A serial killer is terrorising a rural community in the United States, where a 15-year-old girl has become the fifth person to be murdered in the last week.

Abby Leigh Tyler died on Saturday morning, two days after she was wounded and her father Stephen Tyler killed when a gunman opened fire as they were closing the family business, the Tyler Home Centre, in the South Carolina city of Gaffney on Thursday.

Police have linked their deaths with three other shootings, all of which took place within a 10 mile (16 km) radius in Cherokee Country.

Cherokee County Sheriff Bill Blanton said police were now hunting a serial killer, and released an identikit picture of the man police believe is the gunman.

The killing spree began on Saturday June 27 when prominent local peach farmer Kline Cash, 63, was found by his wife Vickie shot dead in the couple's rural home in Cherokee County. On Wednesday Gena Linder Parker, 50, and her 83-year-old mother Hazel Linder were found bound and shot to death at Mrs Linder's home, a few miles away from the Cash's farm .

Police would not say how the deaths were linked and could not provide a motive for the murders, which have terrified the residents of Cherokee Country, a normally peaceful community of 54,000 people set amid peach orchards and farms 50 miles (80 kilometers) west of Charlotte, North Carolina.

"We're knee-deep in the investigation," Sheriff Blanton told reporters.

The murders are reminiscent of the 2002 Washington Beltway killings when snipers John Muhammed and Lee Boyd Malvo shot dead 11 people over a period of three weeks.

Gun sales increased in Cherokee Country as nervous residents armed themselves, cancelling July 4 celebrations to stay inside behind locked doors.

Clyde Thomas, the Tylers' minister at Cherokee Avenue Baptist Church, told his congregation: "The irony is that the freedoms we have, we're locked behind closed doors with firearms." He had a pistol in his office, the Herald-Journal newspaper reported.

Cherokee County local Hazel Smith, 47, told Sky TV she was terrified. "If he killed once, he'll kill again," she said. "Tonight, I'm going to stay inside and pray, pray a little harder that he gets caught."

An un-named local said: "The whole community is out looking for him."

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