CONCORD, N.H. — A convicted rapist and murderer who died in prison in Rhode Island in 2011 also killed women in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, luring them to remote spots and strangling them with their own clothing, New Hampshire’s attorney general said Tuesday.

In the case of Judith Whitney, prosecutors said Edward Mayrand was already giving away her jewelry to women at a bar on the day or day after he killed her in July 1987 in New Hampshire.

Whitney, from Amherst, Massachusetts, was 43 when she was last seen alive with Mayrand in Keene.

A hunter found her body four months later in Winchester, New Hampshire, a drawstring tied in a granny knot around her neck.

The New Hampshire Cold Case Unit announced Tuesday that it had used DNA, similarities in the way the women were killed, witness statements and inconsistencies in Mayrand’s stories to link him to Whitney’s death and the 1983 murder of 25-year-old Kathleen Daneault in Gardner, Massachusetts.

Mayrand, who was convicted of killing another woman in 1994, had long been suspected in both murders, but investigators could not find enough evidence to bring charges.

In a statement released by the Worcester County District Attorney’s office, Daneault’s family praised the officials who solved her murder.

“Our one solace is that Edward Mayrand passed away in prison alone without loved ones around him to comfort him, just as he left Kathy to die alone,” the family said.

“While this does bring us some sort of closure, it does not erase the 31 years that the son whom she loved more than life itself, has been without his mother.”

Prosecutors say on Nov. 17, 1983, he left a restaurant with Daneault in Gardner, Massachusetts, and strangled her with a piece of her own blouse, torn off and tied in a simple granny knot around her neck.

Investigators in September 2014 found Mayrand’s DNA on the cloth, contradicting his story that they had no physical contact.