Prosecutors Open Case Against San Diego Serial Killer Suspect : Court: Cleophus Prince Jr. goes on trial in the stabbing deaths of six women in 1990. Evidence includes DNA genetic fingerprint.

For most of 1990, a serial killer terrorized San Diego, stabbing six women to death and provoking the largest police manhunt in the city’s history.

No other crime rampage has gripped the city so severely, captivating the media and the neighborhoods where the slayings took place. For much of that year, many women slept with guns, baseball bats and other weapons and organized foot patrols to protect themselves.

Each crime fit an eerie pattern--women, often home alone, slain with one of their own knives moments after taking a shower, with no sign of forced entry in any of the cases.

Prosecutors say the killer was Cleophus Prince Jr., a former Navy machinist whose trial began Monday, more than three years after the first slaying and almost two years after his arrest in his native Birmingham, Ala. If convicted, he faces the death penalty.

Prosecutors’ arguments took up most of the opening day, and defense attorneys later sought to cast doubt on eyewitness accounts after the third killing, when a maintenance man and a gardener claimed to have seen an assailant running from the scene.

With families of the victims occupying one side of the packed courtroom and the defendant’s mother on the other, Deputy Dist. Atty. Daniel Lamborn walked the jury through a gruesome slide show that drew gasps and tears.

Lamborn’s opening argument consisted of telling the jurors how Prince often spotted young women while they were swimming or sunbathing and then followed them home, where he fatally stabbed them--in one case more than 50 times--with knives from their own kitchens.

Throughout the slide show, which featured color close-ups of the victims’ gaping wounds, the defendant sat impassively, staring at the screen, blinking frequently, his eyes never turning from the pictures.

Lamborn said many of the wounds occurred in clusters around the victims’ breasts--a pattern exhibited in each of the slayings and one that prosecutors say will be characterized by various experts as being consistent with serial homicides and one killer.

Some experts say that if Prince is the killer, the case is unusual in that serial killers rarely murder outside their race. Prince is African-American; all the victims were white. Three jurors are African-Americans, the others are white.

Potential witnesses include an FBI investigator whose work served as the inspiration for one of the characters in the movie “The Silence of the Lambs.” Other experts will testify about DNA genetic fingerprint evidence, a key component of the case against Prince.

Lamborn said a semen sample collected at the scene of the second killing, in February, 1990, matches Prince’s DNA type. The chances of it belonging to someone other than Prince are, he said, one in 124,000.

Prince is charged with 27 counts, including the six murders, in addition to one rape and numerous burglaries and attempted burglaries. Lamborn offered evidence showing that eight women--many of whom were burglarized--were fortunate in not ending up dead.

In addition to the women who were killed, all were striking in matching a certain type--young, attractive, physically fit and wearing expensive jewelry. Some belonged to a health club where Prince was a member.

In one of the day’s more disturbing pieces of evidence, Lamborn sought to show through receipts and eyewitness accounts that rings worn by three victims ended up in Prince’s possession.

After one killing, the prosecutor said, Prince took the ring from the finger of his third victim, 18-year-old Holly Suzanne Tarr, and gave it to his girlfriend as a Christmas present. It was recovered in a search of the girlfriend’s home.

Police say that in early 1990, Prince had moved into the Buena Vista Gardens apartments in Clairemont, a few miles east of Mission Bay, where many of the tenants are young singles and students at San Diego State University or UC San Diego in La Jolla.

On Jan. 12, 1990, police discovered the first victim--20-year-old SDSU English major Tiffany Paige Schultz, who moonlighted as a nude dancer at a nightclub. Schultz had been stabbed more than 50 times.

A month later, 21-year-old UCSD student Janene Marie Weinhold was found dead with more than 20 stab wounds. Weinhold had also been raped in what police say is the only sexual assault in the case.

Weinhold had left a basket of wet laundry by her front door and cookies burning in the oven, which was still on when police arrived at her upstairs apartment. Prosecutors say much of their key evidence, including the DNA semen match, was found in Weinhold’s apartment.

In April, 1990, Tarr, a high-school actress from Okemos, Mich., was visiting her brother during spring break. Prosecutors say Prince stalked her from a nearby pool to her brother’s apartment, where she was stabbed once in the heart before neighbors heard her scream.

Moments later, a maintenance man broke into the apartment and confronted a hooded, knife-wielding man running out. He and a gardener have described the assailant as a young man with dark skin.

The Tarr case is crucial because it is the only time eyewitnesses saw the killer flee from the scene. But quoting from a police radio transcript, defense attorney Bart Sheela noted that the maintenance man reported the suspect as Hispanic, about 17 years old, five feet tall and 130 pounds.

Prince is a dark-skinned black male in his mid-20s, who is 5-foot-10 and muscular. Sheela said Prince also fails to match the description of a black male cited by other witnesses.

Prince left Clairemont, where the first three killings occurred, in May, 1990, and moved to East San Diego. Less than three weeks later, Elissa Naomi Keller, 38, became the fourth victim in the series. Her mutilated body was discovered by her daughter a block from Prince’s new apartment.

In September, 1990, shortly after Prince joined the health club near the Miramar Naval Air Station, where he had been stationed until discharged in 1989, 42-year-old Pamela Gail Clark and her 18-year-old daughter, Amber, were found stabbed to death in their home in University City, near La Jolla.

Police say Prince followed a typical pattern with Pamela Clark, watching her leave the club, then stalking her to her home, where he broke in and killed her. He adopted the same routine with eight other women whose homes were burglarized when they were away or who thwarted his attempts to break in, police say.

Lamborn said witnesses will to testify that Prince bragged about slaying the Clarks, before and after they were killed.

“One witness will say that Prince bragged about ‘doing a mother and her daughter,’ ” Lamborn said. “He told the witness the mother was 41 or 42 and the daughter 18. And before the murders, he bragged to this person about ‘wanting to do a mother and her daughter.’ ”

Acquaintances of Prince’s will testify, Lamborn said, that in the weeks after the mother and daughter were killed, Prince took to wearing Pamela Clark’s wedding ring on a chain around his neck.

The trial is expected to last several weeks.