Jury Gets Case of Man Charged in 1963 Murder : Trial: Prosecution links the former sailor to the 30-year-old murder through fingerprint analysis. Defense says he was the victim of a mishandled investigation.

The case against a man on trial in a 30-year-old killing went to a jury Monday after his lawyer portrayed him as a victim of a botched police investigation and a prosecutor called him a liar who got away with murder until a computerized fingerprint analysis system helped catch him.

“One forensic expert after another . . . made a determination that there was a positive match between the fingerprints (found at the murder scene) and those of that man,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Paul W. Turley told the jury as he pointed to defendant Vernon M. Robinson. “There has been no evidence to refute that.”

Turley was referring to as many as 35 finger and palm prints that police say they lifted from the Hollywood apartment where Thora Marie Rose, a 43-year-old drugstore clerk, was found strangled and bludgeoned to death on Oct. 3, 1963.

The prints were the only physical evidence presented during a three-week-old Los Angeles Superior Court trial that link Robinson, an 18-year-old Navy recruit in 1963, to the crime.

Robinson’s lawyer, Bruce G. Cormicle, told the jury that the fingerprints prove nothing.

“I’m not conceding those are my client’s fingerprints,” he said.

Cormicle speculated that police failed to thoroughly pursue the trail of a man who was known at the time of Rose’s death to have been on a burglary and rape rampage in Hollywood. In addition, Cormicle suggested that detectives improperly handled the fingerprints lifted from the murder scene.

After Monday’s final arguments, Superior Court Judge Nora M. Manella told the jurors they will begin deliberating this morning.

The case against Robinson, a building maintenance company executive at the time of his arrest in 1990, has drawn national attention because of the time between the slaying and his arrest.

Police were led to him after they used a computerized system, then relatively new, to help match fingerprints found at the murder scene to sets of Robinson’s that were on file.

Testimony in the case began Oct. 6 and included the transcribed words of witnesses who are now dead and police officers who retired long ago.

Robinson testified that he has no idea how his fingerprints got into Rose’s apartment. Both the prosecution and defense said he did not know the woman. Robinson has maintained that he could not have killed Rose because he was in basic training at a naval station in San Diego at the time. During an earlier court hearing, an alibi witness who has since died testified that he saw Robinson at the training station on or about the time of the slaying.

That testimony was attacked through naval records that seemed to show that Robinson may have been out of basic training for as long as month before Rose was killed. Those records also seemed to show that Robinson and his alibi witness never trained together.