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Ex-crime lab tech dies before cops close in

Retired criminalist facing arrest in ’84 case died Tuesday in presumed suicide

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SDPD criminalist Kevin Brown works at a crime scene in 1991. — Howard Lipin / U-T San Diego
SDPD criminalist Kevin Brown works at a crime scene in 1991. — Howard Lipin / U-T San Diego
(Howard Lipin)

For 30 years, investigators worked to unravel the mystery of who killed 14-year-old Claire Hough as she smoked cigarettes and listened to cassettes at Torrey Pines State Beach.

On Thursday, San Diego police said they believe one of the suspected killers was working among them as a criminalist in the same police lab where evidence of the teen’s brutal slaying was examined and stored.

Kevin Charles Brown, 62, who retired from the department in 2002, committed suicide this week as police and prosecutors were closing in for an arrest, authorities said.

Ronald Tatro was identified through DNA as a suspect in a 1984 homicide. He died in 2011.
Ronald Tatro was identified through DNA as a suspect in a 1984 homicide. He died in 2011.

A second man also identified as a suspect, Ronald Clyde Tatro, is also dead, having drowned in an apparent boating accident in Tennessee in 2011.

Investigators said a 2012 test found both men’s DNA matched samples taken from the teen’s body.

Claire’s family on Thursday expressed gratitude to detectives. For them, the case is finally closed.

“In a way, it doesn’t make any difference who killed her,” her father, Samuel Hough, said from his Rhode Island home. “She’s dead and there’s nothing we can do about that. The important thing for us is what she was and what she became — the fact that she was so positive, so rich, at the time that she died.”

But Brown’s widow accused police of a bungled investigation, saying this is a clear case of DNA contamination because of her husband’s proximity to the evidence in the lab.

“The police have hounded my husband all year, and he ended up having a nervous breakdown and killed himself,” Rebecca Brown said Thursday. “They kept hounding him on something he didn’t do. He’s a good, kind, sweet, gentle man.”

San Diego homicide Capt. Al Guaderrama dismissed those allegations, saying Brown was not assigned to any part of Claire’s investigation and was not associated with any of the evidence processed.

“We do not believe that there was any type of contamination in this case at all,” Guaderrama said.

Claire’s death has mystified and frustrated detectives for decades.

She was strangled late in the evening of Aug. 24, 1984. Her body was found on a towel under the Old Highway 101 bridge. Her left breast had been cut away, and fingernail marks lashed her body, according to the autopsy report.

It’s unclear what motivated the teen to take the short walk from her grandparents’ Del Mar Heights home, where she was visiting, but police believe she took the jaunt willingly. Her father said she was known to take similar trips to the bay near her home in Cranston, R.I.

In many ways, Claire was an average teen who had a fondness for reading, a crush on actor Shaun Cassidy and KISS posters in her bedroom.

Her grandparents said she had spent part of her day at the beach and assumed she retired to her room that evening. They didn’t realize she was gone until 9 a.m. the next day when they reported her missing.

But Claire’s body had already been discovered by a passer-by about 5 a.m. A portable radio, cigarettes and matches were nearby.

Her death was eerily similar to an unsolved killing at Torrey Pines State Beach that took place six years before. Barbara Nantais, a 15-year-old who had spent the night there with her boyfriend, was found strangled and mutilated Aug. 13, 1978. Her right breast had been nearly cut off.

Investigators have speculated the two deaths may be related, but Guaderrama said no evidence they collected during their investigation connects Brown or Tatro to Barbara’s killing.

Police would not say Thursday if the two men had a relationship. On the face of it, they appeared to lead very different lives.

Tatro had a lengthy criminal record, police say. In 1985 — a year after Claire’s killing — a 43-year-old Tatro was arrested on suspicion of kidnapping and trying to rape a 16-year-old girl in La Mesa, police said. He coaxed her into his van and tried to subdue her with a stun gun, but she screamed and managed to get away.

She gave officers a license plate number. As police moved in on the van, he slit both his wrists. He pleaded guilty to felony false imprisonment and was sentenced to three years in prison.

Brown worked as a criminalist, first for New Mexico State Police from 1980 to 1982, then for the next 20 years at the San Diego Police Department. He worked in many parts of the lab over the years, from firearms to trace evidence.

He married his wife in 1993. After retiring from the San Diego Police Department, he worked again for New Mexico’s lab. He sold gadgets at Fry’s Electronics upon moving back to San Diego before retiring for good.

His widow said the first inkling of the police investigation turning toward her husband came Jan. 9 when police knocked on the door of their Chula Vista home with a search warrant.

“It shocked the whole family,” she said. Investigators seized numerous items: computers, old photo albums, cameras, her mother’s cookbook.

Guaderrama said the DNA discovery had spurred an exhaustive investigation. Interviews around the country were conducted, law enforcement agencies from other states were enlisted to help and 30-year-old evidence was reanalyzed.

The homicide captain wouldn’t discuss any other search warrants that were executed, but did say several pieces of evidence were found.

Brown was questioned multiple times throughout the year as were his family, friends and neighbors. He suffered from bouts of anxiety and depression and investigators were told about his fragile mental state, according to the criminal defense lawyer he’d hired, Gretchen von Helms.

He passed an independent polygraph test administered by a former police officer, von Helms said.

“They haven’t believed him and they’ve kept at it,” his wife said. “They just pushed my husband to an early grave.”

Brown was last seen Monday morning. He was still in bed when his wife went to work at Mater Dei Catholic High School, where she teaches. He got up, dressed and told his live-in mother-in-law that he had things to do.

His body was found on Tuesday, hanging from a tree at Cuyamaca State Park on Highway 79 near mile marker 7.25, Guaderrama said.

The widow said she was told that no suicide note has been found. Police have searched Brown’s truck and a cabin the family owns nearby.

Staff researcher Merrie Monteagudo contributed to this report.

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