171-Year Term Not the End for Murderer

After a criminal career spanning 23 years of rape, robbery and murder, it seems that justice has finally caught up with Edward Perreira.

Time and again, short sentences, early parole, unreliable witnesses, use of aliases, and mistakes by law enforcement authorities set the 45-year-old Brooklyn native free to commit more crimes.

On Friday, Perreira was sentenced, under the alias Michael Flores, to 171 years in prison for the 1995 Redwood City bludgeoning death of 29-year-old Michelle Redmond with a hammer, and related crimes.

“I am fully aware that the sentence I am about to impose will make him spend the rest of his life in prison,” said retired San Mateo County Superior Court Judge James Browning, who presided over the trial last fall and returned to the bench for the sentencing. “He deserves nothing less, and nothing less will protect society from him.”

It was a reckoning of sorts for a man who appears to have repeatedly slipped through cracks in nearly every phase of the judicial process. More than a dozen people came to see him condemned, including some of the jurors in the case.

But the life sentence came too late for Redmond’s father. And for the family of a Southern California woman, whose death has remained unavenged for 18 years, it is only the beginning.

Perreira will be sent to Los Angeles to face capital charges in the 1981 rape, robbery and slaying of Beth Field Silver in her Sherman Oaks home. It is a case in which Perreira eluded prosecution, for a variety of reasons, for 15 years.

“This closes a big door today, but it opens another to our own personal grief,” Donovan Field, Silver’s stepmother, said after the hearing. She and her son, Silver’s half-brother, flew in from Malibu to see the man they are convinced killed Silver put away for good.

Perreira, wearing a jail-issue red shirt and pants and restrained by cuffs, shackles and chains, looked straight at the judge, unflinching. He was sentenced to the maximum for every crime he committed one fall day three years ago, and dozens of additional years imposed by the three strikes law because of his past convictions.

“I have protested my innocence since my arrest,” Perreira told the judge, vowing to appeal. “I am confident I will eventually be vindicated.”

He complained that he was convicted solely because prosecutors prejudiced the jury against him by having three women testify that he had raped them, more than a decade ago.

At the conclusion of the hearing, several members of the audience applauded.

Redmond’s father, Michael Hardeman, said he was relieved Perreira got the maximum sentence, but it is in the Silver case that he holds hope for what he considers true justice. Prosecutors in that case have taken preliminary steps to seek the death penalty.

“I don’t care if he gets a million years. It doesn’t mean anything at this point,” said Hardeman, 55. “If he got death, that would be satisfaction.”

But the Silver slaying is not an open-and-shut case. Prosecutors twice declined to file it because they said the evidence was not strong enough for a conviction.

Charges were finally brought in 1996 after a Times report outlined Perreira’s lengthy criminal record, Silver’s family energetically lobbied prosecutors and police uncovered a few more nuggets of evidence.

Deputy Dist. Attys. Robert Cohen and Jeffrey Boxer say they have plenty of proof Perreira killed Silver--he was arrested with the murder weapon, allegedly pawned Silver’s jewelry and allegedly tied her up the same way police say he has bound others.

But time has also taken its toll.

“I don’t have any doubt that he did it. It’s just a very, very difficult set of circumstances,” Cohen said. “No 18-year-old case is easy to try, but this one has some additional problems.”

Another man, who authorities now say was innocent, was initially tried and acquitted for Silver’s killing. Witnesses have died. Important evidence was damaged in the Northridge earthquake. The testimony of a man who said he saw Perreira in Silver’s house before the killing can no longer be used because it was obtained under hypnosis, no longer accepted in court.

None of that matters to Silver’s father, Malibu businessman George Field. All he wants, he said, is for his daughter’s death to be resolved.

“I made a commitment,” Field said in an interview at his home weeks before the sentencing. “As far as I’m concerned, as long as I’m ambulatory, I want to see him tried.”

Beth Silver was found dead by her husband, Stuart Silver, on Oct. 2, 1981, in the bedroom of her Sherman Oaks home. She had been tied up with a telephone cord, a sweater shoved in her mouth for a gag.

Investigators determined she had been raped and shot in the head. Her jewelry was missing.

As they searched for clues, police found fingerprints on the headboard belonging to Michael Robbs, an African American employee Stuart Silver had fired from his car rental business two weeks earlier.

Robbs had an unconfirmed alibi, and detectives arrested him on suspicion of murder.

As the case marched toward trial, other leads pointed to another of Silver’s former employees. LAPD Detectives Bob Horowitz and Howard Landgren didn’t know his name was Perreira at the time; all they knew was that a witness saw a white man at Silver’s house before she was killed. Stuart Silver identified the man as an ex-employee and couldn’t remember his name but said he had “Eddie” tattooed on his right biceps, a description that matched a suspect in two Hollywood rape cases.

Detectives said an LAPD supervisor told them to stop looking for “Eddie” because Robbs was already charged with the crime.

At trial, Robbs provided an alibi. Even more surprising, Stuart Silver changed his story and gave a reasonable explanation for Robbs’ fingerprints: He suddenly remembered that Robbs had helped move the brass headboard when the newlywed couple moved to the house a few months earlier.

Robbs was acquitted in January 1983.

“I thought he’d gotten away with it,” George Field said. “The trial was over and done with. I had no idea [Perreira] ever existed.”

The detectives did. They reopened the case and tracked him down to Folsom State Prison, where he was serving a 21-year sentence under the name Michael Juan Flores--one of half a dozen names he’s used over the years--for a 1982 San Bruno armed rape and robbery. In that crime, he robbed his former boss and raped the man’s fiancee, tying them up with telephone cords and gagging them with their clothing--details with an eerie resemblance to the Silver crime.

Ballistics tests determined the gun Perreira was carrying when he attacked Gary Miller and Suzanne Chin had been used to kill Silver. And investigators discovered he had pawned what they say is Silver’s jewelry under the Flores alias a few days after the murder.

Detectives presented the case for murder charges, but the district attorney’s office declined to file it.

“They told us he was in prison,” Donovan Field said. “We thought he was safety tucked away. We thought he’d die there.”

Perreira was due to be released on parole in 1993, after serving half his sentence. A probation officer who thought he was still a danger contacted Van Nuys homicide detectives.

The original detectives had retired, but Det. Daniel DeJarnette said he and a partner reopened the case and again presented it to the D.A.’s office for filing. The prosecutor who was assigned it said he didn’t think it would stand up in court. He rejected it.

Perreira was paroled to Redwood City.

Two years later, in October 1995, Perreira was picked up for drunk driving. He told officers he was a parolee, but he was released anyway.

The next day at his house, he bashed Michelle Redmond’s head with 28 blows of a hammer. His then-girlfriend, who was in the next room, turned up the television to drown out Redmond’s fruitless pleas for mercy. After the murder, he sexually assaulted his girlfriend.

As with so many of his other victims, Perreira knew Redmond, San Mateo County prosecutor Jack Grandsaert said. They were friends. She sold him cocaine.

“A lot of women characterized him as charming,” Grandsaert said. “A Jekyll and Hyde like this is extremely dangerous in a different way than a lot of men that victimize women. I don’t think he should ever set foot outside of prison again because I think he’s proven himself time and time and time and time and time again.”

According to police, Perreira’s criminal career began with the January 1976 rape and sodomy of a 48-year-old double amputee in New York City. By April, he had been accused of two other rapes and an attempted rape, documents show. In an apparent deal with prosecutors, he pleaded guilty to one rape and the other charges were dismissed. He was sentenced to five years in prison, of which he served three.

In 1980, he was accused of repeatedly raping a woman over a 12-hour period in Florida. A jury acquitted him of rape but convicted him of battery. He was sentenced to time served and released.

After Perreira came to California, he was convicted of two 1982 Hollywood rapes, serving time concurrently with the 21-year-sentence for the attack on Miller and Chin.

Grandsaert, the Redwood City prosecutor, argued successfully that prior victims should be allowed to testify at the Redmond trial to prove that Perreira intended to rape or rob Redmond when he killed her, making the crime first-degree murder.

Perreira took the witness stand, too, to proclaim his innocence. He said that he resolved during his last prison stint to mend his ways, Grandsaert said.

The jurors didn’t buy it and convicted him in October. After the trial, the jurors read newspaper stories and learned for the first time about the Silver case.

On Friday, sitting in the third row of the audience, four of those jurors, all women, said they came to see Perreira get what they hoped would be “the max and then some.”

Shaking her head, one of them added, “That’s what he should have gotten a long time ago.”