Admitted serial killer Coral Eugene Watts may have confessed to killing 12 women in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but those confessions alone will not be enough to try him for the 1974 murder of a college student, a judge ruled.

Kalamazoo Circuit Court Judge William Schma issued his May 27 decision to keep Watts' 1982 confessions to Texas authorities out of evidence in the case of Gloria Steele's murder 30 years ago.

Schma said the prejudicial value of the "prior bad act" evidence outweighed the probative value of linking the crime to Watts, a suspect in as many as 60 murders in Texas, Michigan and Canada.

"The confessions alone, without any direct evidence, are tenuous evidence of the defendant's involvement," Schma told Courttv.com. "Anybody who hears about those confessions will want to convict him."

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The decision stymies Michigan's latest effort to pile up convictions against the country's most prolific killer, who received life without parole in 2004 for the 1979 stabbing death of another Michigan woman.

In a state without the death penalty, the largely symbolic prosecutions are about seeking justice for the victims and their families, and holding Watts to account for his crimes, said Kalamazoo assistant prosecutor Scott Brower.

"Gloria Steele and her family deserve justice," Brower told Courttv.com. "Obviously we're disappointed. This decision significantly affects the progress of our case."

The case against Watts in Steele's death is entirely circumstantial, even by the state's admission.

The 19-year-old freshman was stabbed in the chest more than 30 times in her dorm room at Western Michigan University, where Watts was also a student in October 1974.

A witness testified in a preliminary hearing that she saw a black man running down the stairs of the complex around the time of the murder but stopped short of identifying Watts as the man.

The state also produced records that Watts received a parking ticket in the lot attached to Steele's dorm around the same time.

The defendant's lawyer filed a motion to dismiss the charges in light of the decision.

"This ruling takes away the state's ability to convict Mr. Watts based on his past acts," defense attorney Jeff Getting told Courttv.com. "The state has no DNA, no fingerprints and no trace physical evidence at all." Brower confirmed that statement.

Watts confessed to 12 murders and five assaults in 1982, when he was arrested in Dallas during a home invasion.

He was initially charged with the attempted murder of student Lori Lister, who was found unconscious in her bathtub as Watts filled it with water.

Anxious to close the books on a number of unsolved murders in the area, Texas authorities struck a deal with Watts for 60 years in prison on aggravated burglary charges in exchange for confessing and leading police to the bodies of the victims he chose to bury.

A Texas appeals court decision had significantly reduced Watts' sentence when in 2004, just two years away from Watts' release, the Michigan Attorney General's office successfully prosecuted him for the 1979 slashing death of Helen Dutcher.

An eyewitness identified Watts as the man he saw stab Dutcher, 37, 12 times in the face, neck and chest in the Detroit suburb of Ferndale, in a manner similar to the other murders Watts admitted.

In that trial, Oakland County Circuit Judge Richard Kuhn allowed jurors to hear about the methods Watts had previously used as evidence of "a common plan, purpose or scheme."

He also allowed three of his surviving victims to describe for the panel their near-death experiences with Watts.

At Watts' sentencing in open court, Kuhn lamented that he could not mete out the death penalty and called on the Michigan legislature to amend the state's constitution.

Watts' trial attorney in the Dutcher case says he believes his client would have been acquitted in her death were it not for the evidence of his past crimes.

"Once the jury hears about those prior bad acts, the presumption of innocence is gone," said defense lawyer Ronald Kaplovitz. "When they hear about all those bad things, they think he probably could have done it."

Kaplovitz says as a defense attorney, he finds the use of prior bad act evidence "troublesome."

"He's not a sympathetic character to begin with, and with this evidence, you run the risk of having a jury look past the facts of the case at hand and convict him for something he already admitted to."