Driver in Fatal Crash Seized After 31 Years as Fugitive

A fugitive who escaped from custody 31 years ago while serving a sentence for killing six people--three of them children--in a spectacular four-car pileup on a Los Angeles freeway was arrested Wednesday after he arrived at Ontario International Airport aboard a flight from Florida, authorities said.

Victor Leonard de Casaus, 67, of Mexicali, Mexico, was taken into custody shortly after midnight, Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies said. He had been sought since January, 1959, when he walked away from the Malibu sheriff’s station, where he was an inmate trustee.

In 1958, De Casaus was convicted of six counts of manslaughter and drunk driving resulting from a crash on the San Bernardino Freeway in September, 1955, that killed a couple, their three children and another man. A second couple and their two small children were hospitalized with injuries.

De Casaus was serving six consecutive one-year sentences when he escaped, and deputies said they believe he fled to Mexico where he managed his family’s wholesale grocery business.

At the time of the accident, he worked in a grocery warehouse his family owned in Los Angeles.

Investigators said several efforts to have De Casaus returned to this country were unsuccessful. Mexico has no extradition treaty with the United States.

Authorities learned, however, that De Casaus traveled on occasion to Florida, where he also ran a grocery warehouse, traveling on a passport bearing his own name. Deputies said they received information recently that De Casaus would arrive at Ontario, where he was arrested Wednesday.

In the 1955 crash, De Casaus’ speeding car jumped the freeway’s center divider and smashed into oncoming traffic. The crash, a half-mile east of Eastern Avenue, left wreckage and bodies scattered over 100 yards, and gasoline from a ruptured tank sent a curtain of flame down the roadway.

Supermarket manager Joseph Golden, 54, of Duarte, his wife Minnie, 39, and their children, Barry, 12, Robert, 7, and Linda, 4, were killed. They were returning home from a family dinner in observance of Yom Kippur, the end of the Jewish high holy days.

The sixth victim, William L. Spackler, 24, of Los Angeles, was in a separate car.

The 35 years since the accident have not dimmed the anger of Esther Wilkins, 75, of Temple City, Minnie Golden’s sister.

“I lost five people--just like the snap of a finger,” she said Wednesday. “I’m happy they’ve got him now. If he pays for it, then that will be a little gratification.”

Wilkins said the news of De Casaus’ arrest “brought tears to all of us. the accident is a family heartache. It’s something that you just don’t forget.

“I’d say it was a case of getting away with murder. He didn’t get what he deserved. The man was drunk. They gave him a year for each person he killed. They put him in a place where it was easy to walk out.”

Wilkins’ husband, Leon, 73, said he immediately recognized De Casaus’ name when he heard the news on his car radio. The couple said surviving family members had been tearfully recalling the accident for much of the day Wednesday.

“It took me years to get over it,” Leon Wilkins said. “In fact, I don’t think I’m over it yet.”

De Casaus’ careening car also crashed into one driven by David B. Hearn, then 23. Hearn, his wife, Nell, 22, and their two small children were hospitalized with injuries ranging from broken bones to cuts and bruises.

“We had put the whole thing out of our minds,” Hearn, 58, said Wednesday in a telephone interview from his home in Portola Valley in San Mateo County.

He and his family moved from Van Nuys less than a year after the accident, and he said he did not know that De Casaus was a fugitive.

A computer programmer with IBM, Hearn said the accident “kind of changed our lives.

“The settlement from the accident gave me an opportunity to go to college. I went to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and sort of cut our ties with Los Angeles.”

Interviewed in his hospital bed a day after the 1955 crash that made Page 1 news for several days, Hearn said he could recall nothing.

“I still don’t remember anything about the accident,” he said Wednesday. “The kids didn’t really know it all happened. They know about it, but it’s not family lore.”

Hearn’s daughter, Deborah, not quite 2 at the time of the accident, now lives in Eugene, Ore., he said, and his son, David Jr., 6 weeks old at the time, is now a construction supervisor in Livermore.

When the accident occurred, it was called the worst in the history of Los Angeles freeways. The next day, De Casaus said from his hospital bed that he would “gladly change places” with any of the six victims.

Witnesses said De Casaus’ car was traveling at more than 70 m.p.h. California Highway Patrol investigators said his blood alcohol level was much higher than the legal minimum to show intoxication.

De Casaus is being held at the Men’s Central County Jail, where he immediately began serving the five years left on his sentence. Escape charges are pending, deputies said Wednesday.