Suspect Charged 12 Years After Slaying : Crime: Rewards, TV appeals brought no leads in killing of Secret Service agent. A probe into unrelated murders led to break in case, police say.

Twelve years after the murder of Julie Cross--the only female Secret Service agent to die in the line of duty--the Los Angeles district attorney’s office filed murder charges Thursday against a convicted triple murderer serving a life sentence in state prison.

Andre Stephen Alexander, 40, was charged after a six-year investigation by Los Angeles Police Detective Richard (Buck) Henry, who succeeded in linking him to the crime after huge rewards and appeals on a television crime show failed to turn up new leads, authorities said.

Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner said the evidence against Alexander was developed through Henry’s investigation of the killing of three people in 1978. That investigation led to Alexander’s conviction in those murders two years ago.

Reiner said witnesses from the earlier case led to the discovery of physical evidence tying Alexander to Cross’ murder.

Reiner refused to provide more details about the cases, saying detectives are still searching for a second suspect involved in the shotgun killing of Cross while she was sitting in an unmarked car with another agent near Los Angeles International Airport.

“It’s been a long process,” Henry said. “I’m pleased with the filing.” But he said, “A lot of work has yet to be done.”

The new murder charges carry the possibility of the death sentence because Cross was a federal agent and was killed during the commission of a robbery.

Reiner said the case could have been filed in federal court because Cross was a Secret Service agent. But prosecutors decided to try the case in the state court system.

“In California we do have the death penalty . . . and we have life without the possibility of parole,” Reiner said.

Cross was killed on the night of June 4, 1980, while she and her partner, Agent Lloyd Bulman, were investigating a counterfeiting operation in Westchester.

They were parked near a staked-out house, waiting for a search warrant. As they sat in their car, two men approached, apparently planning to rob them.

Cross and Bulman identified themselves as law enforcement officers, and Cross got out of the car with her gun drawn, Reiner said.

She was somehow disarmed in an ensuing scuffle. Alexander grabbed a shotgun in the agents’ car and fired first at Cross and then at Bulman on the other side of the car, investigators said.

Bulman was wounded, but survived after feigning death. Cross was killed. She had been in the Secret Service less than a year.

Henry, then a patrol officer, had first arrested Alexander in 1972 for robbery. It was then that Henry discovered that he and Alexander had attended Venice High School together.

Eight years later, Henry was one of the first patrol officers to arrive at the scene of Cross’ murder.

As a detective in 1987, he again arrested Alexander for the 1978 murders of a printer, his girlfriend and another man who were all involved with Alexander in a counterfeit money order scheme.

Alexander killed the three in the belief that the printer was preparing to go to the police, Reiner said.

Alexander’s counterfeit money order scheme and the counterfeiting operation that Cross was investigating at the time of her death were unrelated, Reiner said.