Suspect in 5 S.D. Slayings Is Arrested

Police Sunday announced an end to the largest manhunt in the city’s history, saying an arrest has been made in connection with the serial stabbing deaths of five women in Clairemont and University City.

Cleophus Prince Jr., a 23-year-old construction worker, was apprehended by police in his hometown of Birmingham, Ala., three hours after having been released from the city’s jail on a charge of misdemeanor theft.

At a press conference at police headquarters in San Diego, investigators were tight-lipped about the case, but Deputy Chief Cal Krosch--a member of a 34-person team involved in the 13-month inquiry--said genetic DNA evidence was a major factor in linking Prince to the crimes.

The parent of one of the victims, who asked not to be quoted by name, told The Times on Sunday that, “Apparently, from a scientific point of view, he is irrefutably the guy.”

City Councilman Bruce Henderson, whose district includes the Clairemont neighborhood where the first three slayings occurred,

said police have told him they have “an extremely strong case.”Henderson said that, despite the nature of controversial DNA evidence, investigators have placed Prince at the scene of the killings and know for a certainty that he cannot be excluded as a suspect.

Prince is being held without bail on five murder counts in the Jefferson County Jail in Birmingham, awaiting extradition to San Diego, which authorities said could take days or even weeks. Police said two officers from San Diego went to Birmingham on Sunday to question Prince, but declined to elaborate.

Prince is 5-foot-7, 175 pounds and matches “almost exactly,” in the words of one investigator, a widely circulated composite drawing released after the stabbing death of 18-year-old Holly Suzanne Tarr in a Clairemont apartment on April 3 of last year.

Tarr, an aspiring actress from Okemos, Mich., who was visiting her brother on spring break, was the third victim in the series.

The slayings began Jan. 12, 1990, when 20-year-old Tiffany Paige Schultz was stabbed more than 50 times. The last occurred Sept. 13 with the stabbing deaths of 42-year-old Pamela Gail Clark and her 18-year-old daughter, Amber, at their home in University City.

Janene Marie Weinhold, 21, the second victim in the series, was stabbed more than 30 times in her Clairemont Drive apartment on Feb. 16 of last year. KFMB-TV reported Sunday night that the suspect had lived near Weinhold in the same Buena Vista Gardens apartment complex around the time of the killings.

Tarr’s was the only slaying in which the suspect was spotted by witnesses--a Buena Vista Gardens maintenance man who confronted him moments after the slaying, and a painter who said he got “a good look” at the killer as he ran away.

Homicide agents said they would not release any photographs of Prince until he can be identified by witnesses in a San Diego police lineup.

Deputy Chief Krosch said that, after police determined Prince was “our man,” they were alarmed to find out he had been in jail in Birmingham on an unrelated theft charge but released three hours earlier.

“With the assistance of the Birmingham police and a bail bondsman, Prince’s parents were then contacted,” Krosch said. “They were told he needed to sign some papers (formalizing his release). So, he came in (to the Birmingham police station around 12:30 a.m. Sunday, EST) with his parents. As a result of this ruse, they pounced on him.”

At the impoverished Gate City housing project where Prince lived with his mother, brother and sister, Dorothy Prince, the mother, told the Birmingham Post-Herald that she did not wish to be interviewed at length until after she had talked with a lawyer.

“The police said they wanted to see my son, and he asked me to take him because he wanted to see what they wanted,” Dorothy Prince said, referring to the request by authorities that her son return to the station after being released on the theft charge.

“They never would have found me if he decided to hide from them,” she said. “I don’t know what’s going on. The police aren’t telling me anything. I don’t believe he did it. I don’t believe he is capable of doing anything like that. I don’t believe they have any hard evidence that says he did it. If he did do it, why would he have gone to jail like that on his own?”

Viola Davis, a neighbor of Prince’s in one of the Alabama city’s most crime-ridden areas, said she believed Prince had recently served a tour of duty in the military.

“I’ve always known him as Little Pie,” Davis told the Birmingham News. “That’s just the nickname everybody called him. He’d been away in the service for a while--I really don’t know where. He just got back home about a week or so ago. He mostly keeps to himself.”

Chris Sims, a neighbor, told the Birmingham News he knew Prince’s nickname as Eric, and said he didn’t know him well but “had had a few beers with him every once in a while.”

Sims said Prince was a construction worker, who, at one time, worked for his father. Sims said Prince drove a green Nova and had once attended Woodlawn High School in Birmingham.

Lt. Martin Wicklund, a spokesman for the Navy, said Sunday that Prince is not on active duty in the Navy and that he would have “no way of knowing” until today whether Prince had been discharged from the service.

A spokeswoman for the Marines at Camp Pendleton said she had “no idea” whether Prince was on active duty or had been discharged, “but we haven’t heard anything about it, and I think we would have by now.”

A story from the Birmingham News, published in 1984, revealed that a Cleophus Prince Sr.--36 at the time--had been arrested with his wife, Sharon, then 27, on suspicion of having raped an 18-year-old woman who attended a party at their home.

Deputy Chief Krosch said that Cleophus Prince Sr. is the name of the father of the suspect in the Clairemont-University City case, but The Times was unable to confirm Sunday night whether Prince’s father was the suspect cited in the 1984 rape case in Birmingham.

Birmingham District Judge Jack Montgomery was quoted in the story as saying that it was the first time he had sent to the grand jury a rape case in which a woman was also charged.

Raymond Weinhold, the father of the second victim in the series, Janene Weinhold, said Sunday that he had “been told a lot” by police but could not elaborate at this time.

“My reaction is a mixture of feelings,” Weinhold said from his home in Scottsdale, Ariz. “It’s fantastic relief that this animal--if he’s the right one--will not kill a beautiful, interesting person again. It’s relief mixed with a hell of a lot of hatred for that guy.

“My feelings range all over the board, including this wildly irrational picture of myself carrying out some ultimate form of justice--doing the same thing to him that he did to my daughter.”

Willard W. (Bill) Schultz, the father of Tiffany Paige Schultz, a San Diego State University student and the first victim in the series, was apparently the only parent of any victim not notified about the arrest. Schultz was the only parent to have publicly criticized police during their investigation.

He told The Times last fall that police had delayed processing hair and skin particles taken from his daughter’s palm and believed to be those of the killer. Police later acknowledged the delay but said such evidence did not figure prominently in the case--an apparent contradiction to Sunday’s disclosure that genetic DNA findings now play a major role.

“I’m absolutely relieved,” said Schultz, a member of the Board of Supervisors in Nevada County, Calif. “I just don’t know what else to say . . . I’m just glad the guy’s off the street.”

Moments after Schultz’s daughter, who moonlighted as a nude dancer, was killed in her Canyon Ridge apartment on Cowley Way, police arrested her fiance, Christopher Jon Burns. Burns was held for five days in County Jail on suspicion of murder and then released for lack of evidence.

Asked Sunday if Burns had been cleared, Deputy Chief Krosch said, “This is our suspect”--meaning Prince.

Police later arrested a tanker-truck driver named Luis Lebron, whose dark skin and hair vaguely matched the description of the killer. Lebron was let go after police determined he was not the killer.

The first three victims in the case lived within two blocks of one another in a Clairemont apartment district. In each of the five cases, police say the killer entered through unlocked or open doors in the middle of the day. He apparently arrived without a weapon and killed each victim with a knife, believed to have been obtained inside the home.

A murder weapon was found in each of the cases except the first, police say.

Some victims had just showered or were undressing when the killer attacked, police say. He is believed to have followed them home from swimming pools or fitness clubs and then waited for the right time to attack, an investigator close to the case said Sunday.

With the exception of Pamela Gail Clark, who police believe may have been killed because she was home on the morning her daughter was attacked, each victim was in her late teens or early 20s. Each bore an eerie resemblance to one another. Clark and Schultz had blond hair, the others brown. All were white.

If Prince is the killer, his being black and his victims white “would indeed be rare,” said James Alan Fox, a professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University in Boston and the co-author of “Mass Murder: America’s Growing Menace.”

Fox, a recognized expert on the subject, said serial killers most often “murder within their own race.”

“Assuming that he’s the guy, it is most unusual,” he said. “White serial killers usually kill white victims. Black serial killers usually kill black victims. There have been a few cases of crossover, but not many. Very, very few, in fact.”