Man Charged in ’81 Killing of Sherman Oaks Woman

Prosecutors Tuesday filed murder charges against a convicted rapist who they say killed a Sherman Oaks woman in her bedroom in 1981 and eluded prosecution for 15 years, until he was arrested on suspicion of another killing.

Los Angeles detectives unearthed new evidence against Edward Perreira, 40, authorities said, after an article in The Times in March detailed how he had apparently slipped through the cracks in the criminal justice system.

Perreira is in custody in San Mateo County under the name Michael Flores, charged with murder in the death of a woman there last fall.

“It took 15 years, but it’s still good news,” said Howard Landgren, a retired LAPD detective who investigated Perreira in the 1981 killing of Beth Field Silver but was unable to persuade the district attorney’s office to charge him then.

After the report in The Times, Malibu businessman George Field, the father of the victim, and his wife, Donovan, lobbied prosecutors for four months to bring charges against Perreira, going all the way to a meeting with Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti late last month.

On Tuesday, George Field thanked Garcetti and other prosecutors and detectives for taking action.

“On Thursday, Donovan and I are going to Betsy’s grave,” Field said. “We’re going to put down some lovely flowers and I’m going to tell her and hope this will never happen to another girl again.”

Prosecutors twice had declined to charge Perreira with the killing, but changed their minds after LAPD Dets. Dan DeJarnette and Roberta Moore found new evidence that placed Perreira at Silver’s home the day of the killing, authorities said.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Bob Cohen said Tuesday that the evidence shows Perreira “made contact” with the Silver house the day of the killing, but added that he could not specify how. This and other unspecified new evidence was enough for prosecutors to charge Perreira with one count each of murder, robbery, burglary and rape, making him subject to the death penalty.

Phil Wynn, head of the district attorney’s Van Nuys office, said Field’s pleas and the article in March convinced him to take a third look at the case.

Born in Brooklyn, Perreira allegedly began a two-decade series of crimes in 1976, when he was arrested on suspicion of raping three women after his discharge from the Marines. In those cases and in subsequent attacks, he allegedly bound his victims with their own clothing before assaulting them.

Drifting from New York to Florida to Los Angeles, the suspect eventually found work at a Southland rental car company owned by Stewart Silver, now owner of the Anaheim Bullfrogs roller hockey team.

Silver found his wife of two months, Beth, 26, bound with a sweater and shot once in the head in the bedroom of their hillside home the night of Oct. 2, 1981.

One week later, Landgren and fellow LAPD homicide Det. Bob Horowitz arrested a man who worked at Silver’s rental car company--apparently the wrong man.

The evidence against that suspect, Michael Robbs, was flimsy and he was acquitted in a jury trial. Meanwhile, Horowitz and Landgren found a witness who had seen Silver talking with another man in her kitchen hours before her death.

Armed only with an artist’s sketch of the man, who had a tattoo reading “Eddie” on his right biceps, the detectives identified him as Perreira, tracing his path back to New York City, where they dug his records out of New York police files.

Perreira, whose frequent name-changing led to his being listed in California law enforcement records as Flores, was serving a 24-year rape sentence in a California state prison when the detectives located him in the 1980s. But the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office declined to file murder charges against him, saying it would follow too closely on the heels of Robbs’ acquittal, those familiar with the case recall.

In 1993, Perreira was paroled to San Mateo. His parole officer called detectives in the LAPD’s Van Nuys division to warn them of “Flores’ ” impending release. Horowitz and Landgren had long since retired, but current homicide investigators pulled their old files and reopened the case, taking it again to the district attorney’s office.

Again, prosecutors declined to file. The prosecutor who made the decision, Deputy Dist. Atty. Phil Rabichow, said one reason was that the witness who placed Perreira in Silver’s house did so only under hypnosis--which was admissible as evidence at the time, but has since been banned.

Perreira, released from prison, found work on an assembly line outside San Francisco. Prosecutors say that two years later, in October 1995, he raped Michelle Hardeman, 29, and beat her to death with a hammer in an unincorporated part of San Mateo County. After a five-day manhunt, Perreira was caught leaving a San Francisco department store, and he remains in custody facing murder charges with special circumstances. He has pleaded not guilty.

By coincidence, Horowitz was driving through the San Francisco area at the time, heard a news report of the arrest on his car radio, and contacted local authorities to establish that it was the same murder suspect he had been after 14 years earlier.

“It’s a difficult case, as all circumstantial cases are, but I have no doubt we have the right guy,” prosecutor Cohen said. Field said the filing has renewed his faith in the system. “It might take time,” he said, “but it works.”