“I’m not going to just hop into any relationship,” Mr. McKinney said. “I’m going to talk it out first with the person, and see what they sound like. And if it sounds good, ask if there’s any way I can see their results.”

Originally published in The New York Times.

An ex-convict who spent more than three years in the Illinois State Prison for aggravated robbery, Mr. Sheley, 28, is said to have killed indiscriminately, ending with the bludgeoning death of an Arkansas couple visiting the St. Louis region.

“It looks like it was a random,” said Chief Timothy Lewis of the Festus, Mo., Police Department south of St. Louis. “He could’ve been using a club, a rock, a bat, a crowbar. We don’t know.”

Thought to have arrived in the St. Louis area in one of his victim’s cars, Mr. Sheley, of Sterling, Ill., became the object of a brief but intense manhunt before he was arrested Tuesday evening while smoking a cigarette outside a bar in Granite City, Ill.

Shackled at the wrist and ankle at the Madison County Jail, Mr. Sheley appeared on closed-circuit television Wednesday in Circuit Court, where a judge informed him he was being held on a charge of murder.

Mr. Sheley stared at the floor and did not enter a plea. He is being held on $1 million bond while he awaits formal arraignment in Knox County, Ill., where he is charged with the murder of Ronald Randall of Galesburg, Ill., and also in Whiteside County, Ill., where he faces murder charges in the death of Russell Reed of Sterling.

The authorities say Mr. Sheley’s killing spree began last Thursday, when they say he used a broken weathervane to bludgeon Mr. Reed, 93, to death in his home and then stuffed his body into the trunk of Mr. Reed’s 2003 Buick.

“He wasn’t murdered in his car,” Sheriff Roger Schipper of Whiteside County said of Mr. Reed, a retired farmer. “There was a bar stool laying in the pool of blood and a broken weathervane that we believe was used like an iron bar.”

Though no charges have been filed, Mr. Sheley is also suspected of killing Brock Branson, 29; Kenneth Ulve, 25; Kilynna Blake, 20; and Dayan Blake, 2, in an apartment in Rock Falls, near Sterling, about 100 miles west of Chicago.

In Galesburg, 70 miles south of Sterling, the authorities suspect that Mr. Sheley abandoned a stolen pickup in the parking lot of a car wash before he encountered Mr. Randall, 65, and bludgeoned him to death Saturday evening.

Family members reported Mr. Randall, a retired factory worker, missing on Monday morning, and the police soon found his truck abandoned in St. Louis

“We knew we had something suspicious,” said Capt. Lindsey May of the Galesburg Police Department. “That’s when our officers started putting two and two together.”

That same morning the bodies of Tom and Jill Estes, an Arkansas couple visiting the St. Louis area, were found behind a gasoline station in Festus, one day after their blood-drenched dogs were found wandering.

“They were here for a graduation and ran into everyone’s worst nightmare: a spree killer,” Chief Lewis said. . “We don’t know what exactly happened, but there was a violent struggle.”

By noon Monday, the authorities found Mr. Randall’s body behind a grocery store in Galesburg, and that afternoon the four victims in Rock Falls were discovered. Then, just as quickly as it started, the manhunt ended with Mr. Sheley’s capture.

States attorneys from two counties in Illinois and a prosecutor in Missouri must now determine how, and in what order, they will prosecute Mr. Sheley.

“He’s already got charges in Illinois, and he’s already in custody,” Chief Lewis said. “We’re going to take our time — make sure we’ve dotted all our i’s and crossed our t’s — so that by the time he comes to Missouri he’ll be staring at an airtight case.”

Originally published in The New York Times.

By MALCOLM GAY

CAHOKIA, Ill. — Even as many found cheer that floodwaters along the Mississippi River here would fall well short of what had been predicted, residents and the authorities in this town discovered a stark reminder of what might lie ahead: a sand boil on the aged levee that protects the town, a telltale sign that the swollen river had begun eroding the structure from beneath.

“I didn’t even know what a sand boil was,” Mayor Frank Bergman said as he surveyed the waterlogged levee, referring to the mix of sand and water that bubbles up from the ground. “But it’s clearly time to upgrade our levees and keep our system safe.”

Dan Gill for The New York Times

The flooding that has claimed 24 lives and forced thousands to evacuate across six states continued Sunday, as the Mississippi crested in the northern Missouri town of Canton. Just upriver from St. Louis, Winfield, Mo., and Grafton, Ill., continued battling rising waters. Forecasters from the National Weather Service predicted that floodwaters would begin receding in the St. Louis area later this week.

As the river at nearby St. Louis leveled out at around 12 feet below the record set during the 1993 flood and about two feet below what had been predicted for the weekend, investigators had identified and contained several more boils on the levee, and the marshland that sits just behind it had crept to within 100 yards of the village hall.

Last year, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, after consulting with the Army Corps of Engineers, found that the five-levee system that protects the metropolitan area of East St. Louis, Ill., did not meet its standards for flood protection.

“It’s not that we think these levees will fail,” said David Busse, chief of engineering and construction for the St. Louis district of the corps. “But in order for me to certify these levees, they’d have to meet today’s standards, and some of these levees have been here forever.”

The corps estimates that it would cost roughly $200 million to bring the 70-year-old levee system into compliance — quite a challenge for a region that is home to East St. Louis and several other deeply impoverished communities trying to attract development.

The assessment of the five-levee system is part of a nationwide effort to update FEMA’s flood maps. The levees’ failure to meet the agency’s standards means that when the updated maps are published in 2009, they will no longer show the levees as providing protection from a 100-year flood, according to Norbert Schwartz, the agency’s director of mitigation for the region.

Rather, the 195,000-acre region — comprising parts of Madison, Monroe and St. Clair Counties — will be considered an unprotected flood plain. Such a designation would require homeowners with federally backed mortgages to buy flood insurance, could raise flood-insurance rates and could affect the region’s economic development.

“It all goes hand in hand,” said Derrick Johnson, 47, a car salesman from East St. Louis. “If you only fix one thing, you’re going to suffer from the other. So I don’t care how nice a school you build, it won’t be so nice if it floods.”

Frank Smith, 62, a social worker from East St. Louis, said he was less convinced of the need to repair the levees before addressing other issues, adding that he believed that many of his neighbors could not afford flood insurance.

“We’ve got 3,000 families living without utilities,” Mr. Smith said. “We have sewers that are collapsing. And you’re going to put $200 million into our levee system? How could we afford it?”

But as cities, towns and farms north of here have yielded in the past few weeks to the Mississippi’s tremendous flooding, scientists have again emphasized a sharp increase in flooding in recent history. They say established communities like East St. Louis and neighboring Cahokia would be well advised to repair their levee systems.

“We have had two almost 100-year floods and two almost 500-year floods in a 35-year period,” said Nicholas Pinter, a professor who specializes in flood hydrology at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. “Flood levels all along this stretch of the Mississippi have climbed upward, not just by inches but by 8, 10, 12 feet — up to 18 feet over historical 100-year flood conditions. So the simple answer is that floods are higher and more frequent.

“But the underlying theme to everything that’s going on,” Dr. Pinter added, “is that the current estimates for flood frequency and intensity appear to be grossly underestimated.”

Dr. Pinter maintains that while climate change and levee construction have contributed to increased flooding in the St. Louis area, the real culprits are river modifications made to ease navigation, which put further stress on the levee systems.

“All of our analyses point, at least on this stretch of river, to the river navigation engineering as being the 800-pound gorilla in the system,” Dr. Pinter said. “These types of river-training structures are the major mechanisms that drive flooding rivers higher.”

Dr. Pinter and colleagues have presented their findings to the Army Corps, which so far has resisted the notion that navigational devices have increased flooding.

“All of the information I have seen, and I’ve been looking at this issue for a very long time, navigation structures do not increase flood heights — I’m very confident of that,” Mr. Busse said. “We have data that shows that the flows come in at stages that are the same or lower since we’ve put these projects in, and that’s just a fact.”

But city leaders whose communities are at risk of being in an unprotected flood plain are looking at a very different set of facts.

“You can name the people in this community who work on your fingers,” said Nathaniel O’Bannon, the mayor of Brooklyn, Ill. “But these low-lying areas? Those levees need to be repaired. We really need it done.”

Originally published in The New York Times.

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — As floodwaters began to rise this spring, forcing thousands from their homes, Sgt. Kent Choate oversaw one of the larger evacuation efforts, providing shelter to hundreds of animals whose owners had been displaced.

“We expected we’d house our animals and maybe 100 more lost animals,” said Sergeant Choate, who is in charge of the animal control unit of the city’s Police Department, “but then one of the city’s pumps broke, and we knew it was going to grow exponentially. We just didn’t know how big.”

Photo: Sandra L. Dyas for The New York Times

Almost every spring, water from the nearby Cedar River flooded the approach to the building that housed the animal shelter. But this spring was different. Heavy rains left surrounding farmland saturated, and by early June the engorged Cedar River, normally a lazy stretch of water that feeds the Mississippi, had washed over its banks, flooding an estimated 4,200 homes here and displacing thousands.

As the shelter flooded, animal control officers were forced to relocate the animal shelter to higher ground at nearby Kirkwood Community College, where Anne Duffy, a professor of veterinary technology, had previously offered the college’s Animal Health Technology building as a shelter during flooding.

“We both agreed after the May flooding that we should put a policy together,” Ms. Duffy said, referring to Sergeant Choate. “We were going to get right on that, but then the flood came up before the policy did.”

As the situation deteriorated, flood victims, many staying in hotels, shelters or cars, began dropping off pets at the college. Others, who had been forced to flee without their pets, began calling in with pleas for their animals to be rescued. Within days, what had started as a makeshift shelter had grown into a sprawling operation housing nearly 1,000 animals — dogs, cats, rabbits, birds, lizards, even a red-eared slider turtle — in three buildings.

With the influx of animals came an infusion of aid. Several national chain stores donated supplies. Veterinary technicians came from as far away as California to volunteer, and legions of veterinarians, groomers and even flood victims soon arrived at the shelter wanting to help.

On Saturday, 40-pound bags of dog food were stacked pell-mell throughout the complex, pet toys were crammed into boxes, and desks, shredded paper and cat litter had been pushed into corners of classrooms. Ms. Duffy estimated that volunteers had logged roughly 25,000 hours at the shelter.

One of the lessons driven home after Hurricane Katrina — in which an estimated 200,000 animals were displaced — was that some residents risked, and lost, their lives rather than leave a beloved pet behind.

“The biggest thing learned by everyone from Katrina is the importance of animals in people’s lives,” said Diane Webber, disaster preparedness director for the Humane Society of the United States. “They can’t be excluded from disaster planning and response. People aren’t going to function and they’re not going to evacuate if their animals aren’t provided for.”

Ms. Webber, who estimated the Humane Society sheltered 15,000 animals across Louisiana and Mississippi during the 2005 hurricane, said animal evacuation first arose as an issue after Hurricane Andrew’s march across southern Florida and Louisiana in 1992.

Sandra L. Dyas for The New York Times

The dedication of Americans to their pets is well documented, including a Zogby International poll in 2006 in which 49 percent of adults reported they would refuse to evacuate if they could not take their pets.

Joanna Hughes, 45, said her husband, Philip, had lived with their six dogs in a garage for several days after they evacuated their home in nearby Palo.

“My husband would’ve stayed there right with the dogs until they hauled him away in shackles,” said Ms. Hughes, who visited her dogs at the Kirkwood shelter Saturday. “He cares more about the pets than he ever did about the house.”

Ramona Potts and her mother, Dorothy Jensen, refused to leave their four dogs, including a miniature poodle named Lilly Mae, when floodwaters forced them to evacuate their homes about 10 blocks from the Cedar River.

“We were living in a Buick,” said Ms. Potts, 51, who visited the dogs at the shelter Saturday. “But my dogs weren’t doing too well in the car. Lilly Mae kept jumping out the window.”

Still, many animals were either abandoned or forgotten as the floodwaters approached.

One of the dogs at the shelter, a white German shepherd, was rescued by searchers who were answering a call to rescue another animal.

“There was no rescue request on this dog,” Ms. Duffy said. “She was swimming back and forth in five feet of water when they pulled her out of the house. She was just swimming from the back of the house to the front of the house.”

Ms. Duffy added that that although the German shepherd showed signs of having recently given birth, rescuers did not find her litter. “We speculate that she lost her puppies in the flood,” Ms. Duffy said.

As the waters have receded, the shelter’s population has dropped to around 620. The city of Cedar Rapids has imposed a 14-day hold on all pet adoptions, although unclaimed pets like the German shepherd may eventually be shipped to out-of-state shelters for placement.

“We’re trying to give people a chance to find their lost pets before we put strays up for adoption,” Ms. Duffy said. “But there’s really no way the people of Cedar Rapids could adopt all these animals.”

Originally published in The New York Times.

GRAFTON, Ill. — Residents in cities and towns north of St. Louis continued battling floodwaters Monday as forecasters warned that the Mississippi River would remain near its current peak levels through much of the week.

In hard-hit Lincoln County, Mo., the authorities called on volunteers to help bag an additional 1,000 tons of sand to fortify the inner wall of the Pin Oak levee, which protects about 150 homes in the southeastern section of Winfield.

Jeff Roberson/Associated Press

“We’ve estimated that we’re going to need between 40,000 and 50,000 sandbags to fortify the levee,” said Andy Binder, spokesman for the Lincoln County Emergency Operations Command. “All the primary levees in Lincoln County have been breached or overtopped. Pin Oak is the only levee that’s held. It’s the last of the remaining dry land in eastern Lincoln County.”

Mr. Binder said the flooding had overwhelmed eight of Lincoln County’s levees and had or would affect some 690 homes, 160 of them in Winfield. The National Weather Service predicted that the river would crest Tuesday evening at about 11 feet above flood stage at Winfield and continue running near crest levels through Thursday morning.

“It’s a mess,” Mr. Binder said, adding that several sand boils, ant-hill-like formations produced by extreme water pressure, had developed on the levee in the last day. “It’s a swampy mess.”

North of Winfield in the nearby town of Foley, Mo., floodwaters first submerged the eastern part of town before moving westward across Highway 79 and inundating the town’s western section, said Mr. Binder, who estimated that 110 homes were underwater.

Upriver in Clarksville, Mo., residents awaited the river’s crest, which the Weather Service predicted would arrive Monday evening at more than 11 feet above flood stage and remain there through Wednesday morning.

“We’re in a holding pattern,” said Jo Anne Smiley, the town’s mayor. “So far we’ve had 30 or more homes that have flooded.”

The swollen river, which has forced tens of thousands to evacuate across six states, is expected to crest in St. Louis on Wednesday and continue running at more than seven feet above flood stage through Friday.

“It’s hard to know how many people have been evacuated in Missouri,” said Susie Stonner, a spokeswoman for Missouri’s emergency management agency. “We can’t do damage assessment because there’s still water. Once the water recedes, we’ll have a much better sense of the losses.”

Across the Mississippi River in Illinois, the authorities said they were also waiting for the waters to recede before they could accurately assess flood damage.

“The water’s still coming up,” said Scott Gauvin, manager of the state’s emergency operations center. “Damage assessment is a high priority, but it’s going to take a while.”

Here in Grafton, a small tourist town not protected by a levee, the river has swallowed some 20 homes in the past week. Floodwaters are threatening the town’s well, and officials have shipped in an emergency supply of bottled water in the event that they must order that piped-in water be boiled before use.

“We’re still in pretty good shape,” said Richard Mosby, Grafton’s mayor, adding that after the flood of 1993 the town removed about 100 structures from the riverfront. “We can see the end is in sight. All the things we’ve worked for seem to have worked pretty well.”

Mike Amburg, 51, whose home on a hill about 100 yards from the river is dry but surrounded by water, was similarly sanguine.

“The only way I’d move is if the price were right,” Mr. Amburg, a correctional officer, said as he transferred bags of groceries into his boat. “I’ve got a hell of a view, and this is the first time I’ve been bothered since ’93.”

Across the river in Clarksville, another tourist town not protected by a levee, Jackie Mills had lived in her home for less than a year before it was inundated.

“I just moved in in August, and now I’m camping,” said Ms. Mills, 39. “I’m still trying to figure out where all my things are.”

Ms. Smiley, Clarksville’s mayor, also expressed uncertainty.

“We don’t have any impediment between our town’s shops and the Mississippi, and we’ve liked it that way. We’ve never wanted protection,” she said. “Now that may have to change, because I don’t know if we can go through this again.”

Originally published in The New York Times.

WINFIELD, Mo. — First came the urgent news from a volunteer circling in a helicopter. The pounding Mississippi River had burst a 150-foot-wide hole in a levee, sending water gushing along a new path toward this small city and sweeping at least one empty house off its foundation.

Even as the gash widened to 550 feet, water ripped open two more holes, one after the next, in a nearby levee.

An inner levee, a second layer of protection, continued to guard much of Winfield on Thursday evening. But more than 250 homes in the region were flooded.

“I don’t know if we’re going to be able to save it,” Andy Binder, of the Lincoln County Emergency Operations Command, said of the northeast section of Winfield, population 877. “In some areas, I can’t even tell we have levees anymore.”

Water had swelled over the top of more than 20 levees along the Mississippi between Dubuque, Iowa, and St. Louis. The failures, officials said, mostly drenched tens of thousands of acres of agricultural land.

This time, the threatened levee was protecting small communities, precisely what officials here, who have devoted endless hours to tracking and reinforcing the scores of floodwalls along the river, had hoped to avoid.

“We’re going under as we speak,” Michael Moran, a resident of the Winfield subdivision, said Thursday afternoon as he hurried to stack his pickup with his possessions, the stove, the furnace, everything.

The water crept on to his patio. He was thinking of staying at his mother’s.

Mr. Moran, 52, a pipe installer, said he had no flood insurance for his one-story house, no certainty whether he will move back to his spot near the river.

“I need to think about it,” said Mr. Moran, who rebuilt after the flood of 1993. “I had two years before I could retire.”

In the cities and towns north of St. Louis, weary, blistered residents began to ask whether this all might soon be over. At different points, the river levels, closely watched by nearly everyone here, seemed to rise and fall by the hour. Then only more water.

Experts said the dips stemmed in part from levees breaking upriver followed by the swollen river hurtling south.

More rain began falling on Thursday in some areas, including Quincy, Ill., as workers tended their levee.

The federal government released a climate report predicting that more frequent and intense heavy rains were unavoidable in North America in a world warmed by increasing concentrations of heat-trapping gases.

Though no single period of flooding rains or other extremes can be ascribed to the growing global influence on climate, the odds are tipping toward a continent with more, and more intense, climate extremes, said Thomas R. Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., and a lead author of the report.

“To fully grasp the ramifications of the surge in extreme droughts and floods that is forecast in this report, one need only look at the widespread devastation across the Midwest,” said Richard H. Moss, head of the climate program of the World Wildlife Fund. “We need to start making substantial reductions in emissions to minimize how much and how quickly the climate changes, and, just as importantly, we need to begin a serious program of national preparedness to respond to these increasing threats.”

In the country around Winfield, hundreds of people had fled by Thursday night. People in at least eight houses refused to go.

Winfield was quiet, nearly empty in parts. A shelter opened at the high school.

Not far from here, in Foley, one man pitched a tent on his roof and fired up a generator, officials said, determined to wait out the flood.

Keith Abernathy, too, said he had no intention of leaving his trailer in Winfield.

“That water’s going to come down that street and take a left turn,” Mr. Abernathy, who drives a dump truck, said, pointing down a road. “I don’t usually drink beer, but I’m going to sit on the porch and pop a top because I’m in for a tough road ahead.”

Mr. Abernathy said he had nowhere to go and no way to haul his trailer now.

“I don’t have the money to move it,” he said. “I’m three months behind on my truck payments.”

Officials remained worried into the night. After at least four levee breaks here, another seemed imminent. Raised areas, known as boils, that signal stress from water pressure appeared in a protective wall nearby, said Kelly Hardcastle, director of emergency management for Lincoln County.

“That levee is so wet and under so much pressure that we’re not worried about it topping,” Mr. Hardcastle said, describing water flowing over a barricade. “We’re worried about it blowing.”

By early Saturday, the Meramec River, which snakes through the hill country before feeding into the Mississippi, had crested here, about 30 miles west of St. Louis, and in nearby Eureka. In the afternoon, the National Weather Service reported that the river had peaked in Valley Park at 37.83 feet, less than two feet shy of the record, about 20 miles west of St. Louis.

In Pacific, the Meramec crested at 28.84 feet, below earlier estimates and well shy of the record flood of 1982 when the river topped out at 33.6 feet. Nonetheless, the river spread wide across the town, inundating more than 30 city blocks and displacing more than 500 people.

As the water lapped at sandbags and flowed through living rooms, many people were left staring helplessly at their homes a few hundred yards away.

Standing at the water’s edge, Tammy Freeman, 38, said she and her daughters had been staying with friends during the flood.

“My first thought was to keep the kids safe,” she said. “All my flowers were starting to come up, but now I’m wondering: Am I going to have a place to take my daughters? Are we going to have a place to live? It’s scary.”

Not everyone in the flooded area left. Jim Nantz, whose home is built on an elevated foundation roughly a half-mile from the river, spent much of Friday barbecuing on his front porch.

“My place has got about three feet of water around it and in the crawl space, but there’s no water in the house,” Mr. Nantz said.

The storm, which caused flooding in counties from Texas to Pennsylvania, has been blamed for at least 16 deaths. After showering more than a foot of rain on parts of Missouri and Arkansas earlier in the week, the storm moved northeast, where the National Weather Service said it dumped more than a foot of snow on parts of the Upper Midwest.

But the worst flooding has been in Missouri, where President Bush approved federal disaster aid this week for St. Louis and 70 Missouri counties. The flooding has been most concentrated along the Meramec River and in the southeastern part of the state, where at least 200 homes were evacuated in Cape Girardeau County, said Susie Stonner of the State Emergency Management Agency.

On Saturday, traffic was stalled along Interstate 44 west of St. Louis, where crews barricaded against the river’s swelling waters. Near Valley Park, waters drenched the Interstate’s shoulders, submerging the interchange with Highway 141.

Meanwhile, the authorities in Valley Park put faith in a new $49 million levee, which was designed to withstand water levels of up to 45 feet, well above Saturday’s crest of 37.8 feet.

Mayor Jeffery J. Whitteaker said that not everyone in the town of 6,500 people had been optimistic about the levee, and that about 100 homes near it had been evacuated.

“We let the citizens be their own guide,” Mr. Whitteaker said. “The major concern was that this was the first initial test of the levee. I don’t blame anyone for leaving.”

But John Beard, who lives within 400 feet of the levee, had refused to decamp.

“Why would we spend $50 million on a levee if we’re going to get scared and move every time the water comes up?” Mr. Beard said, standing in his yard. “It defeats the purpose.”

By Saturday afternoon the waters in Pacific had begun to recede and residents were allowed to enter the flooded area. Mayor Herbert Adams said he would allow residents to enter for a “quick inspection” of their homes. He added that in light of earlier flood estimates, he was hopeful the damage would not be too severe.

In Pacific, Jim Smith, a real estate agent who had left his offices, said people would keep coming back no matter how many times it flooded.

“We’ve been here for 200 years,” Mr. Smith said. “It’s hard to leave. We love these river bottoms.”

Among those who will be returning is Gerald Grimm, a semiretired cattle farmer whose property has been flooded three times since 1982.

“It’s going to eat into my pocketbook,” said Mr. Grimm, 79. “But I’ve been there all my life, I figure I’ll finish it there.”

Originally published in The New York Times.

ST. LOUIS — At least 13 people died and hundreds were evacuated on Wednesday as steady rains delivered more than a foot of water across large areas of the Midwest, flooding rivers and roadways.

The rain began on Monday. By Wednesday, the National Weather Service issued flood and flash-flood warnings from Texas to Pennsylvania.

Mark Schiefelbein/Associated Press

Missouri was the hardest hit, with at least five deaths linked to the storm and more than 500 houses evacuated in Wayne and Bollinger Counties, in the southeastern part of the state.

“Right now we’re in flash flood response mode — water rescues, evacuations,” a spokeswoman for the Missouri Emergency Management Agency, Suzie Stonner, said. “It’s been ongoing almost continuously since yesterday. The ground is so soaked that the water just runs off. We’re going to go into a massive flooding situation soon.”

In Kentucky, five people were killed on Wednesday when a tractor-trailer rammed a pickup and van in heavy rain on Interstate 65 about 60 miles south of Louisville. The trucker and a person in the van were injured.

The storms closed sections of hundreds of roads. More than 300 sections were closed in Missouri, more than 60 in Kentucky and more than 30 in Arkansas.

Gov. Matt Blunt of Missouri, a Republican, mobilized National Guard units on Tuesday and requested federal assistance for 70 counties and St. Louis.

Joshua L. Slatten of the Missouri Transportation Department was killed on Tuesday when a tractor-trailer hit his truck while he was barricading a flooded highway near Springfield. Also on Tuesday, Thurman L. Shelton drowned when water inundated his truck in Bollinger County, and Walter Baker drowned after being swept from a bridge in nearby Reynolds County.

Greene County officials said Ronald B. Rudd died when a flood pushed his car off the road one mile east of Springfield, and in Monett, about 40 miles southwest of Springfield, Mark G. Speir drowned in Kelly Creek.

In Hamilton County, Ohio, a 65-year-old woman apparently drowned after checking her sump pump. Two bodies were also found in southern Illinois.

The authorities in Arkansas and Illinois reported extensive voluntary evacuations. Neither state reported fatalities, though the authorities in Arkansas reported several missing persons.

By Wednesday evening, rain had stopped in much of the area as the storm system headed toward the Northeast. Many downstream areas braced for expected record levels.

“The majority of the rivers across southeast Missouri and southern Illinois are forecast to be in a major flooding stage within the next 48 hours,” said Rick Shanklin, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Paducah, Ky. “The rivers and even the small streams are backed up. The water has nowhere to go. So it’s going to be a somewhat slow process to recover from all the flooding.”

In Pacific, 30 miles west of here on the Meramec River, residents voluntarily evacuated as they braced for the river to crest at 31.5 feet, 2 feet lower than its historic 33.64 feet in 1982.

“Right now, we think there are about 50 homes and businesses that might be affected,” City Administrator Harold Selby said. “These are people we know will have water in their homes or businesses.

“We have had floods here before, but one of the things we’re concerned about is that there’s been a lot more development in the flood plain, and we just don’t know how that’s going to be affected.”

Originally published in The New York Times.

ST. LOUIS, March 22 — The Missouri State Board of Education voted on Thursday to take control of the troubled St. Louis public schools.

At an emotional meeting in Jefferson City that was interrupted by students who had arrived by bus from here to protest the expected decision, the board voted, 5 to 1, to strip the St. Louis Public School District of its accreditation, effective June 15.

The board also voted to provide for a transitional three-member panel appointed by state and local officials to run the city’s 93 public schools, many of which are old and run-down. The district’s seven-member school board will remain intact, but will have no governing authority.

The governor, the mayor of St. Louis and the president of the city’s Board of Aldermen will each appoint one-member to the transition panel.

A spokesman for the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, Jim Morris, said the three-member panel was expected to run the district for the next six years, although the State Board of Education could elect to extend the panel’s term indefinitely.

“Ideally, the local board would be in a position to resume authority over the district once it’s turned around,” Mr. Morris said.

The St. Louis school district is at least the seventh to be taken over by a state since March 2004, said Jennifer Dounay, policy analyst for the Education Commission of the States, but none were as large as St. Louis. A year ago, the Maryland legislature blocked an attempt to take over the Baltimore schools.

The St. Louis district, which has 35,000 students — many of whom are poor or homeless — has a history of financial, administrative and student achievement failures. Its cumulative debt in 2006 was almost $25 million, according to the State Board of Education, and it has had six superintendents since 2003.

The district’s 2006 graduation rate was roughly 55 percent, and the dropout rate nearly 19 percent, the state board said. More than 60 percent of 10th graders scored at a level “below basic” in math on state standardized tests last year.

“We’re not preparing kids for college,” said the district board president, Veronica O’Brien, who supports the state takeover. “We don’t even graduate children. Everyone’s been asleep at the St. Louis public schools.”

But three other board members said they strongly opposed the takeover. One of them, William Purdy, said he thought the state should have voted to appoint the three-member panel to an advisory role.

“There’s a problem when the state comes in and literally throws out the people who were elected by the voters of St. Louis to be the governing body of the district,” said Mr. Purdy, adding that he and two other board members were planning to file a lawsuit to block the takeover. “They’ve disenfranchised St. Louis voters.”

Students who graduate this year will be unaffected by the district’s loss of accreditation, but it was far from clear how that would affect future graduates’ chances for college admission and scholarships.

“There’s been a lot of misinformation and anger about the potential harmful consequences for students,” Mr. Morris said. “But that’s never been an issue to our knowledge.”

But a sophomore at Soldan International Studies High School, Kaylan Holloway, was not convinced. “They say, ‘We believe lack of accreditation should not be a problem,’ but that’s not good enough,” Mr. Holloway said. “We need to hear that it will not be a problem.”

Originally published in The New York Times.

By MALCOLM GAY

WRIGHT CITY, Mo., Nov. 6 — The 16-foot-tall likeness of Elvis Presley that stands sentry here at the Elvis Is Alive Museum, a fading outpost of Americana, has seen better days.

White paint is peeling from the plywood cutout. The wood at Elvis’s left hip is starting to rot, and many faded blue and yellow poker chips that once formed his bejeweled belt have vanished in the dust of 18-wheelers passing through this town 45 miles west of St. Louis.

For 17 years, Bill Beeny — museum curator, real estate salesman, Baptist minister — has used the wooden cutout to lure travelers to his museum, a cramped 400-square-foot shrine to all things Elvis, but especially to its owner’s theory that the King never actually left the building.

Now, Mr. Beeny, 81, wants to convert the museum into a food bank and is auctioning its contents on eBay. The contents, offered in a single lot, include the newspaper clippings that crowd the walls, the open coffin that houses an Elvis replica (“It doesn’t look like Elvis, but neither did the guy in the casket”), the scratchy recordings that Mr. Beeny swears are of Elvis speaking seven years after his “alleged” death in 1977 and the rusting 1974 Cadillac parked out front.

“It’s getting a little decrepit,” Mr. Beeny said of the cutout sign. If no one wants it, he said, “I’ll make it a working man — repaint it with blue jeans, an open shirt and a tool in his hand. I’ll have a sign that says: ‘Our Mission Is to Serve Others.’”

Much more valuable, Mr. Beeny said, are results of a DNA test that he claims proves that the man buried at Graceland is not Elvis Presley.

“That’s the biggie,” said Mr. Beeny, who has written two books, “Elvis’ DNA Proves He’s Alive!” and “DNA Proves That Elvis Is Alive!” “That’s what really put this place on the map.”

Mr. Beeny, who described his curatorial practice as “haphazard,” was vague about how the DNA was obtained and tested, explaining that he had been sworn to secrecy by the doctor who gave him the samples.

The auction ends Thursday evening. By Wednesday evening, bidding was stalled at $8,300.

Mr. Beeny said he had been only a nominal Elvis fan until his curiosity was piqued by customers at a cafe he owned here expressing doubts that the King was gone for good. “They’d say: ‘The man in the casket weighed 170 pounds. It’s a known fact that Elvis weighed 255 pounds. How did he lose 85 pounds on the way to the morgue?’ The questions went on and on.”

Mr. Beeny said thousands of people had visited the museum, which shares space with his real estate office and his conservative Internet radio station, Mighty Stream Radio. “I don’t know how many eyebrows they pulled off of Elvis” in the coffin, he said. “We finally painted them on there.”

“The notoriety of the Elvis museum in the past,” he said, “will add to the value and the credibility of it in the future.”

Mr. Beeny has taken pains to distance himself from other conspiracy theorists. “We don’t put credence in a lot of these tabloids,” he said, motioning to several headlines. “They say the same thing, but they take a different approach. They saw him at Wal-Mart, or eating a burger at Burger King. Our approach is more factual. We have DNA.”

Mr. Beeny said the Presley estate viewed him as a pariah. Several calls seeking comment from Elvis Presley Enterprises were not returned.

The auction’s terms stipulate that the high bidder must take possession of the museum’s contents by Nov. 30 — pickup only, no shipping. “I hope very much that some responsible person will buy it who will perpetuate its legacy,” he said. “We try to convert people to Jesus Christ; we don’t try to convert them that Elvis is alive. But look at the evidence, weigh it against the evidence that he died, and draw your own conclusions.”

Law enforcement officials said Thursday that there was strong evidence that the imprisoned rapist who confessed this week to murdering six women more than 25 years ago in Cape Girardeau, Mo., and Carbondale, Ill., also killed women in as many as three other jurisdictions.

“He’s not proud of what he’s done, but he also explained that there’s a dark side to him,” said Lt. Paul Echols of the Carbondale Police Department, who used DNA to link the convict, Timothy W. Krajcir, to the 1982 killing of a 23-year-old woman in Carbondale. “He used the term ‘twisted.’”

The authorities in Pennsylvania said Thursday that they had used DNA evidence to tie Mr. Krajcir, 63, to the 1979 murder of Myrtle V. Rupp, 51, who was found strangled in her home near Reading.

Pennsylvania officials interviewed Mr. Krajcir this week, said Lt. Thomas McDaniel of the Pennsylvania State Police. Lieutenant McDaniel would not say whether Mr. Krajcir had confessed to Ms. Rupp’s murder.

“It’s his DNA,” Lieutenant McDaniel said, adding that Mr. Krajcir’s DNA did not match any other cold-case murders they had re-examined. “Our criminal investigators spoke with him at length — it was a very productive interview. The next stage is to take all the information and consult with the district attorney’s office on charges.”

On Monday, Mr. Krajcir pleaded guilty to the 1982 Carbondale killing. He was sentenced to 40 years in prison.

Later that day, the police in Cape Girardeau, a small city in southeast Missouri, announced that Mr. Krajcir had confessed to five murders there in 1977 and 1982. He sexually assaulted two of the murder victims in Missouri. He also raped a third woman, who survived.

The authorities in Marion, Ill., announced Thursday that DNA had also linked Mr. Krajcir to the 1978 stabbing death of Virginia Lee Witte, 51, whose body was found in her Marion home. Mr. Krajcir also provided law enforcement officials with details about three previously unsolved sexual assaults and robberies in the area, according to a statement from the Marion police.

“The interview went really well,” said Tina Morrow, a Marion detective. “He gave us a lot more details that we didn’t have.” Officials said the state attorney’s office was being kept informed of the investigation’s progress.

Officials in Paducah, Ky., said detectives there were looking into whether Mr. Krajcir might be a suspect in cold cases from the late 1970s and early 1980s.

“Detectives hope to interview Mr. Krajcir if they conclude he might be involved in any of Paducah’s unsolved cases,” the police in Paducah said.

Mr. Krajcir has been continuously imprisoned since 1983 as a repeat sexual offender and was first linked to the Cape Girardeau murders after investigators there heard that DNA evidence connected him to the rape and murder of the Carbondale victim, Deborah Sheppard.

Noticing similarities between Ms. Sheppard’s murder and a rash of killings that terrified residents of Cape Girardeau 40 miles to the southwest, investigators there began re-examining additional cases, two of which yielded a positive DNA link.

Confronted with the DNA evidence, Mr. Krajcir confessed to the other murders only after the prosecuting attorney of Cape Girardeau County, Morley Swingle, agreed to waive the death penalty.

Mr. Krajcir now faces multiple life sentences for the Cape Girardeau killings.

David Rupp, a nephew of Ms. Rupp, the Pennsylvania victim, said that while he was “glad to know who finally did it, there’s no ‘why.’”

“This guy’s just a psychopath,” Mr. Rupp said. “But at least I know now that it was not somebody in the local area.”

“I think they are going to find quite a few more victims,” he added, “because whenever this guy was not incarcerated, he was murdering.”

Originally published in The New York Times.

By MALCOLM GAY

COWDEN, Ill., July 22 — Stripped to the waist and armed with nothing but his bare hands, John Burns plunged headfirst into a half-submerged hollow log in the Kaskaskia River, hoping to encounter a male catfish guarding its nest inside.

If all went as planned, the fish would attack and Mr. Burns would grab its powerful lower jaw and, with the help of his friend Howard Ramsey, hoist it to the surface of the river, just outside Cowden.

Dilip Vishwanat for The New York Times

Mr. Burns and Mr. Ramsey were noodling, or hand fishing, a popular pastime on the lakes and rivers of the Southeast and Midwest. Noodling dates to the first American Indians. Depending on who is doing it and where, it may be called hogging, tickling, grabbling or stumping.

“We grab beavers, muskrats, snapping turtles, snakes,” said Mr. Ramsey, 61, who is retired from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. “We grab whatever lives in the river, but if it’s got hair on it, put it back. That’s my rule.”

Sticking one’s hand in the mouth of a catfish, which can weigh more than 100 pounds, carries significant risk of physical injury. For Mr. Ramsey, noodling in his home state harbors yet another risk: noodling is illegal in Missouri, a situation Mr. Ramsey is working to change.

In 2005, Mr. Ramsey and the advocacy group he founded, Noodlers Anonymous, persuaded the Missouri Department of Conservation to allow a six-week hand-fishing season as part of its five-year study of the state’s catfish population.

Unlike rod-and-reel anglers, who in Missouri are allowed to catch 20 catfish per day year round, noodlers were limited to five fish per day during those six weeks, and from only three rivers in the state.

All seemed fine for two seasons, Mr. Ramsey said. But just as Missouri noodlers were preparing for this year’s season, which was to start June 1, the department found that 13 percent of catfish tagged for the study, or 646 fish, had already been caught. It ended the noodling experiment three years ahead of schedule.

Dilip Vishwanat for The New York Times

“Exploitation rates are already high, so why would we want to add another method of legal harvest?” said Steve Eder, the department’s fisheries division chief.

But conservation department records indicated that of the 646 tagged fish caught in the first 18 months of the study, only one had been noodled.

“There’s a bias going on there,” said Gary Webb, 63, a member of Noodlers Anonymous who says he can trace his hand-fishing heritage to 1844. “The M.D.C. has bad-mouthed and slammed hand-fishermen ever since the department was created.”

In frequent trips to the Capitol in Jefferson City, Noodlers Anonymous has gained support from several state lawmakers and other elected officials. Still, a pro-noodling bill would have limited effect: Since its formation in 1937, the Department of Conservation has had sole governing authority over the state’s fish and wildlife policy.

Banned by the Missouri Legislature in 1919, noodling has always enjoyed a sort of outlaw status, said Mark Morgan, a professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

“That made it even more special: evade the conservation officer and catch the big fish at the same time,” said Dr. Morgan, who in a 2006 study of hand fishing compared the department’s treatment of noodlers to that of a “crazy aunt kept in the basement.”

Hand fishing is legal in at least 13 states in the Midwest and Southeast. This year Kansas allowed its first noodling season, and each June noodlers from across the country descend on Pauls Valley, Okla., for the annual Okie Noodling Tournament. The sport has inspired several documentary films, including one decidedly non-X-rated video called “Girls Gone Grabblin’.”

But as noodling gains prominence, it is opening old rivalries between traditional anglers and noodlers.

“They’re doing it when the fish is on the nest,” said Virgil Agee, president of the United States Catfish Anglers Tournament Series, “and when you remove the fish from the nest you leave the eggs without any protection, so you’ll have thousands and thousands of catfish die.”

This spring’s heavy floods and the ban on their sport has meant a long summer for Missouri’s noodlers. Mr. Ramsey, who was fined $500 for noodling in 1999, said he had traveled to five states this summer to practice his sport.

That makes it all the more trying when he comes away empty-handed, as he, Mr. Burns and two other Missouri noodlers did on their recent outing here.

But long odds and longer drives have not dampened their enthusiasm.

“It’s like I told the U.P.S. man the other day, it’s the challenge,” said Mr. Ramsey, who has a tattoo of a catfish on one shoulder and whose forearms are cross-hatched with battle scars, known in noodling circles as “river rash.” “Anybody can throw a trout line in the river and hang a perch on it. But very few people are going get in the river, and wade around and look for a hole in the bank, stick your hand in there, and hope it’s a catfish.”

Originally published in The New York Times.

Appearing yesterday on ”The Oprah Winfrey Show,” Craig and Pam Akers said they believed that their son, Shawn Hornbeck, had been sexually abused during the four years he was allegedly held captive in a suburban St. Louis apartment by Michael Devlin.

”O.K., I’m going to go there, and ask you what do you think happened,” said Ms. Winfrey, who was granted the first interview with the reunited family. ”Do you think that he was sexually abused?”

Seated on a couch across from Ms. Winfrey, the Akerses both nodded yes.

”Do you think that he was tortured?” Ms. Winfrey continued.

”That I do not know yet,” Ms. Akers replied.

The comments came on the same day that the Franklin County authorities arraigned Mr. Devlin by video on charges of kidnapping another boy, William Ownby, known as Ben.

Unshackled, wearing orange scrubs and flanked by two sheriff’s deputies, Mr. Devlin, 41, showed little emotion as Judge David Tobben read the charge against him. When the judge asked Mr. Devlin how he chose to plead, Mr. Devlin paused, then said, ”I’m not guilty.”

Judge Tobben scheduled a preliminary hearing for March 15.

The authorities found the boys last Friday in a search of Mr. Devlin’s ground floor apartment. Rescuers had been scouring the region since Jan. 8, when Ben, 13, disappeared after stepping off a school bus in rural Franklin County.

Stepping into Mr. Devlin’s apartment, the authorities were surprised when they also discovered Shawn, who had been missing for more than four years after disappearing on his bike in Washington County.

The two jurisdictions are prosecuting the cases separately. On Wednesday, the Washington County prosecutor, John Rupp, charged Mr. Devlin with one count of kidnapping and one count of armed criminal action. Mr. Rupp, who said Mr. Devlin flourished a handgun when he abducted Shawn, said he had no firm date for Mr. Devlin’s arraignment in that county.

The Franklin County prosecuting attorney, Robert Parks, said Mr. Devlin confessed to kidnapping Ben soon after his capture. The prosecutor added that more charges may be filed in the case.Mr. Devlin’s lawyer, Michael Kielty, would not comment on the reported confession. Mr. Kielty added that the dense news media coverage of the case made it ”next to impossible to have a fair jury in this county.”

Mr. Kielty also declined to comment on the Akerses’ claim that Mr. Devlin sexually abused their son.

Holding his stepfather’s hand, Shawn, 15, told the talk show host that he spent his days in captivity sleeping, watching television and playing video games. Shawn, sporting a fresh haircut and absent the many piercings he displayed the day of his rescue, said he was allowed ”some freedoms,” including access to the Internet, the television and the telephone.

Shawn said that he told people he was home schooled. ”We just made a story and kept the story the same,” he said. ”It was always home schooled.”

”You were home schooled?” Ms. Winfrey asked.

”No,” replied Shawn. ”That was the story.”

Shawn’s grandmother, Anna Quinn of St. Louis, later told the Associated Press that Shawn told his family that his captor would at times wake him every 45 minutes. ”Think to yourself when you don’t get enough sleep,” Ms. Quinn said. ”He had to do something to get his cooperation.”

The authorities said Mr. Devlin, who worked for more than 20 years as a manager of a pizzeria, is also being investigated in three other unsolved kidnappings, including the 1991 disappearance of Charles A. Henderson, who was last seen riding his bike in rural Lincoln County, Mo.

UNION, Mo., Jan. 13 — On Thursday evening, they were captives in the same tiny two-bedroom apartment in suburban St. Louis. Abducted four years apart, William Ownby and Shawn Hornbeck were freed on Friday, and they smiled sheepishly on Saturday as their families held back-to-back news conferences to discuss their boys’ astonishing rescue.

Dressed in a checked shirt, blue jeans and a pair of oval glasses, William, 13, who is known as Ben, was instructed not to speak to reporters. Looking up occasionally, Ben clung close to his family as they rejoiced at the turn of events.

“We’re just ecstatic,” Ben’s mother, Doris Ownby, said. “We don’t want to let him go out of our sight.”

Sheriff Gary Toelke of Franklin County said the kidnapping suspect, Michael Devlin, 41, had confessed, but added that he could not discuss details of the investigation.

Robert Parks, the Franklin County prosecuting attorney, has charged Mr. Devlin, a pizzeria manager, with one count of first-degree kidnapping. He was being held on $1 million bond.

Emotions ran high in neighboring Washington County, where Shawn entered the balloon-festooned gymnasium at Richwoods Elementary, his old school. Wearing a blue hooded sweatshirt and sporting a shaggy head of hair and pierced lower lip, Shawn grasped his mother’s hands. Also told not to speak to reporters, he laid his head on his mother’s shoulder as she spoke.

“I still feel like I’m in a dream, only this time it’s a good dream, not the nightmare I’ve had to live for the past four-and-a-half years,” his mother, Pam Akers, told reporters.

Shawn’s stepfather, Craig Akers, said he and his wife had been in disbelief when they were all reunited.

“There was that split second of shock,” Mr. Akers said. “Once I saw the face, I said, ‘Oh my God, that’s my son.’ ”

Shawn, now 15, vanished on Oct. 6, 2002, when he was 11. His parents reported that he had last been seen wearing a Little League jersey as he rode a bicycle to a friend’s house in Richwoods, Mo., a rural town about 65 miles southwest of St. Louis.

Ben, a Boy Scout and a straight-A student, disappeared on Monday afternoon after stepping off a school bus and running down a gravel road toward home in the rural town of Beaufort, Mo., about 60 miles west of St. Louis.

Ben’s disappearance prompted an intense search of hilly Franklin County. Investigators said they had been following about 500 leads in the case, though they had focused on a tip from one of Ben’s friends who had reported seeing a dilapidated white pickup with a camper shell speeding away from the place where Ben disappeared.

“Basically, that’s all we had,” Sheriff Toelke said.

Investigators got a break on Thursday when Kirkwood police officers, Gary Wagster and Chris Nelson, arrived at Mr. Devlin’s apartment complex in suburban St. Louis. They were serving a warrant in an unrelated case but noticed a small white truck matching the description of the one in the Ownby investigation.

After questioning Mr. Devlin at the pizzeria, officers searched his ground-floor apartment on Friday.

Sheriff Toelke said Shawn identified himself to officers as having been missing for four-and-a-half-years when they entered the home.

Roland Corvington, special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, told reporters that when officers entered the apartment, Ben asked: “Are you going to take me home?”

The boys had no visible injuries. Ben’s parents said that on Friday night he was eager to play video games and go to bed.

Mr. Devlin, who managed an Imo’s Pizza in Kirkwood, also worked part-time answering phones overnight at Bopp Chapel funeral home there.

“He was prompt, well-mannered and very efficient,” Jim Moyers, a funeral director at Bopp Chapel, said in a statement.

Neighbors who lived across from Mr. Devlin’s run-down red brick apartment were less generous. They described Mr. Devlin as an immense, bearded man with wire-rimmed glasses who kept to himself. They said that he did not appear to have been keeping secrets, but that he was combative and antisocial.

One neighbor, Mario Emanuel, 29, said that about three months ago Mr. Devlin called the police on a visitor who took his parking space.

Referring to Shawn, Mr. Emanuel, an installation technician for DirecTV, said, “When the police came, they talked to Devlin and the son — who turned out not to be the son — they talked to the police. If they would have investigated across the board, they would have had him.”

Tom Ballman, a Kirkwood police officer, confirmed that Mr. Devlin had summoned the police to the apartment complex, a two-story working-class enclave in the otherwise well-to-do suburb.

Another neighbor said her husband had also had tense encounters with Mr. Devlin over the space.

“The parking spot thing was weird,” the neighbor, Krista Jones, said. “He woke us up one night because he was honking in the parking lot at like 2 o’clock in the morning. Someone had parked in his space.”

“My husband almost beat him up,” she added.

Ms. Jones said that Mr. Devlin kept the blinds drawn, though she would occasionally see Shawn riding his bike in the evening and that the boy was occasionally visited by what appeared to be a friend and a girlfriend.

A check of Mr. Devlin’s name with the Missouri Highway Patrol’s sex-offender registry turned up nothing. And a search of Missouri court records revealed no criminal history.

Mr. Parks declined to divulge information about how the boys had spent their time in captivity, but added that more charges were likely to come. “It’s my hope that he never sees the outside of jail in his natural life,” Mr. Parks said.

Mr. Corvington of the F.B.I. said his agency was also looking into federal charges.

For the time being, though, the families said they were more interested in reconnecting with their rescued sons than worrying about Mr. Devlin’s fate.

“We’ve got a lot of catching up to do,” said a tearful Pam Akers, marveling at her teenage son’s growth. “He’s grown up on me, that’s for sure.”

Originally published in The New York Times.