Court Told Prince Bragged About Assault 2 Days After Slaying

A former neighbor of the man suspected of killing six San Diego women testified Tuesday at his preliminary hearing that, two days after the third victim was slain, he bragged about having sexually assaulted a young woman.

Robin Louise Romo said she lived in the same Clairemont neighborhood where three of the victims were slain and where the suspect, Cleophus Prince Jr., lived during part of 1990. Two other victims were slain in University City and one in East San Diego.

Romo said Prince was friendly with a man who shared her apartment with her and her husband. She said Prince often came over to visit, and two days after 18-year-old Holly Suzanne Tarr was stabbed to death in April, 1990, Prince told Romo about two different women.

“I would like to talk about the second woman you talked about with Mr. Prince,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Rick Clabby. “What did Prince tell you about the second woman?”

“He said he had been out on a date with this woman,” Romo replied. “He took her home, and he knew that she wanted him. And after they got there, she changed her mind, told him that he was crazy . . . and so he forced himself upon her.

“And when he was done, he got up, turned around, and she was crying. And so he went back, and then he told us, ‘I did her again, got dressed and left.’ ”

During the exchange, Prince, 24, shook his head but avoided looking at Romo, who, like Prince, lived at the Buena Vista Gardens apartment complex between January and April of 1990, during which time three of the serial slayings took place.

Tiffany Paige Schultz, a 20-year-old San Diego State University student, was the first victim. She was found stabbed to death in the Canyon Ridge apartment complex, adjacent to Buena Vista Gardens, on Jan. 12, 1990.

Janene Marie Weinhold, a 21-year-old UC San Diego student who lived near Prince in Buena Vista Gardens, was found stabbed to death on Feb. 16, 1990.

Tarr was killed in her brother’s Buena Vista Gardens apartment on April 3, 1990.

Pamela Gail Clark, 42, and her 18-year-old daughter, Amber, were slain in their University City home on Sept. 13, 1990.

Elissa Naomi Keller was found stabbed to death in her home in East San Diego in May, 1990. Police say Prince moved to an apartment complex across the street from Keller’s shortly before she was slain.

Romo, like several witnesses who testified on the second day of Prince’s preliminary hearing, said she was nervous. At times, her hands and lips trembled slightly, but she never wavered from a story that drew audible sighs from members of the victims’ families.

For the second day in a row, friends and families of the victims sat on one side of the courtroom and those of the suspect on the other.

Willard W. (Bill) Schultz, the father of Tiffany Schultz, said one of the odd but poignant moments of the day came when he and Dorothy Prince, the mother of the suspect, met for the first time.

“It was awkward, but I assured her I bear her no ill will,” Schultz said. “I’m sure she’s dealing with a lot of pain too. She seemed to understand and appreciate what I had to say. It has to be rough for her, and it certainly is for us.”

Joseph Lazzaro, the husband of Pamela Clark and stepfather of Amber Clark, said Monday’s first day was “one of the most difficult experiences I’ve ever had to endure.”

Lazzaro said the process was painful for “all of the obvious reasons” and for triggering memories that “all of us thought we’d forgotten. But in a strange way, it helps the healing process to be in that room.

“At times, it feels like we’ve put the thing to rest and then something happens to reawaken all of it. But it helps to sit there with the other families, to share things, to feel things together. We can sigh together, and cry together, and there’s comfort in that.”

It was Romo’s account that provided key testimony on a day when prosecutors continued to portray Prince as a compulsive burglar whose robberies sometimes included rape and murder and pawning his victims’ possessions after having stabbed them repeatedly.

Romo said Prince made his remarks in the presence of two other women and Romo’s husband. She said the conversation took place in the living room of her apartment, and that she shared it with investigators several days afterward.

At the end of Tuesday’s testimony, members of the victims’ families said Romo’s account had been the most powerful by far. But not all prosecution witnesses were as credible or convincing.

Dr. Zalma Rechnic, 79, a retired general practitioner, said he was taking his morning walk on the same day and in the same University City neighborhood where Pamela Clark and her daughter, Amber, were stabbed to death in September of 1990.

Rechnic, Tuesday’s first prosecution witness, said he saw a “dark-complected” man running toward him but with his head turned to the right, at an odd angle, to avoid Rechnic’s gaze. But Rechnic could by no means identify Prince as the man he saw.

“No, the man I saw was much heavier,” Rechnic said. “He was heavyset. A very large man.”

He said what he meant by heavyset was “muscular,” and while Prince, an avid weightlifter, has been prevented from using bodybuilding equipment in County Jail, Rechnic said Prince would have had to have lost a lot of weight to fit the description of the man he saw.

Rechnic added that the man he saw “had a higher neck.” He also had trouble identifying the shirt the man was wearing and even said that, having seen Prince on a television newscast, he did not believe he was the same man he had seen running on the street in University City.

Later in the day, a San Diego police evidence technician testified about having found three knives on the floor of a car belonging to Prince. He said two were steak knives similar in appearance to weapons recovered at three of the murder scenes.

Larry Fregia, the evidence technician, described the three as a large steak knife with an 8-inch blade and 5-inch handle, a smaller steak knife with a 4 1/2-inch blade and 3-inch handle and a small folding knife with a 2-inch blade and 3-inch handle.

At one point, Fregia said he considered it odd to have found the large steak knife underneath the seat on the driver’s side of Prince’s Chevrolet Cavalier. The remark was stricken from the record, after defense lawyers objected.

Marcia Nelson, who said she lived near Weinhold, the second victim, testified about having seen a man who matched Prince’s description in the vicinity of Weinhold’s apartment shortly before she was slain.

Nelson said she avoided identifying Prince in a later police lineup out of a fear, shared by her husband, that “he would come after me.”

A police forensics expert testified that a DNA “genetic fingerprint” match of a seminal stain found on clothing and bedsheets belonging to Weinhold links Prince to having raped and murdered her in what remains the strongest piece of prosecution evidence so far.

The hearing will resume at 9 a.m. Thursday.