Man Cleared After 4 Years in Custody : Crime: Audio tape of alleged confession had been altered, defendant’s attorney says. Judge dismissed case.

Charges against a man held more than four years in a firebombing that killed a southeast Los Angeles woman and her baby were dropped Wednesday after an audio expert said that a tape of the defendant’s alleged confession had been altered, attorneys said.

Compton Superior Court Judge Steven Suzukawa dismissed the case against Robert Vanke Jr., 22, at the request of the prosecution as final preparations were being made for Vanke to go to trial, according to the defendant’s lawyer, Richard H. Millard.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Craig Hum was not available for immediate comment on the audio expert’s finding that there were unexplained stops and multiple erasures on the tape of Vanke’s supposed confession.

Millard would not discuss any theories on how the tape came to be altered, but he said a lawsuit may be filed in connection with the case.

“Obviously those erasures on the tape didn’t just happen without someone making them happen,” he told wire services. “It seems to me that suspicion ought to be cast on those handling the tape.”

Millard said his client was arrested in connection with a bicycle theft on the night of the firebombing.

“All along, my client kept telling the police, ‘I wasn’t there [at the apartment], I was here at the station,” Millard told the wire services.

Vanke was charged with murder and arson in the April 30, 1991, firebombing at the Puebla del Rio housing project that claimed the lives of Dolores Young, 38, and her 11-month-old daughter, Jaleesa Cray. Two of the 10 other occupants of the apartment--Allen Owens, 20, and Young’s 11-year-old son, Derrick--suffered severe burns in the attack.

Police said the Molotov cocktail attack was believed related to a shooting several hours earlier in which a man was killed. Young was a relative of the slain man.

Vanke--whom police identified as a gang member--was among about a dozen men questioned about the firebombing. Detectives said statements of witnesses implicated him, and he was booked on suspicion of murder two days after the attack.

He remained in jail until Wednesday, when the charges against him were dropped.