DNA Test Ties Inmate to 1977 Slaying

New DNA technology has linked a Santa Ana sex criminal to the 1977 rape and slaying of a Bellflower woman who lived directly above his apartment, detectives said Tuesday.

Harry Lavon Rowley, a 45-year-old convicted rapist, will be arraigned today in Los Angeles County on charges that he strangled Pamela Sperry in December 1977, a crime that stymied investigators until samples of body fluid in storage for two decades were reexamined recently with the latest DNA technology.

Rowley, who at the time lived in Sperry’s Bellflower apartment building, had been arrested in the weeks after Sperry was found strangled with a telephone cord, but a judge ruled that there was not enough evidence to try him on charges of murder, rape and burglary. The evidence was filed away and gathered dust until it was dug out by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s investigator Louie Danoff, after Sperry’s family contacted him for an update on the case.

Danoff determined that Rowley was in custody on another charge and arranged for a warrant so that a body fluid sample could be taken and compared to the stored ones. If convicted, Rowley could face the death penalty. In February, he was released after serving a seven-year prison sentence for a series of Tustin rapes, and he was also convicted of child molestation in 1983, records show.

He has been in a Bakersfield prison since his arrest in July on a parole violation. The four-time felon is also being investigated in connection with the 1988 slaying of Rachael Sugarman, a 37-year-old woman who was strangled and set afire in her Tustin apartment, investigators said.