Man Held in Arizona as Suspect in Murder of 2 Women in Santa Ana

A man police described as a deaf-mute was arrested in Arizona Tuesday night on suspicion of murdering his estranged deaf girlfriend and her 65-year-old mother, whose stabbed and bloodied bodies were found in their Santa Ana home Monday night.

Police said three Santa Ana police investigators--one of them fluent in sign language--apprehended Ronald James Blaney Jr., 30, of Fountain Valley at his mother’s home in Prescott.

Blaney was expected to be booked late Tuesday into the Yavapai County Jail in Prescott, Santa Ana Police Detective Mike Alvarado said. He said that the Orange County district attorney’s office would be asked this morning to charge Blaney with two counts of murder and that extradition would be attempted.

Little could be learned late Tuesday about Blaney. Neighbors of the slain women only knew of him.

Over the backyard fence, the mother, Josephine Vinci, had fretted with her next-door neighbor last week about her daughter’s broken romance.

The 65-year-old mother, widowed in December, had said her deaf daughter, 34-year-old Priscilla Vinci, had been hit by her boyfriend that day--also the day the relationship ended, neighbor Mary Mendoza recalled before the arrest Tuesday.

It was the last intimate conversation Mendoza would have with her neighbor of 11 years. On Monday night, Mendoza peered into a window of the mother and daughter’s home and spotted their bodies, side by side on the kitchen floor.

“I’ve known them for so long, and to see them on the floor--it was just devastating,” Mendoza said. “Their bodies were close, kind of facing each other. There was blood--God--I just didn’t want to see anymore.”

Mendoza called police to the Vinci home, in the 1300 block of East Cherry Street in northeast Santa Ana, after her gruesome 7:30 p.m. discovery.

Mother and daughter were dead at the scene, police said, both of them victims of numerous stab wounds from what police described only as “a sharp instrument.” They would not elaborate.

Investigators would not discuss a motive in the attacks but said the home showed no signs of a forced entry or ransacking. Mendoza said all the doors were locked.

It appeared that the killings took place a short time before the bodies were found, officers said.

Neighbors said the mother and daughter had lived alone at the home since Sam Vinci, a retired aerospace engineer, died last December of diabetic complications. A grown son lives in Sacramento, Mendoza said.

One of Priscilla Vinci’s friends, also a deaf woman, visited the two-story tan stucco home Monday night and got no answer at the door, Mendoza said. The friend checked the backyard, looked in a window and thought she saw somebody on the floor. She ran to the home of Mendoza, where she furiously wrote notes explaining her alarm.

That, Mendoza said, was when she ran next door.

“I rang on the door, and there was nobody home. Then I looked around the back,” Mendoza said. The two women were there on the floor, she said, clothed but visibly injured.

Her Mother Had Died

“It is just, well it just seems so sad after all Joe has been through,” Mendoza said.

Besides losing her husband, Mendoza said, Josephine Vinci’s mother had died a few months ago. She had visited her mother almost daily.

Then, last week, the mother had begun worrying about her daughter. Blaney apparently hit her, and she and or her mother “filed a complaint about it with police,” Mendoza said.

Since then, Mendoza said, Blaney “had been harassing her.”

For nearly a decade, the younger Vinci had taken classes at Rancho Santiago College in Santa Ana, spokesman Henry Kertman said Tuesday.

“She was taking classes to improve herself in connection with her employment,” said Herb Terreri, hearing impaired program specialist at Rancho Santiago. Terrieri said the younger Vinci worked full time at a credit reporting firm in Orange.

When her father became ill, in December, 1985, Vinci dropped out of school to help her mother care for him. She planned to return to school, Terreri said, but then her father passed away.

Times staff writer Steve Emmons contributed to this report.