A Brother’s Secret Solves Girl’s Death

An ex-marine and computer specialist whose 14-year-old sister was believed to have committed suicide in Oregon 11 years ago confessed in Los Angeles Wednesday that he shot her to death because he believed she was pregnant as a result of their one-year incestuous relationship.

“I killed her with a pistol in the mouth,” said Kalib Valentine, whose name was Michael V. Wilson before he changed it legally. “I was crazy . . . crazy. There’s no other word for it.”

Valentine, tall, slim with dark hair and a dark mustache, fought back tears as he spoke, explaining that he decided to confess as part of his fight against alcoholism.

“I want to get this off my chest,” he said. “I just can’t live with it any more.

“It was listed as a suicide by the police, but it was not,” said Valentine, now 26. “For about a year, there had been an incestuous relationship, and finally, I was afraid she was pregnant--she said she had missed a couple of periods--and I killed her and made it look like suicide.”

Hours after his confession, Valentine flew with his attorney to Pendleton, Ore., to tell his father, Larry La Von Wilson, 48, that his only son had killed Wilson’s only daughter, Karen, and why. Valentine’s mother died two years ago of cancer.

Valentine will appear this morning before a judge in Umatilla County Circuit Court in Pendleton, where he will be formally charged with manslaughter and enter his plea.

“Kalib wants to confess,” said his lawyer, Robert D. Rentzer of Encino. “He could have confessed right here and now and never have gone to Oregon. . . . But he wishes to atone. He wishes to be punished.”

In Pendleton, Umatilla County Dist. Atty. David Gallaher, who negotiated the manslaughter charge with Rentzer, said in a telephone interview that “if he (Valentine) had not come forward with this confession, no one would have known about it.”

“At the time of her death, there was an autopsy,” Gallaher said. “There was no indication in the autopsy report that she was pregnant, nothing to indicate it was anything but suicide. And there is no body. Karen Rochelle Wilson’s body was cremated.”

In Oregon, there is no statute of limitations on manslaughter, Gallaher said.

The district attorney said the judge will call for a presentencing report from the state Department of Corrections and decide when Valentine will be sentenced and if he will be held in custody until then. Gallaher said he expected a sentence to be handed down in about 30 days.

“The judge could set any sentence he believes appropriate, up to a maximum of 20 years,” Gallaher said.

Rentzer, who introduced Valentine at a news conference in Rentzer’s office, said he first became involved in the case a month ago, when Valentine called his office. Rentzer said he contacted the district attorney’s office in Pendleton and negotiated a plea to the manslaughter charge.

Rentzer said the police officer who originally investigated Karen’s death in 1974, Detective Jim O’Grady, is still working in Oregon and that he suspected from the beginning that Valentine had something to do with the death.

“The officer believed he (Valentine) simply aided and abetted in a suicide,” Rentzer said.

O’Grady was not available for comment Wednesday, and officials said he would not make any statement before Valentine’s court appearance.

Valentine told reporters that he had come forward now, because “when you screw up, you take your lumps. . . .”

“For once in my goddamn life, I want to do something that’s right, and this is right,” he said.

Asked if he was certain that his sister was pregnant when he killed her, Valentine replied that his father told him afterward that there was an autopsy, but “he never told me what the results were.” To this day, he admitted, “I don’t know if it was true or not.”

Valentine, who was only 16 when he killed his sister in mid-November, 1974, said that since then, “I’ve been kind of running . . . changed my name . . . trying to get away from what I did . . . found out I’m an alcoholic . . . trying to get sober.”

Most of the time he was in California. He said he spent four years in the Marine Corps, earning a Good Conduct medal; two years in the infantry; two years working on computers; two-and-a-half years with American Honda; went to school on the GI Bill, and is now a staff support specialist with Radio Shack, working on computers. In recent years he lived in Hawthorne and Bellflower.

Valentine said he had “been drinking for a lot of years to kinda get away from it and not remember.” Then he sobered up in a special program.

“There’s some nasty steps in that,” he said. “You have to admit what you did . . . try and clear up the wreckage of the past.”

It was only five months ago that he first told someone about killing his sister, he said, confessing it to the man who helped him sober up.