Forensic investigators say the killer – gaining notoriety as the ‘Lincoln Butcher’ – places his victims in artfully carved and lavishly padded crates and inters them in a grid-like pattern behind the church.

Lincoln Police Lt. Marcus Perry, heading the investigation, says his team is baffled by this behavior. “We can’t tell if the particular arrangement of burial sites represents a kind of satanic rite or if it’s just a space saving thing.”

The discovery of Lincoln’s collection of corpses was first made yesterday at 1:22 p.m., when mourners at a nearby funeral noticed several patches of disturbed earth in their vicinity.

“Once the police came and we all realized what had happened, I was in shock,” said onlooker Ameila Gomez, in tears. “All these Lincoln natives, buried here for years – that’s just not what you expect to find at a cemetery.”

Perry, officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Lincoln Police have been excavating the area for the past 16 hours in search of more bodies. Almost all of the victims exhumed were elegantly dressed senior citizens, suggesting a mass abduction from some sort of old-person prom.

The revelation of Lincoln’s violent history follows that of several other small towns nationwide. Similar reports from as far as Istanbul, Turkey and Auckland, New Zealand raise concerns that Lincoln represents only one stop on the Butcher’s global spree.

FBI officials’ preliminary analyses of tissue decomposition suggest that the Butcher has been capturing and murdering Lincoln locals for roughly 260 years.