SANTA CRUZ – A man who by his own confessions is a serial killer pleaded guilty to two additional Santa Cruz County murders from the 1980s.

Terry Childs, a 61-year-old former Aptos man, was sentenced to two life sentences without parole in the murders of Joan Mack and Christopher Hall on Friday. The sentences are on top of three earlier murder convictions in Santa Cruz, Nevada and Santa Clara.

Childs’ guilty pleas come more than 31 years after a Santa Cruz police investigator first linked him publicly to Hall’s February 1985 death and 20 years after he made a prison confession to Hall’s killing, plus Mack’s 1984 fatal stabbing. Though tests comparing Childs’ DNA crime scene evidence from Mack reportedly were undertaken in 1997, Santa Cruz County Chief Deputy District Attorney Rob Wade said on Monday that there was no evidence found linking the two.

“Nothing came of it. If there was, we would have prosecuted him,” Wade said.

The Santa Cruz County District Attorney’s Office was able to secure the guilty plea last week after nearly a year of its investigators working with Childs, said Wade. Prosecutors agreed to seek two life without parole sentences in the case, in exchange for the pleas, he said.

“It’s extremely gratifying to be able to bring closure to the victims’ families,” Wade said on Monday. “With regards to Alexis, she came from back East for the sentencing and it’s very gratifying to be able to close that and have that behind her.”

Wade was referring to Mack’s daughter, who was just 5 years old when her Sacramento mother was found dead, at 28, on the bluffs above Seacliff Beach. Mack, who was reportedly living on the streets at the time, was found bound and gagged and covered in stab wounds.

The other victim, Hall, was found shot to death on Dakota Street, across the street from San Lorenzo Park. Santa Cruz Police Department Lt. Mike Dunbaugh publicly linked Childs as a suspect in the death of Hall, a “middleman in a drug deal that went sour” in August 1985.

Childs made his 1997 confession as leverage in avoiding a transfer from Corcoran State Prison to the tougher Pelican Bay State Prison, according to Sentinel reports. Childs sought a deal that would take the death penalty off the table and would allow him to transfer to a prison out of California in exchange for guilty pleas, but was denied those terms by Santa Cruz County and Nevada prosecutors.

Ariadne Symons, then a prosecutor and now a Santa Cruz County Superior Court judge, said in 1997 that the District Attorney’s office needed evidence and more than just Childs’ say-so in the killing of Mack, Hall and his father’s fiancee Penny Rickenbaker, 30, in 1974 in Aptos.

Wade said that his office moved forward in the case this year, based on Childs’ willingness to speak with his investigators and because the “way that he described all of it was absolutely consistent with what we found out.”

Most recently, in 2007, Childs confessed to the 1979 killing of 19-year-old Cupertino resident Linda Ann Jozovich, whose body he left in a remote Santa Cruz Mountains location.

Childs first was sentenced to 41 years in prison in March 1987 for the August 1985 murder of Lois “Jeanine” Lynette Sigala. Childs shot the 17-year-old 10 times in a remote area off Granite Creek Road in Scotts Valley. By the time of his arrest in the case, Childs, then 29, already had served three prison sentences and had accumulated a laundry list of arrests for burglary, robbery and drugs in Santa Cruz.

Childs was being held Monday at Salinas Valley State Prison.