Knight slaying suspect is killed

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PHILADELPHIA (Æ). One man wanted in the slaying of newspaper heir John S. Knight III surrendered to police yesterday and another .`was found shot to death in a New Jersey woodland. A third was at large.

Knight, 30, grandson of the founder of Knight newspapers was stabbed to death in his expensive downtown apartment Sunday morn ing.

A golf caddy found the body of Isais (Felix) Melendez in bushes at Pine Valley Country Club near Clementon, N.J., across the river from Philadelphia.

Melendez, 20, was one of the three men Philadelphia police named Thursday as suspected killers of Knight.

Because of what police discovered in the apartment boxes of Polaroid pictures and tape recordings the initial hunt for the killers focused on Philadelphia's homosexual community.

On Thursday, though, police said the motive for the killing was robbery. They named the three men and within hours one of them, Steven Maleno, 25, also of Philadelphia, surrendered to detectives on a city street.

Melendez' body was fully clothed. He appeared to have been shot with a small caliber gun in the back of the head and possibly in his face.

Police, said they believed he had been shot sometime Thursday night.

The third suspect, Salvatore Soli, 38, was believed to have left Philadelphia soon after the killing and hidden out at motels in Mt. Ephraim, N.J., in the same area where Me lendez' body was found. Police said they had this information from an informer.

Knight kept a diary that police seized. In it, according to both the Philadelphia. Inquirer and Daily News, were names of homosexual contacts and references to sexual escapades.

Maleno

Soli

Associated Press Melendez