Trial Entering Last Stages : Cooper Defense Zeroes In on Report of 3 White Men

As the murder trial of Kevin Cooper moves into its final days, the defense continues to focus on witnesses’ testimony that three mysterious men may be responsible for the 1983 Chino Hills massacre.

Defense attorney David Negus has called several witnesses, including law enforcement personnel and hospital workers, who have testified that a young survivor of the bloody killings told them on different occasions that three white men, or three Latinos, committed the slayings. Cooper, 26, is black.

San Bernardino County Dist. Atty. Dennis Kottmeier has rested the prosecution’s case, which was built on circumstantial evidence. Prosecutors presented no direct evidence linking Cooper to the scene. However, Kottmeier has expressed confidence that the available evidence is enough to convince the jury that Cooper is the person responsible for the June 5, 1983, killings of Doug and Peg Ryen, both 41; their daughter, Jessica 10, and Christopher Hughes, 11, in the Ryens’ Chino Hills home.

Investigators said the victims were hacked with an ax and stabbed with a knife and ice pick. Joshua Ryen, the couple’s 9-year-old son, survived the attack with a slashed throat and a head wound inflicted with the ax.

Cooper has admitted hiding at a house near the Ryens’ home up to the night the killings took place. Investigators also found shoe prints matching the prison-issued tennis shoes that Cooper was wearing when he admitted escaping from the Chino Institute for Men on June 2, 1983.

The bloody sole pattern found at the Ryen home is similar to the diamond design found on prison shoes. A representative of the company that manufactures the footwear testified that the diamond pattern is used only on tennis shoes the firm sells to the state for prison use.

Three San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies have testified that young Joshua Ryen told them that three white men or three Latinos were responsible for the killings. Reserve Deputy Luis Simo testified that Joshua, upon seeing Cooper’s picture on television, told him “he didn’t do it.”

Dr. Mary Howell, Joshua’s grandmother, also testified that Joshua told sheriff’s homicide investigator Hector O’Campo that three Latinos were in the house when the family was killed. The boy also told another deputy that his attackers were three white men, but later identified them as Latinos.

But when Joshua testified on videotape, he said that he could not remember anything about his attacker or attackers.

If Cooper is acquitted of murder, his legal troubles are not over by any means. He still faces an escape charge for walking away from Chino state prison. In addition, Pennsylvania authorities have charged Cooper with rape, kidnaping and another prison escape.

According to Georgie Ann Cherpes, who is in charge of extradition for the Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, district attorney’s office, Cooper walked out of Mayview Mental Institution in June, 1982. Cooper had been sent to the mental hospital after a judge found that he was incompetent to aid in his own defense when he was charged with burglary.

After walking out of Mayview, Cooper allegedly burglarized a home, abducted a young woman and drove her to a Pittsburgh, Pa., park where he allegedly threatened her with a screwdriver, raped her and left her naked in the park, said Cherpes.

Cooper was in the process of being extradited back to Pennsylvania when he escaped from Chino state prison. He was sent to Chino after his conviction on a burglary charge in Los Angeles, where he was arrested under the alias David Anthony Trautman.

A clerical error resulted in his transfer to a minimum-security section at Chino.

After his escape, he was recaptured July 30, 1983, on an island 20 miles south of Santa Barbara and was arrested on unrelated charges of rape, unlawful sodomy, forcible oral copulation and assault with a deadly weapon.

The trial was moved to San Diego because of extensive publicity in San Bernardino.