One of their own: Part II

S U N D AY F E B R UA RY 13 , 2 0 2 2

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S U N DAY

IN MEXICO, WHAT IS TRUTH, WHO’S REPORTING IT?

Online ‘communicators’ say they’re filling role as deaths silence mainstream media

BY WENDY FRY & ALEXANDRA MENDOZA

JOHN BIEVER

In this photo taken by John Biever, Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi celebrates after winning Super Bowl I at the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1967. Biever’s father Vernon, the Packers’ photographer, is at right.

MEET THE SAN DIEGAN WHO HAS SHOT EVERY SUPER BOWL John Biever photographed his first game in 1967 at age 15; today will be his 56th

BY K.C. ALFRED

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K.C. ALFRED U-T

Photographer John Biever will photograph his 56th straight Super Bowl game today in Inglewood.

hile his teenage friends were inside huddled around a television set watching football’s biggest game on a freezing Wisconsin day in 1967, John Biever was on the uncrowded sidelines of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on a warm, sunny afternoon, photographing the first Super Bowl with his father, Vernon.

Today, Biever, now 70 and a San Diego resident for the past decade, will be in a familiar spot. He will be photographing the Cincinnati Bengals playing the Los Angeles Rams in the Super Bowl at Sofi Stadium in Inglewood, just seven miles and a lifetime of images away from that initial game at the Coliseum.

It’s the 56th Super Bowl — for the NFL and for Biever, who is the only person to photograph every Super Bowl.

Biever has seen it all, from Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi in the first game to last year’s Super Bowl MVP Tom Brady and everything in between.

SEE BIEVER • A12

When Marcos Ernesto Islas Flores was shot to death outside his father’s home in Tijuana last Sunday, some initial reports indicated the victim was the fifth Mexican journalist to be murdered since the start of the year. But the victim’s father offered an important distinction when confirming the killing in an interview, describing his son as working until recently as a “communicator.”

The difference is more than semantics. The rise of social media communicators in Mexico — many of them focusing on lurid crimes, often anonymously — have blurred the lines about what qualifies as news reporting. But the people who run the sites say their rise is a response to the unrelenting drug violence that has stilled the voice of some mainstream media.

Islas Flores, 30, was fatally shot outside of the home of his father, Marco Antonio Islas Parra, who

confirmed the killing in a chilling Facebook post. In an interview with Grupo REFORMA, the elder Islas Parra said his son worked as a communicator until a year and a half ago, when he stopped posting for personal reasons. The victim’s father is the director of Zona Norte Noticias, a Facebook page that shares news releases and articles. He previously worked as a reporter, beginning in 1990, for El Heraldo, El Sol de Tijuana and El Imparcial, according to Grupo REFORMA. According to a Facebook page titled Notiredesmx, the son had managed the page until late 2019. His last public Facebook post appears to show images of a woman locked in a dark cell with her children with no description or explanation.

In Mexico, underneath the “unrelenting spectacle of slaughter,” as Carnegie Mellon associate professor of history Paul K. Eiss describes it in an essay about the anonymous El Blog del Narco, there is a SEE MEXICO • A21

ONE OF THEIR OWN

Super Bowl LVI • The NFL championship game between the Los Angeles Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals kicks off at 3:30 p.m. D1

MORRIS CASUTO 1942-2022

SAN DIEGAN CHAMPIONED CIVIL RIGHTS, FOUGHT HATE

BY JEFF MCDONALD He was a native son of New York City who spent his life confronting some of the lowest aspects of human nature. But by every measure, Morris Casuto was outspoken, full of passion and defined by courage.

He attended Ku Klux Klan rallies to better understand his adversaries. He was targeted by White supremacists for speaking out against hate — and he was forced more than once to don a bullet-resistant vest for his own protection. But he often turned to humor to disarm his critics.

Casuto arrived in San Diego in the 1970s, when the Jewish community was less cohesive and less vocal, and changed his adopted hometown fundamentally. He founded the local chapter of the SEE CASUTO • A18

PATH TO REMAIN IN U.S. UNCERTAIN FOR AFGHAN EVACUEES IN SAN DIEGO Hundreds who fled Taliban now must request asylum

BY KATE MORRISSEY Ahmad Zamir Hussainzada was shopping for supplies for his engagement party with several members of his family in Kabul when they learned that the Taliban was approaching their city.

They heard that they might be able to get out on an evacuation flight, but they had to act fast.

Knowing that he and his mother were likely to be targeted by the Taliban, he and the family with him — his mother, two brothers and one sister — headed for the airport. There was no time to contact his father, his other two sisters or his fiancé.

They abandoned their car, leaving the goodies they had purchased for the next day’s celebrations inside.

Now resettled in San

NELVIN C. CEPEDA U-T

Sharifa Mahbobi fled Afghanistan without her husband and two daughters.

Diego, they still have the car keys. Those were one of the only items that traveled with them as they crammed onto a cargo plane to Qatar, relocated to a camp at a military base in New Jersey and finally reached the city where they’re hoping to piece their lives back together.

But the family remains in limbo.

That’s because none of them worked for the U.S.

military, meaning they do not have an easy path to green cards. They will likely have to request asylum to be able to stay permanently in the United States. And without green cards, they have little hope of being able to bring the rest of their immediate family to join them.

“I am happy to be here, but day in and day out, eating food doesn’t feel the same,” said Sharifa SEE EVACUEES • A19

ARTS + CULTURE

THE PEOPLE’S THEATER

After heading the San Diego Repertory Theatre for nearly 50 years, Sam Woodhouse will retire. E1

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CRISTINA BYVIK U-T

hen two San Diego police coldcase detectives arrived unannounced at the front door of retired criminalist Kevin Brown’s home on a January morning eight years ago, he told them he wanted to help.

But his idea of help was different from theirs. He thought they were there for insight about an old case he’d worked. They thought he might confess to being a murderer.

The detectives were investigating the brutal 1984 killing of Claire Hough at Torrey Pines State Beach. Brown’s DNA had shown up in the evidence during a new round of forensic testing.

After more than a year of looking into his background, the detectives showed up, ready to spring a trap.

What happened that morning in Brown’s living room fueled a chain of events — assumptions and accusations, misunderstandings and miscalculations — that brought more tragedy to the already tragic death of a 14-year-old girl. It brought an outcome beyond anyone’s ability to help.

Part two of the series continues on A6.

THE SERIES Today: “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.

Last Sunday: A cold case. A DNA hit. And finally justice. Or was it? (Part I can be read online at sandiegouniontribune/cold-case.)

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A6

THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE

SUNDAY • FEBRUARY 13, 2022

ONE OF THEIR OWN l PART II

guys knew each other well enough that maybe you hung out together once in a while and you just happen to go to the beach at Torrey Pines that day and ran into a pretty young girl who was by herself and, ‘Hey, let’s party with her and hang out with her for a little bit,’ and then it turns into a sexual thing, whether it was consensual or not with her.

And then maybe something just went wrong.”

“No, no, no, no,” Brown said.

“Maybe you know him,” Adams said, “but as you’re engaging in a sexual encounter with this young girl, he interrupts it and — and he’s a wacko and he’s freaking out. Now, he’s attacking and slashing and you’re like, ‘I’m just getting the hell out of here’ and you leave. And she turns up dead and now you’re terrified. I mean you just witnessed something horrific.”

Brown was quiet. Then he asked, “The spermatozoa that you have is mine?”

“Is yours,” Lambert said.

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely.”

‘I MUST HAVE HAD SEX WITH HER.’

B

CRISTINA BYVIK U-T

DOUBTS CREEP IN AS A DETECTIVE SPRINGS HIS TRAP.

BY JOHN WILKENS

K

evin Brown didn’t do well under pressure.

Bullied as a child, anxious and depressed for much of his adult life, the 61-year-old retired police criminalist had suffered consequences at work and at home for failing to stand up for himself.

Now, unbeknownst to him, he was in the crosshairs of two veteran San Diego detectives investigating the brutal murder of a 14-year-old girl at Torrey Pines State Beach in 1984.

Recent DNA tests had identified Brown’s sperm cells on vaginal swabs collected during the autopsy of Claire Hough. The cold-case detectives, Michael Lambert and Lori Adams, had spent a year quietly looking into Brown’s background and that of another man, Ronald Tatro, whose DNA had also shown up in the evidence.

Tatro was literally a dead end, though — drowned in a river in Tennessee in 2011. So the detectives focused on Brown.

On Jan. 9, 2014, they arrived unannounced at his Chula Vista home and asked for his help on some old murders of prostitutes.

This was a ruse to get inside and get him talking.

Brown had spent 20 years working in the San Diego police lab, leaving in 2002, 10 years before the DNA hit. His career there was cut short by poor performances during courtroom testimony. One of his bosses said defense attorneys would “beat him up pretty good” during crossexaminations, get him to back away from his findings.

The detectives spent a couple of hours asking about Tatro — Brown said he didn’t know him — and then steered the interview to Hough. They showed Brown her photo, and he said, “Oh, I remember her.”

“Did you ever meet her?”

Lambert asked.

“No, not personally,” Brown said. “I just remember the picture looks familiar.”

Police interrogations are like ladders: Rung by rung, detectives try to move a suspect uphill in the direction of confessing. They know that a suspect saying “I did it” can be powerful evidence. But confessions are also problematic;

false ones are a leading cause of wrongful convictions.

Here, by admitting some familiarity with Hough, Brown had taken the first step up the ladder.

Her murder was big news when it happened, and it had been revisited in the media numerous times over the years, so Brown wasn’t the only person in San Diego who would have recognized her picture. But the detectives weren’t going to leave it at that.

They asked Brown whether he was the criminalist who analyzed the Hough evidence in 1984 — they already knew he wasn’t — and he said he couldn’t remember all victims in the cases he worked.

There was some discussion about how the lab was set up back then, before DNA tests came along and could identify suspects from the tiniest bits of blood, saliva and other bodily fluids.

Then Lambert dropped a bombshell. “The issue that we have with this case,” he told Brown, “is that in some of the evidence, your DNA showed up.”

“Who?” Brown asked.

“Yours,” Lambert said.

Brown said contamination must have happened: “I had my hands in a lot of things there.”

Detectives knew that Brown’s DNA was from sperm cells, but they didn’t tell him that, letting him wonder out loud if maybe he had touched her clothing or breathed over it while a criminalist nearby examined the evidence. He said they didn’t always wear masks or gloves.

Eventually he asked, “Do you know how it got — where my evidence is?”

U.S. DISTRICT COURT

“Yes,” Lambert said. “Your evidence was on vaginal swabs.”

“What?” Brown said.

“And it was sperm,” Lambert said. “It wasn’t touch DNA, it wasn’t saliva.”

The detectives sharpened their approach. “We know that you were there,” Adams said.

“How else would your semen get inside her?”

“There’s only one way, Kevin,” Lambert said.

“I know,” Brown said. “I’m not that dumb.”

This would have been a moment for Brown to point out that criminalists commonly brought their own semen into the lab, deposited on pieces of cloth so it could be used to test the efficacy of sperm-detecting chemicals.

But he didn’t.

Instead, he wondered out loud if someone planted his semen, although he couldn’t explain how that was done, or who would want to do it. Detectives told him contamination of any kind had been ruled out.

“Did you have sex with her?”

Lambert asked.

“I don’t even remember if I did,” Brown said, adding a few minutes later, “I don’t know how ... I don’t remember ... I don’t remember every person I may have been sexually intimate with, but I do know that I’d never, ever kill anybody.”

The detectives brought up Tatro again, and offered possible scenarios.

“Maybe,” Lambert said, “you

Michael Lambert, seen here during a videotaped deposition, was the lead investigator on the Claire Hough cold-case murder.

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

A laptop photographed by San Diego Police during a search of the Brown home with parts of a handwritten inventory list and the search warrant.

Detective Lambert with portions of a search warrant and an SDPD Forensics Quality Incident report.

Cuyamaca Rancho State Park with writing from Kevin Brown’s journal.

Kevin Brown with his journal and a depiction of a lie detector test.

rown scrambled for explanations. He said back around the time Hough was murdered, he had anxiety issues during sex. “I had the inability to ejaculate,” he said. “I went through quite a few years when I wasn’t able to do that. So I find it hard to find my sperm there when I had that issue.”

He didn’t know it, but he was digging a bigger hole for himself.

One of the issues confronting detectives during their investigation was the low number of sperm cells found on the vaginal swabs.

There were about 150 cells, according to the lab results, when a normal ejaculate has hundreds of millions.

They had theorized that maybe Brown had a low sperm count, or maybe he couldn’t fully ejaculate. And now, in the interrogation, he had offered up that answer himself.

Detectives pressed him further by talking about Hough.

“This is everybody’s daughter,” Adams said. “This is not some prostitute. This is not some throw-away girl that nobody cares about. Everybody that has kids can relate to this girl.”

Lambert: “She wasn’t a troublemaker. She was a good girl from a good family. She came out here to visit her grandparents and ended up being found on the beach.”

Brown: “I don’t know what to say. It wasn’t me. I don’t know how my sperm got in her and I didn’t do that.”

A few minutes later, his mother-in-law walked in. She lived in the house and had overheard something. “This sounds serious,” she said.

“Yeah,” Brown said. “Would you get John? Call John.”

John is John Blakely, Brown’s brother-in-law. He lived in the house, too. He’s a defense attorney.

The interrogation was over.

But the detectives weren’t finished. They handed Brown a search warrant they had obtained a few days earlier. More than a dozen officers came in and began removing things and taking photographs. They were there for several hours.

The warrant authorized them to take computers, cellphones, diaries, photos, newspaper clippings, videos — items that detectives thought might show Brown and Tatro had been in communication over the years since the murder, or that Brown had been following media accounts of the Hough case, or that he had an interest in sadomasochism.

When they were done, they carted away 14 boxes, a suitcase and four trash bags — thousands of objects, many with little obvious connection to the case. They took cookbooks, a Bible, a copy of the Declaration of Independence, a signed photo of former President George H.W. Bush.

It would be up to the detectives to sort through it. But first they went to Mater Dei Catholic High School, where Brown’s wife, Rebecca, taught. They explained what was going on and asked her to drive home so her car could be searched, too.

Standing in the school parking lot, Adams would later recall, she heard Rebecca Brown mutter this: “Boy, I sure know how to pick ‘em.”

L

ater that day, Kevin Brown left a message for the detectives. He wanted to talk some more.

This was unusual.

“I don’t think I ever had a suspect ask me back before,” Adams said, “especially into their house.”

When they met the next morning, Brown said he’d been thinking, “trying to piece in my memory what might have happened in my life, and the name Claire kept popping up.”

He remembered an episode with a friend named Mike, “a hustler” who liked to go out and meet women. Brown couldn’t pinpoint when it happened, but he thought it might have been around the time Hough was murdered, almost 30 years earlier.

“Mike met these two girls,” Brown said, “and I believe one of SEE ONE OF THEIR OWN • A8

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THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE

SUNDAY • FEBRUARY 13, 2022

SAN DIEGO POLICE DEPARTMENT PHOTOS

ONE OF THEIR OWN FROM A6 them was Claire and — God, at the time they looked old enough.”

He said the girls were visiting from out of town and staying at a Holiday Inn near downtown San Diego. He and Mike got together with them several times over the course of a week.

He thought maybe they’d gone to Balboa Park and Pacific Beach, but he wasn’t sure. He believed he probably had sex with the one he thought was named Claire. Could she have been the one who wound up murdered later at Torrey Pines State Beach?

He couldn’t recall details about the girl, even after he was shown a photo of Hough again. “I just remember the word Claire and these two girls that we met,” he said.

The detectives were skeptical.

Hough was staying with her grandparents in Del Mar Heights, not at a Holiday Inn in San Diego. She was 14 and didn’t have a driver’s license or access to a car. She wasn’t riding around town with strangers.

“I don’t believe we’re talking about the same Claire,” Lambert said.

He pressed Brown again on how he knew Tatro, maybe through strip clubs, prostitutes or photo sessions with nude female models. Brown said he didn’t know him.

The retired criminalist also tried to clarify his comments from the day before about sexual dysfunction. He said when he lived in New Mexico in the late 1980s, he was intimate with a woman who told him she had become pregnant. She wasn’t, but it spooked him so much that for years afterward, until he got married, he was afraid during sex to have an orgasm.

“I just didn’t want to have a baby,” Brown said.

He sensed that the detectives doubted his story. He offered to take a lie-detector test. They drove him to a substation in the South Bay. Polygraphs are controversial, their reliability so suspect that courts generally ban any mention of them during criminal trials.

Scientists question whether the physiological changes measured by the machine — blood flow, sweat — are due to deception or to stress and other factors.

Brown was worried about the test. He had told the detectives earlier that he suffered from generalized anxiety disorder, a medical condition that left him flustered and inarticulate under pressure, and now he thought his nerves might betray him, make him look guilty.

“I am at a loss of words how my sperm got on a 14-year-old’s vaginal swabs,” he said. “For the life of me, I have no idea.”

T

he polygraph results were mixed. According to the examiner, Brown was truthful when he said he had never hurt or killed anyone. The results were inconclusive when he said he didn’t know Tatro.

When asked whether he had sex with Hough or knew anything about her death, Brown’s denials showed deception, the examiner said.

After the polygraph, Brown seemed confused by the results.

“I don’t know anything about this Claire,” he said. “I don’t even know where I would have encountered her. In my thoughts, I know I wouldn’t have killed her.”

“OK,” Adams said, “did something just go horribly wrong or maybe get a little rough and get out of control?”

“I’ve never done that with anybody,” Brown said.

The detectives pressed him again to explain the sperm DNA. “I don’t know how it got there,” he said. “Obviously, I must have had sex with her. I don’t know.”

Adams said, “OK, so we will at least agree that sex is the reason why it got there? Period. Sex is how that semen got there.”

Brown: “That’s the only way I can think of.”

But when Adams asked him for details on where and how he first encountered Hough, he was silent. He asked for his brotherin-law, the defense attorney.

Lambert said, “Kevin, I’m going to be honest with you. This is not going to go away.”

“I know,” Brown said.

The detectives tried to keep him talking, suggested again that maybe Brown wasn’t there when Hough was killed. A few minutes later, Brown asked for more information about the teen. He said it might refresh his memory.

“I don’t have the slightest clue what you’re talking about on this stuff,” he said. “But yet you’re right. I didn’t do well on the polygraph.”

Adams tried a different tack.

“I may be out of line,” she said, “but I will say that 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 acted 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.”

“Well,” Brown said, “I didn’t.”

I

n the days following his police interrogations, Brown grew anxious and scared. Twice he had trouble breathing and his wife took him to urgent care.

Off and on throughout much of his life, first in New Mexico and then in San Diego, Brown had sought the help of counselors and doctors. They treated him for insomnia, anxiety and depression.

He traced the troubles to his childhood and being bullied in school. He told the doctors he was often uncomfortable in social groups and had difficulty asserting himself. He said those failures sometimes made him angry.

In February 2014, a month after police first contacted him about the Hough murder, Brown began seeing a new psychiatrist.

He mentioned “legal problems” that were causing stress, but didn’t specify what they were about.

Tensions ran high at home.

Some of the things that had come up about Brown in the police interrogations — nude photo shoots, prostitutes, pornography — were news to his wife, Rebecca, who was there for part of the questioning. “It didn’t please me,” she said, although she was certain those activities had ceased once they married.

She and her 80-year-old mother, MarLynn Blakely, were also upset about the items police

had seized during the search of the Browns’ home. Many were mementos belonging to MarLynn, who spent parts of her days leafing through photo albums, remembering. Now she couldn’t, and she let Kevin Brown know about it with her tears.

A month went by, then another. Brown lost weight. He couldn’t sleep. He wrote a note about his worst fears: that he would be arrested, kept in jail until trial, a year or longer. He would be behind bars, unable to relax, sharing space with prisoners who would harm him when they found out he used to work for the police.

“Being away for this time and being by myself is the part that scares me,” he wrote.

The Browns hired a defense attorney, Gretchen von Helms.

They told her they believed contamination was the reason for Brown’s DNA hit. She advised them to be patient as detectives finished their investigation.

But waiting was hard. Rebecca Brown called detective Lambert and asked him when they were going to get back the items taken by police. Soon, he told her.

In their minds, once the possessions were returned, the nightmare would be over. Police would know Kevin Brown had not been involved in the murder. He wouldn’t be arrested.

Lambert never told them that, but that’s what they believed.

Kevin Brown started crossing days off on a calendar, each one a step closer to being cleared.

When the stuff came back, they would celebrate. They made plans for a romantic getaway at a hotel in Imperial Beach.

Except the stuff didn’t come back. Rebecca Brown called Lambert again. Soon, he said.

She called the next month. Soon.

She asked him six or seven times.

Kevin Brown was keeping a journal, filling it with self-affirmations. On Aug. 26, 2014, he wrote this list: * Make each day special (like it was your last one) * With each day, face your fears. You can’t hide from them * It (elephant) will go away because you are not the person they are looking for. The truth will set you free

L Kevin Brown, seen in an undated SDPD yearbook photo, worked in the crime lab for 20 years, rotating between assignments in firearms, narcotics, trace evidence and serology. He left in 2002, 10 years before his DNA linked him to the Hough case.

ABOVE: As the investigation continued, Kevin Brown grew increasingly anxious and wrote self-affirmations in a journal. He began seeing a new therapist for help with insomnia and depression, but shared few details about what he was going through.

TOP: San Diego police searched the Chula Vista home where Kevin Brown lived.

The yellow evidence tags show the locations of certain belongings seized as possible evidence. Police carted away 14 boxes, a suitcase and four trash bags filled with items.

ambert knew within three months of the search that none of the items police seized from the Brown house had anything to do with Claire Hough’s murder.

He dug through the boxes and bags himself. Nothing connecting Brown to Hough or to Ronald Tatro. Nothing showing Brown had any sexual interest in teenage girls, or in sadomasochism. Nothing indicating he had been keeping track of media coverage over the years of the murder.

There were other holes in the case the detective was trying to build. Lambert believed that because of the sperm DNA, Brown had assaulted Hough right around the time she was murdered. But tests found no other physical evidence tying him to her or to the place where it happened. No hairs, no fingerprints, no blood, no skin cells.

The only new discovery — DNA extracted in May 2014 from a pubic hair found on the victim’s bandana — pointed to Tatro, not Brown.

Lambert came up empty trying to find ties between the two suspects, too.

He arranged for the Police Department to issue a “crime bulletin” to local media outlets describing Tatro as a “subject of interest” in homicides that occurred in the early- to mid-1980s.

It included a photo of him and a description of the blue-and-white van he drove. It didn’t mention that he was dead.

The bulletin, which generated a short story in the Union-Tribune, asked anyone who knew Tatro “or his associates” to call the cold-case team. No valid tips came in.

Lambert also sent a confidential bulletin with two photos of Brown on it to law enforcement agencies nationwide. It identified him as a former criminalist whose hobbies included nude photography.

The bulletin said Brown was being investigated in connection with the murder of a teenage girl who had been raped, beaten, stabbed and strangled. It asked the agencies to review their unSEE ONE OF THEIR OWN • A10

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THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE

SUNDAY • FEBRUARY 13, 2022

KRISTIAN CARREON

ONE OF THEIR OWN FROM A8 solved homicide files “for any similar cases” and compare the evidence with Brown’s DNA. Again: nothing.

Lambert interviewed people who knew Brown. He went to China Lake and met with Navy physicist Kevin Sheldon, a former roommate. He showed him a picture of Tatro; Sheldon didn’t recognize him.

Sheldon told the detective how meek and impressionable Brown was — that you could get him to do and say almost anything. But, Sheldon later recalled, that didn’t seem to be a message Lambert wanted to hear.

He quoted the detective as saying that Brown was playing “a cat and mouse game,” but that wouldn’t stop police from solving the case. To Sheldon, Lambert had already made up his mind.

The detective wasn’t the only one.

I

n the fall of 1992, 10 years after he had moved to San Diego and eight years after Claire Hough was murdered, Kevin Brown placed a personals ad in the Union-Tribune, “men seeking women.” It said he was interested in a slender, non-smoker for a possible relationship.

Rebecca Blakely saw the ad, called the phone number and left a message. On Dec. 4, 1992, they had their first date, at the Harbor House restaurant in Seaport Village. It went well.

They did a Venn diagram to chart their commonalities: dancing, cats, music. It turned out that each had the same car-radio stations programmed as presets.

“I thought he was really sweet,” Blakely recalled later. “He was quieter and thoughtful. He seemed very respectful. He was not loud. He was not demanding.

He was not pushy. He was not arrogant. Things I did not want to get involved in.”

By the third date, to watch the Christmas boat parade, she knew she wanted to marry him. She asked if he would kiss her. He did.

The wedding was about eight months later, in Lake Tahoe. It was her third marriage, his second. Neither had children.

Her family was not thrilled with the relationship. Some of them found Brown reclusive and odd.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” one relative whispered to another the first time they saw him. “I got a weird vibe,” said another.

Their suspicions bubbled up again when they learned he was being investigated in the Hough case. Rebecca Brown’s sister called and asked flat-out whether he had sex with the girl.

He said “yes,” according to her account. She said she called Lambert and relayed the conversation.

Brown thought his comment was taken out of context. The phone conversation with the sister-inlaw came shortly after the police interrogations.

Detectives had led him to believe he’d had sex with Hough because that was the only explanation for his sperm winding up on the vaginal swabs.

He didn’t believe that for long.

He started thinking more about his time in the lab and talking to some of the criminalists he used

to work with back in the 1980s, including James Stam, a former boss.

Stam believed contamination was the likely explanation for what happened. He remembered how different things were in the lab back then, in the days before DNA analysis.

How criminalists all worked at large tables in the same cavernous room, not always wearing masks or gloves. How evidence swabs were left in the open air to dry.

And how they brought their own semen into the lab, kept it on small pieces of cloth to use in testing. The cloths were stored in desk drawers or the refrigerator, available for anyone to use.

“We weren’t being a willy-nilly, crummy lab,” Stam said. “It’s just the way things were.”

Stam was interviewed by Lambert and told him he didn’t think Brown was guilty. The detective begged to differ, pointing out incriminating statements Brown had made during the interrogations.

That information didn’t impress Stam. He remembered the problems Brown had as a criminalist testifying in court, how he could be pushed around by defense attorneys and talk himself into trouble.

“Until you can eliminate contamination,” Stam remembered telling the detective, “you can’t go anywhere further with this.”

To Lambert, it had already been eliminated. His boss told him that when he first got the case. So he saw no need to go into detail with Stam about the lab practices in 1984.

He didn’t ask any of the other criminalists he interviewed, either.

That left him surprised by what came next.

O

n Sept. 26, 2014, Lambert and his partner, Lori Adams, interviewed Steve Blakely, one of Rebecca Brown’s brothers. He told the detectives he could imagine Brown committing the murder “because there is something off about him.”

His wife, Nancy, was so concerned about the allegations she barred Kevin Brown from their house and took his picture off a wall.

Steve Blakely also told detectives about comments made by the Browns several months earlier. The couple shared their belief that Kevin had been implicated in the Hough case through contamination, and that it occurred because he had his sperm in the lab.

“I thought there was no way that (sperm in the lab) could happen,” Steve Blakely told the detectives.

Lambert had the same reaction. “Like, eww, why would you do that?” he remembered thinking. “I never heard that before in almost 30 years of law enforcement.” It wasn’t something the Browns had ever shared with him, either.

After the meeting with the Blakelys, Lambert called the police lab and asked David Cornacchia, who had done the DNA

apparent suicide note and the guns.

A short time later, Lambert went to the school where Rebecca Brown worked. He said he wanted to make sure she was OK and not in any danger from her husband.

She told the detective that the only person Kevin Brown was likely to harm was himself.

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U-T FILE PHOTO

David Cornacchia, a criminalist seen here in September 2000 in the SDPD crime lab, conducted the DNA testing that linked Kevin Brown to the Claire Hough case. Detectives turned to him after learning to their surprise that criminalists kept their own semen standards in the lab.

TOP: A wallet photo of Rebecca and Kevin Brown during a retirement party in 2002 at their Chula Vista home. After he left the department, detectives sometimes contacted him with questions about cases he had worked.

To read part one of this three-part series, scan the code above or go to sandiegounion tribune.com/coldcase, where you also can read the final installment should you not want to wait until next Sunday.

work in the Hough case, whether criminalists kept their own semen in the lab.

It’s true, Cornacchia said.

True in 1984, and true now.

Lambert’s stunned reaction caught the criminalist off-guard.

“It is funny,” Cornacchia said later, “because at that moment I realized I have been doing this for so long, I didn’t realize that it (semen in the lab) is kind of weird.”

Stunned or not, the revelation didn’t alter Lambert’s investigation. He said Cornacchia told him that lab managers were aware of the practice when they concluded that contamination was unlikely in the Hough case.

“He’s on the science side of things, and I have to trust in the fact that when he makes an identification in the lab, that they observed whatever protocols are pertinent to them,” Lambert would later say. “We don’t challenge them on their work and how they do it.”

Cornacchia, however, wasn’t in the lab in 1984 and didn’t know how it operated. He said he told Lambert that.

As all this was going on, Brown’s struggles continued. His weight loss was nearing 25 pounds on an already thin frame.

He stopped gardening and doing other things he enjoyed.

He had trouble concentrating and spent hours sitting in chairs, staring. His hands sometimes shook.

Rebecca Brown tried to pull him out of it. In late September, they scheduled a date night. She came home from work and found him in bed, lethargic.

There was a bullet on the floor and what she thought might be a suicide note.

It thanked her for the 20 years they’d been married. “They’ve been wonderful,” he wrote.

“You’ve been wonderful.”

He denied that he was thinking about killing himself, but his brother-in-law, John Blakely, was concerned enough to take three guns that were in the house and lock them away.

A defense attorney, Blakely had been giving Brown informal advice during the investigation, but he wasn’t representing him.

In fact, he told Lambert he thought Brown might be guilty: “To me, he fits the profile of somebody who might be involved in something like this.” He also told the detective about the

ctober 2014. Lambert had been investigating Claire Hough’s murder for almost two years. He was getting close to presenting the case to the District Attorney’s Office for a decision about whether to charge Kevin Brown.

Out of the blue, Brown called and made another appointment to speak with the detective. He wanted to know when police would be returning the items they had taken nine months earlier during the search.

This, according to what Rebecca Brown remembered her husband telling her, was Lambert’s reply: You know you killed her. I know you killed her. And you’re not getting your stuff back until you confess.

“He was crestfallen,” Rebecca Brown said.

Lambert denied he would ever tell a suspect that — “I would be worried that they would flee” — but the result was the same: The stuff didn’t come back.

In mid-October, Rebecca Brown got a phone call from her sister, Pat Stengel, who lives in Missouri. She said she had just talked with Lambert, who told her his investigation was wrapping up.

“And then,” Stengel said, “it’s bye-bye Kevin.” Rebecca Brown shared that with her husband.

That weekend, Rebecca Brown was directing a play at the high school where she worked.

Her husband would usually come along and video-record the performances. But she had told school officials about the ongoing murder investigation, and they banned him from campus.

He suggested going in disguise. She said no. He was downbeat the whole weekend, so out of it she took away the pills he was taking for anxiety and insomnia.

He called Lambert and canceled the appointment they had for another interview.

The next day, Oct. 20, Rebecca Brown came home from work and her husband wasn’t there. He’d left about 10 a.m. to run some errands.

One of them was to Home Depot, to buy a rope.

One was to a cabin the family owns near Julian, to get a white plastic chair from the front porch.

Rebecca Brown reported him missing. The next day, rangers in Cuyamaca Rancho State Park spotted his black Ford Ranger parked off Highway 79. They walked down a dirt trail.

Kevin Brown was hanging from a tree, dead.

The final part of this series publishes next Sunday.

Editor’s note: 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