Published August 18, 2022 • Updated on August 18, 2022 at 6:30 pm
The defense attorney for a man linked by DNA evidence to the deaths of two women in Montclair and Burbank in the 1980s told jurors in closing argument Wednesday that prosecutors failed to prove his client raped and strangled the women.
www.nbclosangeles.com
A man described by prosecutors as a serial killer was convicted Thursday of
murdering two young women whose bodies were found in Montclair and Burbank in the 1980s.
Horace Van Vaultz, Jr., 67, showed no reaction as the clerk of the court read the verdicts.
The jurors also found true the special circumstances of multiple murders and that the murders were committed during rapes.
Vaultz unsuccessfully tried to convince jurors that he had consensual sex with the women, and his defense attorney theorized that someone else appeared after those encounters and committed the murders.
The families of 21-year-old Selena Keough, who was found dead in 1981, and 22-year-old Mary Duggan, who's body was found in 1986, could be seen sobbing, crying, and comforting one another as the verdicts were read.
"To believe the defendant's story, you'd have to throw out all your common sense,"
Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman told jurors at the end of her closing argument. "You'd have to believe this defendant is the most unlucky person on the planet, to have
three women all turn up dead with the defendant's semen inside them.
(...)
A recent re-examination of evidence also showed a DNA link between Vaultz and the third connected murder in Ventura County, prosecutors said.
Janna Rowe's body was found partially clothed in a trash pile in December 1986, and police learned Vaultz had rented a motel room for her in Thousand Oaks several days earlier. A piece of custom-made jewelry she wore was found in Vaultz's mother's jewelry box.
All three women had been strangled and tied up in similar ways.
Jurors in Downtown L.A. began to hear closing arguments Friday in the trial of a man accused by prosecutors of being a serial killer, who was arrested after genealogical database searches allegedly linked him to the murders of two young women in the 1980s. “He’s a man who brutalizes and...
www.nbclosangeles.com
After Vaultz was identified police learned he had been tried and acquitted in 1988 of a similar murder in Ventura County.
Janna Rowe's body was found in a trash pile in Ventura in December, 1986. Vaultz had rented a motel room for her in Thousand Oaks days earlier, and was later seen driving her car.
Even though Vaultz was found not guilty of Rowe's murder it was presented at this trial as potential evidence of Vaultz's pattern of behavior toward women.
"It is not a coincidence that these women met the same fate at the hands of the same man," Deputy DA Silverman said during closing arguments.
The cases went cold for decades until they were linked to Horace Van Vaultz Jr., 67, through investigative genetic genealogy, which uses genealogical websites to identify potential relatives of a suspect based on DNA collected at a crime scene.
www.nbcnews.com
Prosecutors also said a recent re-examination of evidence showed a DNA link between Vaultz and a third killing in Ventura County, KNBC-TV
reported.
Janna Rowe, 25, was strangled and left on a trash pile. Vaultz was acquitted of her death in 1988, before DNA evidence was used at trial, and cannot be retried.
