Phoned-In Tip Yields Suspect in Slaying of Pacoima Girl

On Jan. 29, 1985, more than four years after police started investigating the slaying and sexual molestation of a 7-year-old Pacoima girl, detectives got a break.

An anonymous woman caller told police “her conscience was bothering her” because she thought she knew who strangled and sexually assaulted Lisa Ann Rosales, said Lt. Bernard Conine. Lisa’s body was dumped in a ditch less than three miles from the Rosales home a day after she was reported missing. The attacker, the caller alleged, was Luis Raul Castro, 59, whose name had surfaced shortly after the killing along with many other possible suspects, Conine said.

Faces Trial Today

As a result of the investigation that followed the tip nearly two years ago, Castro, who Mexican authorities said has confessed to the crime, is to appear for formal trial in Mexican federal court today--exactly six years from when Lisa disappeared on her way home from school on Dec. 8, 1980.

The path that eventually led to Castro’s arrest last month in Mexico was fraught with frustration and many, many dead ends.

For example, police reviewed the records of more than 1,000 persons they thought might have committed such a crime. Of those, scores of people cooperated in being interviewed--none of whom, police agreed, could have been the murderer. Although Castro was on the original list of suspects police wanted to check out, they did not locate him for questioning. They learned later that Castro had left the United States for his native Mexicali in early 1981.

Police say they believe Mexico now has the right man in custody, thanks to a combination of luck and detectives’ tenacity throughout what Conine called an “on again, off again” investigation. Now that the case appears to be near conclusion, detectives are wondering what they could have done differently. They also are attempting to answer questions emerging now, as the trial begins.

When the murder probe began, investigators here were almost sure that Lisa’s attacker was an experienced child molester who probably had assaulted other children in similar fashion and who could strike again.

Police Apprehension

As detectives combed the records and checked the whereabouts of more than 1,000 known sex offenders, Conine said, they waited with apprehension for another crime that had the Rosales killing’s “distinctive features,” which detectives have said are too gruesome to relate.

The matching crime never came.

“That was one of the things that baffled us,” said Conine, commander of detectives at Foothill Division.

“My experience in that area is that a child molester doesn’t do it one time and quit,” said Detective Cliff Ruff, who was initially assigned to the case. “He had a specific appetite for a particular kind of girl and age of girl, and that appetite would have to be fulfilled in the future.”

In the months after the killing, detectives monitored the police Teletype for sex crimes. In all, Ruff said, they examined at least 50 for similarities to the Rosales case and found none that matched precisely.

One that “perked up the investigation” came on a March night in 1981, Conine said. A patrol sergeant in the Rampart Division in downtown Los Angeles had nabbed a man in the act of kidnaping a 4-year-old girl.

But that suspect was cleared after detectives interviewed him, Conine said.

“The man was very cooperative and very explicit on the type of crime he was going to commit on the little girl,” Ruff said, “and it wasn’t the same crime as the one on Lisa.”

Possible Suspect

On May 4, 1981, six detectives bearing a search warrant examined the records of 600 “mentally disordered sex offenders” at Atascadero State Hospital, Conine said. They found only one that might be a suspect.

A former inmate had kidnaped a girl of the same age in a fashion similar to the scene described by one of Lisa’s schoolmates, who had told police she saw a man pulling the Rosales girl into a yellow truck, according to Conine. But the suspect had released the girl unharmed, and investigators learned he had been in a different county at the time of the Rosales slaying, Conine said.

In addition, detectives following early leads in the case identified five possible suspects who did not cooperate with police and could neither be cleared nor charged, Ruff said. Three others did cooperate, Conine said, submitting to interviews and polygraph tests that exonerated them.

As the investigation plodded forward, emotions remained high in Pacoima after the killing. About $10,000 was raised for a college scholarship fund in Lisa’s name at San Fernando High School, and a local elementary school established a garden in Lisa’s name.

Detectives, meanwhile, were spending hundreds of hours tracking down people named in police records and in a state registry of known sex offenders. At least 469 of these persons were checked, and the list narrowed to more than 200 who could have been in Pacoima at the time of the Rosales killing, detectives said. Scores of them were interviewed and cleared, Conine said.

One of the names on the original list of registered sex offenders, detectives said, was one of the three aliases of Luis Raul Castro, the suspect now charged in Mexico with killing Lisa Ann Rosales.

The name Luis Castro had come up before, Conine said, in the first few months of the investigation, when detectives interviewed members of the Rosales family and friends and neighbors along the stretch of Herrick Street where the girl lived and was last seen.

But Castro never was interviewed, and detectives did not link him to the crime until the anonymous telephone call in January, 1985--after residents of the Herrick Street neighborhood were interviewed again by homicide detectives, Conine said.

Police are limited in what details of their investigation they can make public, they say, and it is unclear exactly why Castro was not investigated shortly after the killing, when his name was first mentioned to detectives by someone interviewed soon after Lisa’s death.

“It wasn’t the type of information like, ‘This guy was seen peering over the wall,’ ” Conine said. “He lived in the community, and he did some work at the Rosales residence. . . . No information was around at that time to make him more of a suspect than, say, the mailman.”

Investigators also were working with a common Latino name and without a birth date or address of Castro, a man who, as it was later learned, was an illegal alien, Conine said.

“They could not connect that name to a person,” he said. “He was using three aliases. Investigators then didn’t connect him to his real name. . . . An in-depth investigation of the community could have found out who he was. There just wasn’t enough time to spend a lot on this particular clue. They had lots of other information to check out.”

Another Year Elapses

Even after the anonymous tip, detectives, who had been occupied throughout the Rosales case with a heavy workload involving other crimes, would spend another year finding out more about Castro before deciding to present the case to Mexican authorities in July.

It took six to eight months more to find a bilingual typist and finally translate into Spanish the case file, which bulges out of five three-ring binders, Conine said. Mexican federal prosecutor Angel Saad said Mexican authorities conducted their own investigation before arresting Castro on Nov. 24.

Under Mexican law, any citizen of Mexico can be tried there on charges stemming from a crime in another country if the act also is a crime in Mexico. The death penalty is not in force in Mexico.

Police here have said there is physical evidence that might link Castro to the Rosales killing, but they have not elaborated.

In Mexico, Castro confessed to being alone in the Rosales home with Lisa while doing carpentry work on a bedroom closet, Saad said. He bound, gagged and sexually assaulted the girl, later dumping her strangled body onto an embankment near Hansen Dam, according to the confession, Saad said.

Castro also told Mexican authorities that he knew the Rosales family so well that he carried a spare set of keys to the house, Saad said. He said he did not know how Castro ended up alone in the house with Lisa, but Castro has not been charged with kidnaping.

The Rosales family has been unavailable for comment.

Not Allowed Contact

Conine would not comment on the reported confession, and two Los Angeles Police Department detectives were not allowed to speak to Castro when they went to Mexicali last Tuesday, Conine said.

Mexican authorities told the Los Angeles detectives details of the crime, purportedly related by Castro, that only Lisa’s killer would know, Conine said.

But other details of the reported confession, such as the relationship between Castro and the family, have raised questions in the minds of investigators here. Conine, who has declined to describe Castro’s life in the United States, said detectives were unaware that he did carpentry work.

They are trying to verify or discount Lisa’s schoolmate’s account of a kidnaper in a yellow truck, Conine said. The schoolmate’s description of the kidnaper does not fit that of Castro, and no yellow truck has been linked to him, Conine said.

Conine took command of Foothill Division detectives in mid-1981. He reversed the decision of his predecessor, Capt. John Salvino, who assigned the case to detectives investigating juvenile sexual assault. Conine turned it over to homicide detectives.

Asked if he viewed the decision to assign the case to the juvenile unit as a mistake, Conine said, “In my opinion, yes it was.” Although homicide detectives were involved in the early part of the investigation, they did not have primary responsibility for it, he said.

Conine praised the work of the original detectives but said he took them off the case because “there was a feeling . . . that a real homicide detective had never really delved into it.”

Salvino, who since has retired from the police department, was unavailable for comment.

Even after the case was reassigned to homicide detectives, who took a fresh look at the most important clues, there were still no significant breaks until the January, 1985, phone call, Conine said. He speculated that it was the detectives’ renewed investigation, concentrating on the Pacoima neighborhood where Lisa disappeared, that nudged the caller’s conscience.

But he added, “Luck had a lot to do with it.”