Prince Will Stand Trial in Six Slayings : Crime: The judge cites a pattern in her review of the evidence in the women’s stabbing deaths.

Cleophus Prince Jr. was ordered to stand trial Thursday in the stabbing deaths of six San Diego women and a series of break-ins, burglaries and other crimes that battered the collective psyche of the city for well over a year.

After a three-week hearing in which 94 witnesses testified and 100 pieces of evidence were introduced, Municipal Judge Patricia A. Y. Cowett ordered the 24-year-old Prince to answer to all 32 counts against him in Superior Court.

Prince’s arraignment is scheduled for March 26, at which time prosecutors will decide if they will seek the death penalty.

“What emerges from a review of all the evidence presented in this case is a very complex matrix,” Cowett said. “But I find there are certain definite, striking, unique or at least unusual, and indeed somewhat predictable patterns or similarities of behavior.”

As Cowett detailed the charges against him, Prince sat motionless with his thumb pressed against his left cheek. His mother, Dorothy, who has attended all three weeks of his preliminary hearing and took the witness stand Wednesday, pursed her lips as Cowett spoke but showed no emotion.

For Prince, who was arrested March 19 in his native Birmingham, Ala., after an 11-month manhunt for the killer of women in the University City and Clairemont areas, the decision to bind him over for trial was no surprise.

His defense attorneys warned him it was a distinct likelihood and were so certain that they argued against only seven of the 32 counts, including only three of the six slayings.

“I knew what the judge was going to do so why should I waste three hours?” said Loren Mandel, one of Prince’s defense attorneys. “I know the judge would rule probable cause, and all that means is that they are now allowed to have a trial. At some stage, we will have a chance to put on an appropriate defense.”

Cowett accepted the prosecution’s argument that an overwhelming amount of evidence linked Prince, a former Navy mechanic, to the crimes.

Taken together, the proximity of Prince’s apartment to those of the victims, the positions of the bodies, the location of the stabs wounds, the macabre pattern of blood seemingly dripped from the knives onto the bodies and their partial disrobing displayed a “haunting similarity,” prosecutor Dan Lamborn said.

“I’m asking this court not to look at each individual count because this whole case shows a continuum, a spectrum, a series of crimes committed by Mr. Prince that happened over a year and two or three months,” Lamborn said. “It is critical that this court look at this behavior as a whole.”

From the start of the three-week hearing, Lamborn and co-counsel Rick Clabby methodically walked Cowett through the particulars of the six killings that began with the slaying of Tiffany Schultz, a 20-year-old San Diego State University student killed in January, 1990.

Prince lived in an adjacent apartment complex to Schultz in Clairemont. He lived in the same set of apartments as Janene Weinhold, 21, a UCSD student who was the second murder victim, and the brother of Holly Tarr, an 18-year-old Michigan high school student who was visiting San Diego. Tarr was the third victim.

“We started off showing you where Miss Schultz lived and how where she lives forms a quadrangle with each point being a murder victim or the residence of Cleophus Prince,” Lamborn said. “You draw a straight line between the Prince apartment, Janene’s and Holly Tarr’s, and it is haunting what forms in that picture.”

Three witnesses identified Prince as being near the Schultz apartment around the time of the killing. Prince’s girlfriend, Charla Lewis, testified that Prince was not at work when the killing occurred.

A former roommate of Prince quoted him as saying that he had stabbed a woman in the neck and chest, exactly as Schultz was fatally injured.

Defense attorneys say it was Schultz’s former boyfriend, Christopher Jon Burns, who probably killed his girlfriend after a heated argument about her dancing nude at a local club. Burns was arrested shortly after her death but was released three days later for insufficient evidence.

“There’s more evidence against Burns than there is against Prince,” Mandel said. “That’s the reason the cops arrested him and made him a very good suspect.”

Mandel said police found it peculiar that Burns came home the night of the killing and never opened the door to his roommate’s bedroom, despite the roommate’s habit of leaving it open at all times. Only after about two hours, which Burns spent listening to music, did the roommate come home and open the door to find Schultz dead on the floor, stabbed more than 50 times.

Prince is linked to Weinhold’s murder by a DNA match extracted from a semen stain found at the scene, prosecutors say. Mandel and Sheela said they will seek to have that evidence kept from the jury during trial because it does not point unequivocally to Prince.

Police also have traced a ring Tarr’s to the apartment of Charla Lewis, Prince’s girlfriend. Lewis said it was a gift. Defense attorneys say the presence of the ring does not mean that Prince killed Tarr.

A second ring in the case belonged to 38-year-old Elissa Keller, the fourth murder victim, killed in her East San Diego apartment a block from where Prince lived after moving from Clairemont. Prince reported the ring stolen six months after the slaying of Keller.

Defense attorneys did not contest evidence Thursday in the Weinhold, Tarr or Keller slayings, figuring Cowett would rule against Prince anyway.

But Mandel argued that there was not enough proof to connect Prince with the slayings of Pamela Clark, 42, and her 18-year-old daughter, Amber. The pair were slain at their University City home in September, 1990.

Three witnesses testified that Prince spoke of the Clarks. To one person, he said, “I’m doing a mother and a daughter.” To another, he described the mother as a masseuse. Pamela was a massage therapist. To a third, he listed the mother’s and daughter’s approximate ages.

“This is more than spooky,” Lamborn said. “These are admissions from a man who, at the very least, is fantasizing about a woman and her daughter.”

Like Pamela Clark, six other females, whose homes were either burglarized or where break-ins were attempted, were members of the Family Fitness Center on Miramar Road. Prince and his girlfriend, Lewis, were also members briefly.

Prosecutors said money was missing from Pamela Clark’s wallet. The day of the murder, during which Prince did not work but called in sick, Prince deposited $80 into his bank account.

Clark’s membership in the Family Fitness Center and Prince’s cash deposit mean nothing, Mandel said.

“The only evidence connecting Prince to the Clarks is those statements, and they’re ambiguous,” he said. “It’s one thing for him to have said, ‘I killed a mother and daughter.’ To say that he was ‘doing’ them or having sex with them means nothing, because there is no evidence that it ever happened.”