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