Warrants reveal evidence in 1984 killing
A retired San Diego police criminalist connected through DNA to the 1984 murder of 14-year-old Claire Hough apparently told a friend earlier this year that he’d photographed the girl on Torrey Pines State Beach shortly before she turned up dead, according to search warrant affidavits unsealed Friday.
San Diego police detectives had been gathering evidence against Kevin Charles Brown, 63, over the past year, after a DNA examination found his sperm on a vaginal swab taken from her body, the records state. Police say they were close to arresting Brown when he hanged himself last week.
Brown, who was first interviewed about the case in January, denied knowing Claire or Ronald Tatro, the other man implicated in the killing. The DNA examination had also identified Tatro’s DNA on blood from Claire’s clothing and in the broken zipper of her jeans, according to the affidavits, documents submitted by investigators to obtain search warrants. Tatro died in 2011 in Tennessee.
Brown, a 20-year veteran of the San Diego police crime lab, told investigators that his DNA must have shown up as a result of lab cross-contamination. But investigators said Brown never handled any of the evidence in the case.
Brown’s lawyer, Gretchen von Helms, said Friday the sperm is inconclusive evidence, and that there are many possibilities for lab contamination, even with today’s strict standards.
The amount of Brown’s sperm found on the swab was minimal. Von Helms contends the low amount of DNA points to cross-contamination, and not a low sperm count or trouble ejaculating, as police argue. Yet Brown did tell investigators he had trouble ejaculating during that period in his life.
Back in those days, criminalists often used their own blood and semen samples as a “standard” to test evidence against, von Helms said. Swabs being tested weren’t capped then, she added, increasing chances for contamination. She also questioned why semen wasn’t reported being found in Claire’s body during the autopsy, but was found on swabs at the police lab.
“How could they possibly say in 1984 that there wasn’t contamination?” von Helms said.
The affidavits also reveal that as police continued their investigation, they probed into other parts of Brown’s background in an effort to tie him to the killing.
Brown told investigators that, during the 1980s, he was a regular member of a photo club that took nude shots of college girls and strippers recruited for the purpose.
Brown asked to take a polygraph test to prove his innocence, but, according to the court records, the results indicated deception when he was asked about knowledge of Claire’s death or about having sex with her. The test, which was administered at a police station, couldn’t make any conclusions about his answer to questions about Tatro. And Brown’s lawyer said he passed the portion of the test when answering that he never hurt or killed anyone.
Afterward, police considered a statement Brown made as incriminating.
As they were sitting after the polygraph, Detective Lori Adams told Brown: “I don’t believe for a second that you thought she was 14. I really don’t. I think she was probably a little bit more mature than most girls and probably a little bit more ... active ... probably a little more grown up than most girls. I don’t believe for a second that you would have known her age, her true age.”
Brown immediately responded, “Well I didn’t,” and several seconds later under his breath, “I had no idea,” the affidavit states.
Another time, Brown told detectives that he might have hung out with a “Claire” who was visiting from out of town back then, and he assumed he had sex with her but had no specific memory of it.
He also started reaching out to his old friends from those days, telling them of the police investigation.
When reached by police, one of those friends said Brown had said the same girl he’d finished a photo shoot with on the beach had turned up dead, according to the records. Brown’s lawyer disputes that statement was ever made.
The records reveal police really wanted to find a connection between Brown and the other suspect, Tatro. Search warrant affidavits argue the two men might have socialized in the same circles — Brown frequenting strip clubs and Tatro admitting to using prostitutes.
Tatro was a career criminal by this point. He had been a police officer in Arkansas for about a year, records show. But in 1974 he kidnapped and raped a woman at knife point. He attacked a 16-year-old girl in La Mesa in 1985, and was a person of interest in the February 1984 murder of Carole Defleice, a San Diego prostitute. He was never arrested in that killing, which remains unsolved.
Claire’s killing in August 1984 was particularly violent. She was strangled, her face beaten, her throat sliced, her left breast cut off.
Her murder was strikingly similar to the 1978 strangling death of Barbara Nantais, 15, on the same beach. Her right nipple had been nearly sliced off. Wet sand had been stuffed in the mouths of both girls.
The FBI and investigators had long suspected both killings were done by the same person, but Barbara’s death remains unsolved, with no genetic evidence pointing to either Tatro or Brown. Tatro was in prison during the first murder, and Brown was living in New Mexico.
It’s unclear if police ever found a link between the two men, and investigators would not say. In their searches of Brown’s Chula Vista house, the affidavits show, they hoped to find correspondence between the men, or newspaper clippings of the killing. What they did seize was lots of computers, hard drives, disks, photos, cameras and the like.
They were also searching for the straw purse that a Circle K employee had seen Claire carrying the night of her death. The search warrants don’t show a purse being recovered from Brown’s house.
