One of their own: Part I

MARINE FAMILIES

MONITOR HEARINGS

IN DEATHS

Parents of those killed in ’20 vehicle sinking frustrated by results

BY ANDREW DYER

Aleta Bath sat alone in the back of a Camp Pendleton military courtroom, shaking her head as a lawyer explained to three Marine Corps officers why his client was not at fault in the tragic 2020 sinking of an armored amphibious troop transport.

The board had heard testimony that the Marines received training on escaping the vehicles. Bath knew that was disputed by the Corps’ own official investigation.

“No,” she said to herself.

“That’s not true.”

On her lap lay a photo of her son in his Marine Corps uniform. Pfc. Evan Bath, 19, and seven other young Marines and asailor died when their Assault Amphibious Vehicle known as an “amtrack” or “track” by Marines sank beneath the waves of the Pacific two summers ago. Her cellphone was open to the texts she exchanged with him up to the day he died.

Bath and a handful of other parents of those killed have been a consistent and determined presence over the past month in the hearing rooms where Marines of various ranks

SEE PARENTS A19

IMMIGRATION DRIVING U.S. POPULATION INCREASE AS BIRTHS SLOW

Fewer babies, rise in deaths bring growth rate down to just 0.1%

BY MIRIAM JORDAN & ROBERT GEBELOFF

Overall 2021 will go down as the year with the slowest population growth in U.S. history.

New census data shows why: Both components of growth gains from immigration and the number of births in excess of the number of deaths have fallen sharply in recent years. In 2021, the rate of population growth fell to an unprecedented 0.1 percent.

Yet within these sluggish figures, a new pattern is emerging. Immigration, even at reduced levels, is for the first time making up a majority of population growth

In part this is because Americans are dying at higher rates and having fewer babies, trends accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic. But it is also because there are signs that immigration is picking up again. Even after four years of stringent controls on immigration imposed under former President Donald Trump, the overall share of Americans born in other countries is not only rising but also coming close to levels last seen in the

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MEXICAN PRESS SEEKS SAFETY IN PROGRAM

But government often falls short of goal for journalists, others

BY GREG MORAN, ALEXANDRA MENDOZA & WENDY FRY

January was a horrifying month for journalists in Mexico. Four were murdered, two of them in Tijuana, getting the new year off to a bloody start and setting an entire profession on edge.

Things didn’t improve when February began.

“I am going to kill you like a dog.” That’s what Netzahualcóyotl Cordero García, the 47-year-old director general of an online news site in Cancun, heard in the darkness on the street outside of his home Tuesday night.

He escaped death, narrowly His attacker’s pistol malfunctioned reports say the bullet fell on the ground as he leveled it at his target which allowed the journalist to knock the assailant off his bike.

ONE OF THEIR OWN

Claire Hough was nearing her 15th birthday when she traveled from Rhode Island to San Diego to visit her grandparents. She never got to blow out any candles. Somebody killed her first.

Her murder in August of 1984 became one of the county’s most troubling unsolved homicides brutal in its details and frightening in its location: scenic Torrey Pines State Beach, visited by thousands of people annually

THE SERIES

Today: A cold case. A DNA hit. And finally justice. Or was it?

Sunday, Feb. 13: “I must have had sex with her.” Doubts creep in as a detective springs his trap.

Sunday, Feb. 20: “They are not going to get away with this.” A widow’s quest delivers a dramatic courtroom twist.

As the years went by, San Diego police cold-case detectives revisited the slaying from time to time, looking through the files for missed clues and asking criminalists if there was some new way to extract DNA from the evidence.

It turned out there was.

What happened next is the stuff of Hollywood movies, mystery novels and true-crime podcasts at long last an answer to the question of what happened to Claire Hough. A triumph, it seemed, of tenacity and technology

But the DNA results became more complicated than that, and more tragic Story begins on A12.

Cordero Garcia said he had received threats by phone and text for a month about his reporting. He had taken them seriously enough to enroll 10 days before the attack in the Federal

SEE SAFETY • A20

WAR ON TRUTH

Today, an Opinion special section presents commentaries about the slain journalists in Mexico and displays the photojournalism of Alfonso Margarito Martínez Esquivel, who was killed last month. Inside

S.D., AFGHAN STUDENTS CONNECT OVER ZOOM

Virtual meetings between Carmel Valley classroom, learning center in Kabul

BY KRISTEN TAKETA

On a recent Thursday night after 8 p.m., two San Diego high school girls taught a lesson about DNA to a class of girls and boys in Afghanistan, a country that does not allow girls their age to attend school. The exchange was happening through Zoom, from a classroom at Canyon Crest Academy in wealthy Carmel Valley all the way to Mawoud Learning Academy a private education center in Kabul.

Pictured on Canyon Crest’s Zoom screen were faces of more than two dozen Afghan teenagers, mostly girls, sitting on wooden benches in a sun-filled room at Ma-

SHAUN WHITE RETIRING

The snowboarding gold medalist says he’s retiring from the sport after the Beijing Games. D1

woud. Their eyes smiled behind blue and black surgical masks whenever Canyon Crest seniors, Aditi Anand and April Zuo, laughed or made jokes during the lesson. Closest to the camera their teacher Najibullah Yousefi smiled as he translated for his students. Anand and Zuo explained that dish soap can be used to help extract DNA, because its hydrophobic properties break down membranes surrounding the inner parts of a cell, including DNA.

“I think we catch it,” Yousefi said. “That soap caused the membrane of the cell, the cell membrane, away from the water.”

“Yes, wonderful!” Zuo said, and around her more than two dozen Canyon Crest students broke into applause at the understanding that bridged the two cultures on opposite sides of the world

Since last April students at

SEE STUDENTS A18

A student at the Mawoud Learning Academy in Kabul, Afghanistan, shows her artwork to Canyon Crest Academy students in Carmel Valley via Zoom on Thursday

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ACOLD CASE, ADNA HIT AND FINALLY JUSTICE... OR WAS IT?

The murder of Claire Penelope Hough wasthe kind of mystery that keeps homicide detectives awake at night pulling at loose threads.

For almost 30 years, they’d tugged and tugged andcouldn’t unravel t. Now they wanted to try again.

Their persistence was due partly to Hough’s age a month shy of 15 when she was sexually assaulted and strangled on an August night in 1984. Cops have teenage daughters, too.

Part of it was the savageryof the attack at Torrey Pines State Beach She was battered in the face and slashed on the neck Sand was stuffed down her throat. Her left breast was cut off

So yes, they wanted to catch this monster, even as the years ticking by made that more difficult Time is no ally to crime-solvers: evidence degrades, witnesses die detectives get assigned to other cases.

But as the calendar advanced so did science.

Every couple of years, new techniques or equipment would come along, offering hope to cold-case detectives working unsolved murders. They would retrieve old items stored in evidence rooms and ask the forensic scientists to have another go

So it was in the summer of 2012 that Lynn Rydalch, a San Diego Police Department homicide detective, sent an email about the Hough murder to the department’s lab.

“I don’t want to leave any stone unturned,” he wrote. “Any ideas you have for something that might have been missed would be greatly appreciated.

The request went to criminalist David Cornacchia He’s an expert in DNA, the increasingly sophisticated identification of criminal suspects from even the tiniest bits of blood, saliva and other bodily fluids.

Since its introduction in the late 1980s, it has revolutionized crime-solving, considered so irrefutable as evidence that it spawned a maxim: “DNA don’t lie.”

Earlier tests done over the years on clothing and other evidence located stains that appeared to be from humans.

But the lab never had enough material to link it to anybody

This time, using more powerful tools, Cornacchia extracted DNA, amplified it, and created a genetic profile. He ran it through law-enforcement databases to see if there was a match.

In Hollywood movies television cop dramas and true-crime podcasts, th s is the swelling moment of delicious truth.

Lady Justice rebalances her scales and reaches across the decades to tap a bad guy on the shoulder Sometimes she taps in real life, too.

Blood spots on Hough’s jeans and underwear came back to a felon named Ronald Tatro.

His criminal record included raping a woman at knifepoint in Arkansas in 1974 and attempting to kidnap a teenager in La Mesa in 1985 after zapping her twice with a stun gun. He once checked himself into a psychiatric clinic, troubled by his inability to control violent urges.

Finally it seemed, the planets had aligned to solve Claire Hough’s 28-yearold murder But there was a complication. Cornacchia also got a DNA hit on

vaginal swabs collected all those years ago during the girl’s autopsy And it wasn’t Tatro. The sperm cells belonged to someone familiar to the crime lab. He used to work there.

Kevin Brown grew up in Sacramento, the youngest of two children. His father was a podiatrist his mother an administrative assistant in state government. He went to Cal State Sacramento and got a bachelor’s degree in forensic science. After he graduated, in 1979, he started working as a criminalist for the New Mexico state police. Brown liked the job but not the location. He was a Californian at heart Three years in, he moved to the San Diego police lab. He stayed for 20 years, rotating through various units narcotics, firearms, serology, trace evidence before leaving in 2002.

Adecade later his DNA showed up in the Hough case. And it stunned the police lab. Manager Jennifer Shen and other supervisors huddled behind closed doors, trying to figure out what the result meant and what to do about it. Shen knew Brown. They had been in the same lab for seven years at the beginning of her time there and the end of his. She remembered him as “a very pleasant person” and had enjoyed their office interactions.

It was upsetting to think that one of their own could be a murderer especially someone who was by all accounts mild-mannered, even timid. Brown was 6-foot-4 but not imposing.

He was someone whose bosses dinged him in evaluations for getting rattled and tongue-tied during courtroom testimony One female criminalist considered him “weak-jellied” and said, “I could beat the crap out of him myself.”

But if Brown didn’t have it in him to assault Hough, that meant his DNA wound up in the evidence through contamination, a prospect that presented its own worries to lab management. It would make them look bad, raise questions about the integrity of the work there.

Inadvertent contamination happens with surprising regularity in crime labs. Technicians brush up against a bicycle or cough over a handgun and their DNA winds up in the mix. They pick up a pen used by someone else, and transfer that person’s DNA onto apiece of evidence down the line.

That’s why Brown and other criminalists provide genet c samples for the lawenforcement database, to weed out mistakes when they happen.

But Brown’s DNA in the Hough case wasn’t from wandering skin cells or droplets of saliva. It was sperm, on vaginal swabs. Lab managers had never encountered such a thing.

understood how it could

theory.

PART

ONE OF THEIR OWN

The lab managers couldn’t imagine anyone being that sloppy Even in 1984, before anyone knew anything about supersensitive DNA testing, criminalists understood they had to be careful.

But the supervisors trying to figure all this out weren’t in the lab back then, when it was not just in a different era but in a different building. They didn’t know how the semen standards were stored or how the criminalists cleaned their tools, or even whether they always wore masks or gloves.

They didn’t ask, either because they didn’t want word of Brown’s DNA hit spreading in the office

They did know this, however: Brown wasn’t the analyst who examined the Hough evidence in 1984. That was John Simms, a criminalist respected by his peers for his thoroughness.

Simms, still in the lab and serving as its quality assurance officer, was mortified by the idea that something he’d done might have messed things up. Had he used Brown’s semen standard instead of his own? He told Shen he didn’t think so, although he couldn’t recall working the case. There had been so many over the years The lab managers were in a quandary. Should they tell the cold-case detectives about Brown’s DNA, or write it off as contamination, even though they doubted that’s what happened?

Dismissing it would allow police to tie Tatro, the convicted rapist, in a tidy forensic bow. Shen and the others decided to put it all on the table. Let detectives investigate. Maybe they would find more evidence tying Brown to the crime. Maybe they would connect him to Tatro, figure out how the two of them wound up together on the beach with the girl. Maybe they would find more reasons to suspect contamination.

“We were in a very difficult

spot, recalled Patrick O’Donnell, the supervisor in charge of DNA testing.

“We needed to disclose this result but do it in a way that provided a complete set of explanations as to why we are seeing this result. That was our obligation. “Had we covered up this result, and then three years later there is additional evidence that Kevin Brown somehow was a serial killer, then we would not have done our duty.”

The idea of a serial killer wasn’t idle speculation. Six years before Hough’s murder another teen, Barbara Nantais, 15, had been murdered on the same beach, and in the same manner: sexually assaulted, beaten, mutilated, strangled. Her slaying was unsolved, too.

Normally criminalists let detectives know by phone when DNA results are in. This time they did it in person. The meeting was held in the fall of 2012 in a location that spoke to how thorny the case was: aconference room in the police chief’s office.

Shen attended, along with O’Donnell. Rydalch, the coldcase detective, was there with his boss.

No written record of the meeting is known to exist The lab managers would say later that they told the detectives this: They believed contamination had not occurred, that it would have required a “colossal breach of protocol,” but they couldn’t rule it out. It’s always possible.

That’s not what the detectives heard. They left the meeting certain that the scientists had explored and eliminated contamination, leaving only one explanation for Brown’s sperm: sexual contact.

And that’s the message they passed along a few days later to detective Michael Lambert, who had just joined the cold-case

team. He inherited the Hough file from Rydalch, who was retiring.

Born in Berlin, the son of an Army soldier, Lambert grew up on the East Coast and joined the Navy after graduating from high school. He served five years and then joined the San Diego police academy in 1989 at age 25

He’d wanted to be a cop since childhood a friend’s uncle was an officer but not just any cop.

On the first day of the academy, when recruits stand up and share their hoped-for futures, he talked about becoming a homicide detective.

About 12 years into his career, he got his wish. He’d done stints by then in patrol, narcotics and as a generalist in the detective pool. He worked murders for about a decade before moving to the cold-case team.

He immersed himself in the Hough file, which numbered thousands of pages. He learned that the teen was from Cranston, R.I the youngest of two children in a middle-class family She was entering 10th grade, a bright girl who didn’t care much for school. She liked poetry and the bands Kiss and Van Halen. She would stick up for people she thought were being picked on, and sometimes do or say things to shock others. She smoked Marlboro Lights and had a boyfriend back home who was four years older

In August 1984, Hough came out to San Diego with a friend. They stayed in Del Mar Heights with Hough’s grandparents, a 15-minute walk from Torrey Pines State Beach, which they visited almost daily

They sat on towels on the sand near a bridge, listening to music from a portable radio/cassette recorder

Her friend returned to Rhode Island after they had been here for about a week. Without her companion, Hough told her grandparents she was bored. On the night she was killed, she slipped undetected out of the house and walked to the beach, stopping at a Circle K to buy cigarettes. The clerk there thought she looked 20, not 14 Around 5 the next morning, a man collecting aluminum cans on the beach swept his flashlight across what he assumed was someone sleeping. She was on her right side, on a white towel, her sandals off. When he saw the blood, he called police.

The beachcomber’s name was Wallace Wheeler a self-proclaimed psychic with schizophrenia who had recently been arrested as a “peeping Tom.” Police considered him a suspect especially after he began sending weekly letters to Hough’s parents sharing visions he had of the killer as a long-haired man who was missing an ear

At the urging of detectives, the Houghs played along for a while, in case Wheeler decided to confess He never did.

Four years later he killed himself, jumping from the 13th floor of an apartment building in San Diego.

The forensic lab’s double DNA hit left Lambert with questions as he began to investigate: How did Ronald Tatro, a convicted rapist, and Kevin Brown, a former police employee with no criminal record, ever meet, let alone commit a murder together?

Or were they lone wolves who just happened to prey on the same girl at the same place at the same time?

The detective flew to Minnesota to interview the friend who had been in San Diego with Hough. He showed her photos of the two men, taken around the time of the killing, when Tatro was 40 and Brown was 32 She didn’t recognize either one Lambert showed her a photo of the van Tatro was driving back then nothing there, either

The friend, Kimberly Jamer told him Hough was faithful to her boyfriend they talked about everything, she said and would not have been interested in men that old. The only people they met in San Diego were teens around the same age hanging out at the beach, and that was just in passing.

Lambert and his partner Lori Adams, looked into Tatro’s history Born in Elmhurst, Ill., he made it through the 10th grade before dropping out and later earning a GED He was divorced and had two children. He served six years in the Army, in two separate stints, and blamed a “run-in he had with a female service member for his subsequent crimes.

In 1974, in Arkansas, he lured a store clerk to his car shoved her in the trunk and drove to an isolated area. He stuck a knife in her mouth and raped her Prior to being arrested, he went to a psychiatric clinic in Hot Springs telling the doctor this wasn’t his first offense and that he had no control over his compulsions.

Sentenced to 40 years, he served eight and was paroled to San Diego, where his sister lived. He worked as a handyman, doing maintenance work for apartment owners and real estate agents.

In September 1984, one month after Hough was murdered, Tatro was investigated by San Diego

TOP: Kevin Brown, photographed at a crime scene in 1991, worked as a criminalist for the San Diego Police Department for 20 years, leaving a decade before DNA results implicated him in the murder of Claire Hough. His reputation with his lab colleagues was mixed

Long after he’d left the force, Kevin Brown stored his SDPD badge with other keepsakes in his Chula Vista home. “He loved his job,” according to his wife, Rebecca, but composure problems he had while testifying in court derailed his career.

SAN DIEGO POLICE DEPARTMENT

ONE OF THEIR OWN

police for his possible involvement in the murder of Carol DeFelice, a prostitute. He was never charged in that case.

Then, in June 1985 a 16-yearold girl whose car had broken down on University Avenue in La Mesa was offered help by a man in ablue van. After she got in he tried to subdue her with a stun gun and ordered her to sit between the seats. She screamed, fought him off, and escaped, memorizing the van’s license plate number as she fled.

The plate was registered to Tatro. Police found him at his sister’s house, in the back of the van He was naked on the floor bleeding from both wrists. Two razor blades were nearby, as was apornographic magazine depicting bondage and sadomasochism He’d written a note leaving all his possessions to his sister

He was taken to a hospital, and then to court, where he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years in prison “I want psychiatric help,” Tatro told a probation officer, “and I want to live a normal life.”

When he got out of prison, he was sent back to Arkansas for violating his parole there and eventually wound up in Tennessee. On Aug. 24, 2011 27 years to the day after Hough’s body was found Tatro drowned in what authorities ruled a boating accident on a river.

Was the date a coincidence or amessage? Tatro’s hat, glasses and wallet were still on the boat, tucked away safely Officials said it appeared he went into the water on purpose

If it was a suicide, it was the second one involving someone associated with the Hough case. And not the last.

In every one of Tatro’s crimes, he acted alone, a possible red flag for detectives trying to connect him to Kevin Brown, the criminalist Or not.

Lambert’s experience working all sorts of cases, from lowlevel misdemeanors to murder, taught him that “there are many times where people acted alone when they were out there, and then there are instances where those same people who act alone in crimes will also act in concert or with other people in other crimes.

So detectives kept looking for links, and began making plans to

search one place where they thought they might find them: Brown’s house.

Although the criminalist had left the San Diego Police Department a decade before his DNA showed up in the Hough case, he was still in the area. He shared a two-story, three-bedroom home in Chula Vista with his wife Rebecca, her mother and one of her brothers

After quitting his SDPD job his bosses had made it clear his difficulty on the witness stand jeopardized his continued employment he returned to New Mexico and the state crime lab for a few years Then he and his wife came back to San Diego, where he worked in an electronics store until he was 55, old enough to begin drawing his police pension.

Lambert expected at some point to try to interview Brown, but he worked around the edges first, talking to criminalists who knew him from the lab.

He learned things that roused his suspicions

Brown had a nickname among co-workers: “Kinky Kevin.” It stemmed from a fondness for strip clubs and nude photography activities he pursued during his first decade here, while he was abachelor

Several of his former colleagues told Lambert that Brown didn’t just go to strip clubs he bragged about the visits. They said Brown also regaled them with tales of organized photo shoots involving naked models, including one in a hotel that was raided by the vice squad. He once asked a female employee to pose for him.

Annette Peer a retired criminalist who found Brown “creepy,” said she was alone with him in the lab one day when he started reading out loud from a police report. Criminalists did this from time to time, laughing at sections they found odd or amusing

There was nothing funny about the report Brown had, Peer told the detective. It detailed a sexual assault “very violent.” Peer couldn’t understand why Brown had the report in his desk, let alone why he chose to share it with her Peer said Brown also brought apornographic movie to work one day and showed it to several male colleagues.

Strippers nude models, porn —Lambert wondered if those were the shadowy worlds where

COURTESY PHOTO

Ronald Tatro was linked by DNA to the Hough case, too, and cold-case detectives tried in vain to find evidence connecting him to Brown. This photo was taken in 1984 the same year Hough was slain.

TOP, clockwise from upper right: Claire Hough and a portion of her autopsy report.

Ronald Tatro, a portion of a case toxicology report and a photo of Tatro’s van. A portion of a San Diego Police department press release about the case and depictions of a DNA strand and spermatozoa.

Kevin Brown, drawings from an investigator’s evidence notes regarding blood on Hough’s pants and a photo of her blouse.

A San Diego Police Department photo of the bridge above where Hough’s body was found and a portion of the case’s original evidence list.

Brown and Tatro met. Birds of a feather?

By the end of 2013 the detectives were ready to approach Brown directly

Aconfession is often the most powerful evidence prosecutors present in a criminal trial, so detectives work hard to obtain them Lambert told Peer that he might have to “sweat Brown to close the case. (“God, I wish I could be a fly on the wall,” she replied.)

Lambert also sought permission to search Brown’s house. In early January 2014, he filed a 34-page affidavit outlining the history of the case, the DNA results and the “Kinky Kevin stories It said the crime lab had determined that contamination “is not possible” as an explanation for Brown’s sperm showing up in the evidence.

Superior Court Judge Frederic Link signed the warrant. It authorized police to take cellphones, computers newspaper clippings, photographs and other items that might have information relating to Hough, Tatro or the murder investigation.

Ateam was assembled About adozen police officers waited outside while Lambert and Adams walked to the front door. They had not informed Brown they were coming. He didn’t know he was under investigation. Brown answered the knock on the door It was about 8:30 a.m and he was still in his pajamas and robe. “Good morning,” he said, and allowed them in.

Lambert said they wanted Brown’s help with some old homicide cases involving prostitutes. He showed Brown a photo of one of the victims, killed in February 1984. Brown didn’t recognize her

There’s a man we believe might be involved in the murder the detective said. Maybe you know him.

The man was Tatro. The detectives said he had been contacted by police in September 1984. That would have been one month after Hough was murdered. He was parked in a Dodge van on El Cajon Boulevard, in an area frequented by prostitutes, they said.

An officer filled out a field interview card, and on the back scrawled a note: Tatro said he knows a SDPD employee named Kevin Brown. None of that was true. There was no police stop, no field interview card, no claim by Tatro that he knew Brown. This is known as a ruse, and it’s been deemed legal by the courts. Police can lie to a suspect

while pursuing a confession, as long as they don’t cross the line into illegal coercion. But just where to draw that line is controversial, and several states Oregon, Illinois, New York have passed or proposed laws to curtail falsehoods.

The detectives showed Brown aphoto of Tatro and another one of his van. “Maybe you were buddies at the time or something like that,” Lambert said, suggesting the two might have met at a strip club or a bar

“It doesn’t ring a bell,” Brown said.

“You must have had some kind of interaction with him,” Adams said.

Brown: “I don’t know how he got to know me.”

“For him to to drop your name,” Lambert said, “obviously he knew you existed and obviously he knew that it was a police employee, because how else would he know that if you had never met?”

Brown kept looking at the photo, wracking his brain. He mentioned the nude photography wondered if maybe Tatro had been taking pictures, too. They talked about that for several minutes, the detectives asking for details about whether the models were also strippers or prostitutes.

The detectives said Tatro was someone who targeted young females. They mentioned the La Mesa stun gun case and asked Brown if maybe that jogged his memory. It didn’t.

“We feel pretty confident this guy is probably good for some other cases,” Lambert said. “That’s our big reason for trying to find somebody that may have known him back then that would be able to give us some kind of insight as to the type of person he was.”

Brown went to his computer and looked up the name of a man who organized the nude photo shoots. He suggested detectives contact that guy to get a line on Tatro.

Then Lambert said they were looking at Tatro in connection with a particular case He showed Brown a photo of Claire Hough.

“Oh,” Brown said, “I remember her.”

This story was compiled from thousands of pages of police reports, court filings sworn depositions and trial transcripts. Unless otherwise noted, the quotes used are from those records. john.wilkens@sduniontribune.com

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