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Thread: Alfredo Rolando Prieto - Virginia Execution - October 1, 2015

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    Alfredo Rolando Prieto - Virginia Execution - October 1, 2015


    Stacy Siegrist, 19


    Tony Gianuzzi, 21


    Yvette Woodruff, 15


    Veronica "Tina" Jefferson, 24



    Rachel Raver, 22


    Warren Fulton, 22





    Facts of the Crime:

    Alfredo R. Prieto was sentenced to death on March 4, 2008 (and re-sentenced to death on December 15, 2010) in Fairfax County for the capital murders of Rachel A. Faver and Warren H. Fulton III, both 22 and both last seen alive December 4, 1988, as they were leaving a restaurant in Washington in Raver’s Toyota Corolla.

    Two days later Raver’s partially nude body was discovered in a field along Hunter Mill Road just south of the Dulles Toll Road in Fairfax County.

    Raver’s jeans, underpants, gloves and shoes were found halfway between her body and Fulton’s about 100 feet away. Raver had been raped and each died from a gunshot wound in the back fired by the same handgun.

    Raver’s car turned up in Queens, New York, where it was ticketed by police December 5, the day before the slayings were discovered. But it was not secured until months later after Raver’s mother was notified by mail that the ticket was past due.

    In 1999, testing was performed on a vaginal swab taken from Raver and a DNA profile was discovered that did not belong to either her or Fulton.

    In 2005, a cold hit matched the foreign DNA in the Raver/Fulton slayings with Prieto, who was on California’s death row at San Quentin State Prison for the 1990 rape and murder of a teenage girl.

    He was extradited to Fairfax County in 2006. His first trial ended with a mistrial because to juror misconduct. He was convicted again in 2008.

    Prieto was also linked by DNA to a May 10, 1988 rape and capital murder in Arlington County but those charges were not prosecuted after Prieto was sentenced to death in Fairfax.

    For more on his California case, see: http://www.cncpunishment.com/forums/...rnia-Death-Row

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    A Fairfax County jury has convicted a man on two counts of capital murder for killing a young couple near Reston two decades ago.

    The jury now will decide whether 41-year-old Alfredo R. Prieto should be executed for the crimes.

    Prieto already is on death row in California for the 1990 rape and shooting of a 15-year-old girl. He is charged in Arlington County with the rape and shooting of another woman in 1988.

    Prieto was convicted of killing Rachael Raver and Warren Fulton, both 22, in a wooded area near Reston in 1988. Both had been shot; Raver was raped. The crime long had been unsolved until a hit in a DNA database linked Prieto to the killings.

    He first went to trial in May and a jury convicted him of two counts of capital murder, but during a penalty phase a juror said he had been pressured into voting guilty and a mistrial was declared.

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    Prosecutors think Warren H. Fulton III was on his knees when Alfredo Prieto fatally shot him in the back. Then, they think, Prieto shot Fulton's girlfriend, Rachael A. Raver, and raped her as she lay dying. After eight weeks of listening to details of those two crimes, and of two other rape-murders attributed to Prieto, a Fairfax County jury today sentenced him to two death sentences.

    Virginia will now contend with California to see who will be the first to get Prieto, 42, to the death chamber. Prieto was convicted in 1992 of raping and murdering a 15-year-old girl in Ontario, Calif., and received a death sentence, but his California appeals have as much as 10 more years ahead, and Virginia authorities think their process will be completed in five.

    The families of Fulton and Raver were in the courtroom to hear the denouement of a nearly 20-year odyssey that began with the discovery of the young couple's bodies, in a vacant lot along Hunter Mill Road near Reston, on Dec. 6, 1988. Both were 22 years old. Raver had graduated the previous spring from George Washington University, and Fulton was a senior there, the captain of the varsity baseball team.

    "I'm relieved and very happy because justice has been done," Veronica Raver, mother of Rachel, said after the sentences were announced.

    The jury deliberated eight hours over two days last week, then came back quickly today with a verdict after 45 minutes' more deliberation.

    Prieto blinked rapidly as the death sentences were announced. The trial was the longest in Fairfax history, according to Commonwealth's Attorney Raymond F. Morrogh. Prieto did not testify, and the jury only heard him speak in recorded telephone conversations he had while in the Fairfax jail. The jury's death sentences will be imposed, or reduced to a life sentence without parole, on May 23 by Fairfax Circuit Judge Randy I. Bellows. The death sentence was the first recommended by a Fairfax jury since 1997.

    The case caps the storied career of longtime Fairfax prosecutor Robert F. Horan Jr., who retired last year after serving 40 years as the commonwealth's attorney of Virginia's largest jurisdiction. The first prosecution of Prieto ended in a mistrial last summer, after Horan had announced he would not seek reelection in the fall. But Horan, 75, agreed to return and try the case with Morrogh, his former longtime deputy, for free.

    "The evidence called for it," Horan said today of the jury's verdict, which also included 20 years on a grand larceny charge.

    The jury convicted Prieto of the two Fairfax slayings on Feb. 6. In order to obtain a death sentence, prosecutors then had to convince the jury either that the crimes were vile and depraved, or that Prieto posed a future danger to society. To that end, prosecutors presented evidence of the May 1988 rape and shooting of Veronica Jefferson in Arlington, to which Prieto was linked by DNA, as well as records of his convictions in California for wounding three people in a drive-by shooting in 1984 and the rape and murder of Yvette Woodruff in September 1990.

    Prieto's attorneys, Jonathan Shapiro and Peter D. Greenspun, responded by attempting to prove that Prieto was mentally retarded, and thus ineligible for death under a U.S. Supreme Court ruling. They presented Prieto's mother and other family members from El Salvador who described his difficult upbringing in a war-torn country, and several mental health experts who testified that he was either mentally retarded or brain-damaged.

    Horan and Morrogh responded with their own mental health expert, who said Prieto wasn't retarded, as well as Prieto's own writings and conversations from jail to show that he was sound. Horan used his vast experience in confronting various mental health defenses over the years, including his knowledge of technical terms and diagnoses, to sharply cross-examine the defense experts.

    And so the penalty phase of the trial took almost twice as long as the guilt-or-innocence phase. In the end, Horan made his final, hour-long closing argument a passionate reminder of the reasons why he felt Prieto should be executed. Shapiro answered with a two-hour plea to spare Prieto's life.

    The case for Prieto's guilt was made almost entirely on DNA. Police had no suspects after Raver and Fulton's bodies were found, and many years of investigation had run into a dead end. Then, in 2005, while Prieto was in San Quentin State Prison's death row in California, his DNA was entered into a national database. It came back with a match to the semen left on Raver's body, as well as that left seven months earlier on Jefferson's body.

    Using ballistics evidence and the placement of the bodies, Horan theorized that Fulton was shot first, and that Raver then tried to escape. "She has to know she's going to be the next to die," Horan said. "And she runs, and he shoots her and he rapes her while she dies. . . . It's depraved behavior, it is outrageously vile and it warrants the death penalty."

    The jury's only sentencing options were the death penalty and life without parole. "Choosing life over death in this case," Shapiro told the jury, "if that's what you choose to do, doesn't mean you're excusing these crimes. It only means you understand that people are shaped by what they live through."

    Shapiro touched on Prieto's upbringing, his many years in prison, the movie "The Shawshank Redemption," even the Bible in his appeals to the jury. He recounted the biblical tale of Jesus interrupting the stoning of an adulterer, in which Jesus said, "He who is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her."

    The prosecution is given the final word, and Horan flashed righteous indignation in his 10-minute rebuttal. "Members of the jury," Horan intoned, his voice rising, "the only stones in this case are the gravestones of Warren and Rachael and Veronica. The gravestones of the innocent victims of this defendant."

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    Alfredo R. Prieto, convicted of three murders and suspected in two other slayings, was given two more death sentences this morning by a Fairfax County judge.

    Prieto, 42, was convicted in February of the rape and murder of Rachael A. Raver and the murder of Warren H. Fulton III, both 22, in a vacant lot outside Reston in December 1988. Prieto's lawyers then tried to convince the jury that Prieto, with an IQ of about 70, was mentally retarded and not eligible for the death penalty. But after three weeks of testimony, the jury rejected the retardation defense and recommended death sentences for both murders.

    Nine of those jurors, along with many of Raver's family members, sat in Fairfax Circuit Court Judge Randy I. Bellows' courtroom to see if he would uphold their verdict. And when Bellows, a former federal prosecutor, looked at and spoke of the families of Raver and Fulton, tears came to his eyes and his voice cracked.

    "You ruined their lives," Bellows told Prieto. "They will never, never recover. I could not put it better than Mrs. [Jackie] Fulton did when she said that the bullet you put in her son went through him and lodged in her heart."

    Prieto, given the opportunity to make a statement, said: "I have nothing to say, by lawyer's advice." Unlike at the trial, when he wore a button-down shirt and dress slacks, today he wore a Fairfax jail coverall, which allowed one of the gang tattoos on his neck to be seen more clearly.

    Prieto did not react when Bellows sentenced him to death, twice, and also imposed consecutive sentences of life, 20 years and six years for the rape, theft of Raver's car and use of a gun. It was the first death sentence issued in Fairfax in 10 years, since the 1998 sentencing of Mir Aimal Kasi for the fatal shootings of two people outside the CIA headquarters in Langley in 1993.

    As Prieto rose to be escorted from the courtroom, Raver's brother Matthew leaned over and said, "Hey Prieto, go to your room." Prieto shook his head but said nothing. Matthew Raver later explained that Prieto "likes to have control, so I wanted to let him know he wouldn't have control any more."

    Veronica Raver, Raver's mother, traveled from Yorktown, N.Y., one last time to watch a case that went through one five-week trial that ended in a mistrial last summer, and then an eight-week retrial this year. "We're pleased and thank God it's over," she said after the sentencing. "It's everything I prayed for. I'm still trembling." Then she turned and mildly scolded her son for speaking to Prieto.

    Prieto already faced one death sentence in California, for the 1990 rape and shooting of 15-year-old Yvette Woodruff in Ontario, Calif. As a result of his incarceration there, his DNA was entered into a nationwide DNA data bank. In 2005, that data bank provided a hit out of the blue on the DNA left at the scene of Raver's and Fulton's slaying near Hunter Mill Road on Dec. 4, 1988. Their bodies were not found until two days later.

    Police believe that Prieto intercepted them somewhere between a sports bar in the District and Fairfax County, and forced them to drive at gunpoint to the unlit lot now occupied by houses. The former Fairfax commonwealth's attorney, Robert F. Horan Jr., theorized that Prieto ordered Fulton to his knees and shot him once in the back. Horan said Raver then ran, was also shot once in the back and then raped as she lay dying.

    "On the night you executed them," Bellows said, "you turned the final moments of their life into what could be described as a living hell. It's hard to imagine the desperation, horror and sheer terror you inflicted upon Ms. Raver and Mr. Fulton."

    Horan, who retired last fall but stayed with this case, argued today that "it's hard to imagine a more vicious killing than what he did to Warren Fulton and Rachael Raver. You couldn't invent it much worse than what he did."

    Horan sought Prieto's extradition to Virginia, despite the California death sentence, because Prieto's appeals were moving slowly and in 2005 were expected to still last another 10 years. So Horan obtained two murder indictments against Prieto in November 2005, and California agreed to send him to Virginia in April 2006.

    In addition, prosecutors in Arlington obtained another murder indictment against him, after his DNA allegedly also matched that left at the scene of a May 1988 rape-murder. The details of the slaying of Veronica "Tina" Jefferson, 24, were then used in the sentencing phase of the Fairfax case, to help convince the jury to impose the death sentence.

    Arlington prosecutors still are planning to try Prieto in September.

    Prince William prosecutors also said Prieto is a suspect in the September 1989 slaying of Manuel F. Sermeno, whose body was found in a burning car near Interstate 95. But with three death sentences already imposed, prosecutors there are unlikely to try Prieto.

    A juror from Prieto's first Fairfax trial, as well as nine jurors from the second trial, were in the audience today. The foreman of the second jury, Raymond G. Melusky Jr. of Fairfax, said his colleagues wanted "to try to show some support for the family. And really, to see it through to its conclusion. It's very rational, very fair, very unanimous."

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    The Virginia Supreme Court is considering the appeal of a California death row inmate who also has been sentenced to death in Virginia.

    Alfredo Prieto was convicted in 2008 of the 1988 rape and murder of Rachel Raver and the murder of Raver's boyfriend, Warren Fulton III, in Reston. The jury recommended two death sentences.

    Prieto's lawyer told the Supreme Court today that verdict forms used by jurors were unconstitutional because they didn't explicitly allow life without parole, even if Prieto qualified for the death penalty. A lawyer for the state said the judge made that option clear in his jury instructions.

    The cold case was solved after California entered a sample of Prieto's DNA into a national database that matched samples from the crime scene. Prieto was already on California's death row for the rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl.

    http://www.timesdispatch.com/rtd/news/local/article/DETHGAT02_20090602-120601/271359/

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    September 19, 2009

    Serial Killer's Death Sentence Overturned by Va. Court

    By Maria Glod
    Washington Post Staff Writer

    Virginia's highest court Friday overturned the death sentence of a serial killer convicted in the 1988 slayings of a young couple in Fairfax County, ruling that a defective verdict form did not properly allow jurors the choice of sending him to prison for life.

    The Virginia Supreme Court decision doesn't change the guilty verdicts against Alfred R. Prieto, 43, in the killings of Rachael A. Raver and Warren H. Fulton, 22-year-old sweethearts shot in a partly wooded lot near Reston. But a new jury will have to determine whether Prieto deserves to remain on Virginia's death row or whether he should serve life without a chance of parole.

    For the victims' families, the decision brings the painful possibility of returning to a courtroom yet again. Prieto's first trial in Fairfax ended in a mistrial, and his death sentences came after a second trial.

    Veronica Raver, Rachel's mother, said she is ready to take the witness stand again to ask a jury to vote to execute Prieto. Her daughter had graduated from George Washington University the spring before she was killed.

    "To me, life is a gift, and he doesn't deserve that gift," Raver said in a telephone interview from her home in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. "I'm not for the death penalty in every case, but some just deserve it. Some people are just plain evil, and he's evil."

    Prieto, who has a long history of violence, is on California's death row for the 1990 rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl. He is a suspect in the 1988 rape and murder of Veronica "Tina" Jefferson in Arlington County. He also is a suspect in a 1989 killing in Prince William County.

    Fulton and Raver were last seen leaving a sports bar in the District shortly after midnight on Dec. 4, 1988. Their bodies were found two days later near Hunter Mill Road. Police believe Fulton was on his knees when he was shot in the back. Raver had been raped.

    The case went unsolved for years, until a cold DNA hit produced Prieto's name as a match to the DNA from semen left at the crime scene.

    After listening to evidence in a 2008 trial, a Fairfax jury deliberated eight hours over two days before deciding that Prieto should die for his crimes. But the Virginia Supreme Court found two flaws in the verdict form, a standard template in the state code, that was used by that jury.

    Virginia law requires that a jury find one or both of two so-called aggravating factors -- that the crimes were vile and depraved or that the criminal is a future danger -- to send someone to the death chamber. The court ruled that the verdict form did not make clear that a jury must unanimously agree on one or both of those factors before recommending a death sentence. Instead, they said, the form suggested that some jurors could find Prieto a danger to society while others could agree on the vileness of the crimes.

    The form, the court ruled, also did not make clear that a jury could find that one or both aggravating factors were present and still choose to spare a defendant's life.

    "The Virginia Supreme Court is saying that if you are going to seek death, even in a conservative state, the law controls and the law says if jurors find one or two aggravating factors, they still have the right to impose life instead of death," said Peter D. Greenspun, a Fairfax lawyer who represented Prieto at trial and has handled numerous capital cases.

    Legal experts said it is unlikely that the case will have a significant impact on Virginia's other death row cases. Judges can tailor jury forms, so the standard form is not always used. In other cases, an inmate might have exhausted his appeals. Still, legal experts said, the Virginia General Assembly probably will alter the form.

    Fairfax Commonwealth's Attorney Raymond F. Morrogh said prosecutors and defense attorneys are scheduled to return to court Friday to set a date to continue the case.

    "We sought the death sentence and the jury returned it," Morrogh said. "Now it's just a question of, will another jury impose a death sentence? We will do our best to make sure justice is done."

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2009/09/18/ST2009091801997.html?sid=ST2009091801997

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    Convicted killer Alfredo Prieto returning to Fairfax County court for resentencing

    Alfredo R. Prieto, convicted of three murders and two rapes, will return to a Fairfax County courtroom for a sentencing trial Tuesday morning, when Fairfax prosecutors will try for a third time to obtain the death penalty.

    Prieto, 44, was already on death row in California for the 1990 rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl when DNA evidence matched him to the rape and murder of Rachael A. Raver, and the murder of her boyfriend, Warren H. Fulton III, both 22, in a vacant lot outside Reston in December 1988.

    Fairfax prosecutors extradited Prieto in 2006, under the theory that Virginia could convict and execute him while his appeals in California dragged on. He has also been charged in the May 1988 rape and killing of Veronica "Tina" Jefferson in Arlington County, although Arlington prosecutors have not moved forward with that case.

    He has not been charged with a fifth homicide in Prince William County in 1989, although prosecutors there have said he is the prime suspect.

    The jury in Prieto's first Fairfax trial, over six weeks in 2007, found him guilty of capital murder. But during the sentencing phase, a juror rebelled and sent out notes saying he'd been pressured by other jurors. Judge Dennis J. Smith declared a mistrial.

    The jury in Prieto's second trial, an eight-week case in 2008, found him guilty of capital murder and imposed two death sentences. But last year, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that Judge Randy I. Bellows had given that jury an improper verdict form that didn't include all the options. A resentencing -- not a full retrial -- was ordered.

    And that sentencing, again before Bellows, is set to begin with jury selection Tuesday. Unlike in the first two trials, longtime Fairfax Commonwealth's Attorney Robert F. Horan Jr. will not be at the prosecution table. His successor, Commonwealth's Attorney Raymond F. Morrogh, will be joined by Deputy Commonwealth's Attorney Casey Lingan.

    It is not clear how many members of the Raver and Fulton families will attend and listen to the brutal evidence -- Horan theorized that Fulton was shot in the back of the head while on his knees and that Raver was shot as she ran away and raped as she lay dying.

    Defending Prieto for the third time will be veteran lawyers Jonathan Shapiro and Peter D. Greenspun, appointed by the court. Court records show the defense was paid nearly $360,000 for attorney and witness fees and costs in the first trial, and about $265,000 for the second trial.

    Complicated legal issues loom for both sides. For the prosecution, Morrogh and Lingan must show a new jury the crimes for which Prieto was convicted in 2008, which is typically done in the "guilt-or-innocence" phase of a trial, and then argue for a death sentence.

    On the other side, Greenspun and Shapiro must decide whether to raise the mitigating defense that Prieto was mentally retarded at the time of the killings and, therefore, not eligible for the death penalty.

    That theory, based on the trauma he experienced growing up in war-torn El Salvador in the 1980s, apparently was persuasive to the juror who rebelled in the first trial. But it did not work in the second trial.

    Greenspun and Shapiro have not said whether they will raise the issue a third time.

    Three hundred Fairfax residents have been summoned and will be questioned on their ability to rule fairly in a death-penalty case. The defense has estimated that this phase might take two weeks, with opening statements Sept. 21. In the two previous trials, jury selection took four days and eight days.

    The sentencing trial is then expected to last through October. Bellows rejected a defense request that he recuse himself because of his strong comments in imposing the jury's death sentence after the second trial.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/05/AR2010090503155.html?wprss=rss_metro

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    Convicted killer facing Va. death penalty suspected of more slayings in Calif.

    A man facing the death penalty in Fairfax County for two murders, and who was convicted of a third in California, is now a suspect in two more California homicides committed in the same fashion, his attorneys revealed in court Monday.

    If Alfredo R. Prieto is charged with the two slayings in Riverside County, Calif., he then will have been charged with six homicides and four rapes -- allegedly all of them committed at the time of the killings -- in slightly more than two years between 1988 and 1990. He has not been charged with the most recently revealed cases, which occurred in the seven months after he moved from Arlington County to California and were linked to him by DNA matches.

    All of the victims were shot.

    Riverside County authorities declined to discuss the cases there Monday, saying they needed to meet with the victims' families first. Last year, the Riverside County sheriff's department submitted DNA samples from five unsolved homicide cases to a lab in Texas, the Riverside Press-Enterprise reported. Investigators declined then to disclose the cases from which the DNA samples were taken. The samples were to be loaded into the national DNA databank to check for possible matches.

    That method was used to link Prieto to the Virginia slayings and resulted in his extradition in 2006. Fairfax cold-case detectives resubmitted DNA samples in the case of Rachael A. Raver and Warren H. Fulton III, both 22, who were found shot to death outside Reston in 1988. The samples matched Prieto, who was in prison in California for another rape-murder.

    In 2008, a Fairfax jury convicted Prieto of raping Raver and murdering her and Fulton. The jury sentenced Prieto to death, but the Virginia Supreme Court last year ordered the sentencing phase to be done again, because the verdict form didn't allow for a particular option that could have resulted in a life sentence.

    Jury selection began Sept. 7 for Prieto's resentencing in Fairfax. Last week, according to a defense brief, Fairfax Commonwealth's Attorney Raymond F. Morrogh informed Prieto's attorneys that he had been told of a "DNA profile hit" in the "killing of a young couple in the Ontario, Calif., area in approximately 1990, with the female alleged to have been raped."

    Defense attorneys Peter D. Greenspun and Jonathan Shapiro asked for a mistrial in the pending Fairfax case so that they could research the new California cases. "Some of the evidence in the new California allegations may be of assistance to Mr. Prieto," the attorneys wrote, "in not only the pending sentencing hearing, but also other prosecutions."

    Morrogh said he learned of the DNA match only after jury selection began. In a hearing before Fairfax Circuit Court Judge Randy I. Bellows, Morrogh said an investigator in Riverside called and asked him if a plea deal could be cut in Fairfax in exchange for Prieto's cooperation in California.

    But Morrogh said he hadn't received any written confirmation of the DNA hit. "It's my judgment we cannot get this evidence in at this stage of the proceedings," Morrogh said. "So I am not going to put it in."

    Bellows declined to declare a mistrial. "The Commonwealth has taken it [the California cases] off the table for purposes of this trial," the judge said.

    Morrogh still plans to argue for a death sentence in Fairfax.

    In the late 1980s, Prieto lived in Arlington with his girlfriend and son. In May 1988, according to a DNA match, he raped Veronica "Tina" Jefferson and then shot her to death. He was charged in that killing, but has not been prosecuted.

    Seven months later, in December 1988, Prieto somehow encountered Raver and Fulton after they left a sports bar in the District. Their bodies were found in a vacant lot off Hunter Mill Road, nowhere near either victim's home.

    Court records show that Prieto moved to California in February 1990, apparently stealing the identity of his girlfriend's brother. In 1990, he and two other men raped three women in Ontario, Calif. The other men stabbed their victims, who lived. Prieto shot 15-year-old Yvette Woodruff, who died. He was arrested four days later, convicted of murder and given the death penalty.

    But his appeals in California, now 18 years along, are not moving, court records show. Virginia extradited him in hopes of convicting and executing him. Jury selection in Fairfax is continuing.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/20/AR2010092005618.html?wprss=rss_metro

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    Sentencing of Virginia serial killer is delayed

    Fairfax County's five-year effort to obtain the death penalty for serial killer Alfredo Prieto took another tortured turn Thursday, when the judge hearing the case reluctantly stopped the trial for two weeks because a key defense witness is unavailable.

    Prieto has been convicted of three murders, charged with a fourth and is suspected in three more. In 2008, at his second trial in Fairfax, a jury convicted him of the murders of Rachael A. Raver and Warren H. Fulton III and sentenced him to death, but the Virginia Supreme Court last year ordered the sentencing to be redone.

    The third Fairfax proceeding is now in its sixth week, with the defense building its case that Prieto should not be executed because of the trauma he suffered as a child growing up in war-torn El Salvador in the 1970s.

    An expert on the impact of war on children has testified, as did a nun who worked with a missionary and three nuns killed in El Salvador in 1980. Members of Prieto's family, including his mother, who fled the country in 1975 and brought her children to California in 1981, also testified.

    Culminating the defense case was supposed to be a forensic psychologist from Texas, appointed by Fairfax Circuit Court Judge Randy I. Bellows at the defense team's request. The psychologist has written a report about Prieto's mental health and defense lawyers hope his testimony will convince the jury to spare Prieto's life.

    But last month, the psychologist's wife was diagnosed with cancer, and last week he informed the lawyers that he could not appear in Fairfax as scheduled. In a phone call with Bellows in court Thursday, the psychologist said he could not be fully prepared, or be emotionally steady, before Nov. 1.

    Neither side wanted to postpone the trial. Fairfax Commonwealth's Attorney Raymond F. Morrogh noted that Raver's mother had traveled to Fairfax and testified even as she is currently undergoing chemotherapy for her own cancer. Morrogh offered to travel to Texas and videotape the psychologist's testimony, which the psychologist declined.

    The defense said it needed the psychologist, and Bellows said the trial would stop after Thursday, when all other defense witnesses were done, and resume in two weeks.

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    Prieto sentenced to death for Fairfax murders

    By Tom Jackman
    Washington Post Staff Writer

    A Fairfax County jury imposed two death sentences Friday on serial killer Alfredo R. Prieto for the murders of Rachael A. Raver and Warren H. Fulton III near Reston in December 1988. The jury was told that Prieto, 44, had been sentenced to death for a 1990 rape and murder in California and that he was linked by DNA to a fourth slaying, in Arlington County in May 1988. But jurors were not told that ballistics tests link Prieto to a fifth homicide, in Prince William County in 1989.

    Neither did they learn that authorities in California are linking Prieto to four additional slayings there, involving a pair of abductions and double homicides in spring 1990. That would link Prieto to nine killings in slightly more than two years.

    Prieto has been incarcerated in California since his arrest there in 1990, and he has been on death row since 1992 for the rape and murder of Yvette Woodruff, 15.

    In 2005, Fairfax's cold case homicide unit resubmitted the DNA from the unsolved rape and shooting of Raver and the killing of her boyfriend, Fulton, in an empty lot near Hunter Mill Road. At some point after Prieto entered San Quentin State Penitentiary, his DNA was entered into a national database, and it matched the semen left at the scene of Raver's killing.

    Then-Fairfax Commonwealth's Attorney Robert F. Horan Jr. decided that Virginia could extradite Prieto and convict and execute him more quickly than California, where Prieto's appeals had already lasted for 13 years. But Horan could not foresee the tortuous road ahead for the prosecutors, police, defense attorneys and surviving family members.

    In 2007, after a six-week trial, a mistrial was declared when a juror claimed he had been pressured into convicting Prieto. In 2008, after an eight-week trial, Prieto was convicted again and sentenced to death. But the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the verdict form given to jurors was incorrect and ordered a resentencing.

    And so, Raver's and Fulton's families returned to Fairfax for a third time. Raver, of Yorktown, N.Y., had recently graduated from George Washington University and lived in Alexandria at the time she was killed. Fulton, a senior and baseball captain at George Washington, lived with his parents in Vienna.

    Commonwealth's Attorney Raymond F. Morrogh, who had been Horan's chief deputy for the first two trials (Horan retired in 2007), took over the prosecution, while attorneys Peter D. Greenspun and Jonathan Shapiro launched their third defense of Prieto.

    This time, the jury was empaneled simply to decide whether Prieto should be executed. Jurors were told of the Woodruff killing and that an earlier jury had convicted Prieto of capital murder in the slayings of Raver and Fulton.

    The defense team did not, as it did in the first two trials, posit that Prieto was mentally retarded and thus ineligible for a death sentence. Instead, it presented extensive evidence of Prieto's horrific upbringing in war-torn El Salvador.

    Prieto regularly saw dead and mutilated bodies in the street, his father brutalized his mother before going to prison, and he watched guerrillas murder his grandfather before he legally entered this country with his mother at age 15. She had left the family six years earlier. Two experts testified about the lasting damage done by exposure to war, poverty, abuse and abandonment.
    "I'm not trying to tell you those things excuse what he did," Shapiro told jurors. "But you can consider whether his moral culpability is reduced. . . . Kids exposed to this stuff become desensitized. It changes your values. It changes your moral code. It changes the way your brain develops."
    Morrogh took the jury back to Dec. 3, 1988, when Raver and Fulton had dinner with Fulton's parents, attended a Christmas party and then went to Mister Day's, a bar in the District. They left after midnight and weren't seen until their bodies were discovered two days later. No one knows how or where Prieto met them.

    Prieto has never cooperated with investigators or testified at any of his trials.

    Fulton had been shot in the back, the medical examiner found, and Morrogh theorized that Raver, forced to disrobe, then ran terrified through the dark bramble until she was shot in the back, too. Morrogh said Prieto raped Raver as she lay dying.

    "Anyone who would commit crimes this dastardly, amoral and inhuman," Morrogh said, "is someone who poses a threat to society."

    He pulled out Raver's red shoes for the jury and said that Raver slipped them on in anticipation of a night of fun and that Prieto forced her to take them off and murdered her.

    The jury deliberated for eight hours over two days before reaching its verdict. Fairfax Circuit Court Judge Randy I. Bellows will impose the jury's sentence, or reduce it to life without parole, Dec. 16.

    In Riverside County, Calif., Stacey Siegrist, 19, and Tony Gianuzzi, 21, were also shot in the back, in May 1990, and Siegrist was raped. Their bodies were found in Rubidoux, Calif., the same place where the car used in Woodruff's murder was found. The killings remained unsolved until Riverside County Sheriff's Department cold case detectives submitted the DNA earlier this year and it matched Prieto, Riverside Sgt. Scott Brown said.

    In June 1990 in Ontario, Calif., Herbert and Lula Farley were returning recyclables to a grocery store when Lula Farley, 71, was shot to death and Herbert Farley, 65, was abducted. His body was later found in Rubidoux. Brown said ballistics showed that the gun used to kill the Farleys was used to kill Siegrist and Gianuzzi. Prieto has not been charged in the four newly linked cases.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...?hpid=newswell

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