Man, 80, convicted in ’72 murder

An 80-year-old man was convicted Monday of a 24-year-old murder in San Pedro.

A downtown Los Angeles jury found Adolph Theodore Laudenberg, a former cabdriver, guilty of the first-degree murder of Lois Petrie, who was found strangled in her San Pedro home the day after Christmas in 1972.

The decades-old murder case was based on DNA evidence left behind on a coffee cup and a napkin Laudenberg used during a 2003 meeting with an LAPD investigator at a Torrance doughnut shop.

The unorthodox method of DNA-gathering raises new issues of privacy rights, legal experts say. Some of them believe judicial approval should be required before DNA is taken from a public setting. Police and prosecutors contend that DNA left on discarded items -- such as Laudenberg’s coffee cup -- is legally no different from a fingerprint.

In the Laudenberg case, the officer who interviewed him discreetly put the napkin in his pocket, poured the leftover coffee out of Laudenberg’s cup and placed the cup next to a trashcan. An undercover officer then picked up the cup, court documents showed.

Authorities said in court documents that the DNA from the doughnut shop meeting will be used to link Laudenberg to another killing in the Bay Area in the 1970s. Laudenberg has not been charged for that crime.

Laudenberg faces a maximum 30-years-to-life prison term, with possible parole, when he is sentenced Jan. 8.