SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO : Computer Leads to Slaying Arrest

With the help of a computerized fingerprint system, Orange County Sheriff’s homicide investigators arrested a San Juan Capistrano man in connection with the recent killing of a retired Hughes Aircraft engineer.

The arrest of Victor M. Pareja, 20, on Thursday ended an eight-day investigation into the death of 61-year-old Robert L. Wood, sheriff’s spokesman Richard J. Olson said.

Pareja, who was arrested on suspicion of murder, was being held at the Orange County Central Jail in lieu of $250,000 bail. An arraignment on murder charges was scheduled for today at Municipal Court in Laguna Niguel, Olson said.

Wood was found dead in his Laguna Heights condominium on May 16 by neighbors who became suspicious when he did not answer phone calls.

Although Wood’s throat had been cut, the coroner’s office determined that the cause of death was suffocation, Olson said.

Pareja’s arrest was due to Cal-ID, a statewide automated fingerprint system that was brought on-line in 1987. The system takes a set of fingerprints and searches for a match among those already filed in the system.

“Without that fingerprint system, we may have never got this guy,” Olson said. “There’s no way we would have had time to sit down manually and look up fingerprints. It would have taken 60 years to do it.”

Pareja’s fingerprints were on file in the system because of an April 7 arrest for petty theft. That case is still pending.

Olson said that investigators collecting evidence at Wood’s Crystal Cay condominium discovered that a videocassette recorder, a wallet and some jewelry were missing. During the search, a fresh set of fingerprints was found on a glass ashtray located in the bedroom near Wood’s body.

Those fingerprints eventually led police to Pareja, Olson said.

Olson declined to say whether Pareja and Olson knew each other.