After 16 Years, O.C. Court Frees Innocent Man

Sixteen years after a jury called him a killer and a judge sentenced him to prison, a former Tustin Marine corporal stood in court Thursday and wept as he was declared a free and innocent man.

Apologizing for the justice system’s grave error, Orange County Superior Court Judge Robert Fitzgerald told 38-year-old Kevin Lee Green that he hoped the second half of his life would somehow make up for the lost time.

Green was sentenced to 15 years to life in November 1980 for a bludgeoning attack on his wife that led to the stillbirth of the full-term fetus she was carrying at the time. Green has always maintained that he did not attack his young wife nor murder his unborn child.

Today, prosecutors and police are expected to announce they have filed charges against a suspect in that crime and five other murders. Sources said Thursday that the suspect to be named is the so-called “Bludgeon Killer,” a mystery attacker who stalked Orange County women in the late 1970s.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Mel Jensen, who recommended that Green be freed, also offered Green an apology in court Thursday on behalf of the Orange County district attorney’s office.

As the apologies were made, detectives from the Tustin Police Department, the agency that initially arrested the one-time corporal, looked on in the courtroom.

After a decade and a half in prison, the 5 p.m. court proceeding that set Green free lasted just about five minutes. When it was over, Green, dressed in street clothes, walked out the door alone to start his life over again.

Green, 22 at the time of his conviction, was found guilty of second-degree murder in the unborn baby’s death and of the attempted murder of his 21-year-old wife, Dianna D’Aiello, who went through speech therapy and suffered significant memory loss following the attack. She divorced her husband in the months following the attack.

Green said he was not home when the attack occurred. But after the 1980 verdict, a member of the five-woman, seven-man jury told The Times that his story “just wasn’t believable.”

The case’s original prosecutor, Cliff Harris, was stunned by the news Thursday night that Green had been exonerated. In a halting voice, he described the turn of events as a prosecutor’s “worst nightmare.”

“I’m in the dark here . . . this is just a terrible, unpleasant shock,” said Harris, who recently served as one of the prosecutors on the Polly Klass murder case. “If he’s truly innocent, not just legally but in truth, then I’m just shocked.”

Harris said the vivid testimony of Green’s wife against her husband made it seem to him an open-and-shut case. “She said it happened, that he hit her with this tape measure. What else can you think if a wife says that?”

D’Aiello had been discovered unconscious in the couple’s Tustin home from a blow with a blunt object on the forehead. The blow was so forceful that the object had penetrated her skull. D’Aiello was taken to a local hospital and survived, but her baby didn’t--doctors concluded that the trauma of the attack had caused the unborn baby to die.

Initially, the Sept. 30, 1979 attack was investigated as a possible crime of the Bludgeon Killer who had killed six Orange County women over a period of two years.

The elusive killer, described as having a pock-marked face and dark curly hair, was the subject of an intense manhunt and public wave of hysteria as he sexually assaulted and killed women. The fears were particularly high in Costa Mesa, where four of the victims lived.

Some women survived the attacks and gave police a description of their attacker, but he left behind no fingerprints. D’Aiello, it seemed, was another victim of the attacks, but in December 1979 police said they had shifted their focus away from the stalker. Instead, investigators announced they planned to charge the victim’s husband.

Defense attorney Ronald G. Brower, who petitioned the court for Green’s release, said in a prepared statement Thursday that “it appeared the conviction resulted from an honest but mistaken belief that he was guilty by the police, the district attorney’s office, the jury and the court.”

“Thanks to the Orange County district attorney’s continuing efforts to solve past homicides, this tragically mistaken conviction was discovered and revealed,” Brower wrote in the statement. “We are grateful for their efforts and integrity respecting this case.”

Reached at his office, Brower said he could not comment further on the case until today.

Judge Fitzgerald also declined further comment and Deputy Dist. Atty. Jensen could not be reached.

At Jensen’s request, Fitzgerald ordered court documents asking for Green’s release sealed until noon today.

Dist. Atty. Michael R. Capizzi and the police chiefs of Tustin and Anaheim are scheduled to appear together at a news conference this morning to announce a break in the long-unsolved Bludgeon Killer case. They will gather in the same courthouse where Green was convicted and later cleared.

After his conviction, the young Marine was moved to several state prisons, spending time at the California Institution for Men in Chino, then San Quentin State Prison, the Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy and, since 1988, the California Training Facility in Soledad.

Also contributing to this report was Times staff writer Thao Hua.