Search for a Killer Is Driven by Grief

There’s fog everywhere, but Luis Navarro can still make out the black-clad woman and the little girl in a pink dress. He can’t see their faces, but as they walk by him he knows that the two are his dead daughter and granddaughter.

“Veronica! Cynthia!” he yells. No answer. As he anxiously tries to reach them, Navarro wakes up abruptly, alone in the empty darkness of his El Sereno home.

It’s always the same dream, Navarro said, one that haunts him at least twice a month. And every time, he wakes up to the same living nightmare that began Jan. 2, 1993.

On that morning, someone strangled Veronica Ultreras, a 22-year-old kindergarten teacher’s aide, and her 3-year-old daughter, Cynthia. The killer tried to cover up the crime by setting the family’s Christmas tree on fire, Los Angeles police investigators said.

No clues or motive have been established for the gruesome slayings, and the trail has grown cold despite the fact that police have twice offered a $25,000 reward for information, said Det. Steve Spear of the Los Angeles Police Department’s criminal conspiracy section, who has worked on the case since 1993.

But that has not stopped Navarro, 53, from engaging in his own private sleuthing. For 6 1/2 years, his entire existence has been aimed at finding the person responsible for killing his daughter and granddaughter.

It’s been a lonely journey, one that the bespectacled, gray-haired plumber said has ruined his life. He has continued his quest, although his wife and other four other children have long since left for another state, afraid that the killer is someone they know and might return. Navarro visits them twice a month.

Otherwise, Navarro has tirelessly distributed hundreds of posters featuring photos of Ultreras and her daughter, concentrating his efforts among the beauty salons and women’s clothing stores in the North Figueroa Street strip where his daughter used to shop.

He quizzes residents from her old neighborhood to see if they remember any little detail. On occasion he has stopped street hustlers, asking them if they know anything that might help catch the killer.

As he goes from house to house, he mostly gets blank stares from residents who have moved in since the murders. Even the scene of the crime--a duplex--has been sold to new owners.

At times, Navarro has stood outside police headquarters for days, carrying signs and demanding a more thorough investigation.

Mother and Daughter Strangled

This much he and police know: On that chilly January morning, Rudy Ultreras, Veronica’s husband, left for his cleaner’s job from the couple’s Highland Park duplex in the 800 block of North Avenue 50.

Between 6:45 and 8:19 a.m., someone came to the door. Ultreras was apparently in the middle of giving Cynthia a bath, getting ready to go shopping.

“Our impression is that she knew the killer and admitted him to the house,” Spear said.

The killer strangled the mother, who was left unconscious in the burning living room. Cynthia’s body was found submerged in the bathtub; she had also been strangled.

Alerted by a motorist, a neighbor managed to drag Ultreras to the doorstep just as firefighters arrived. Cynthia was pronounced dead at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena; Ultreras, who suffered second- and third-degree burns on 60% of her body, was taken to County-USC Hospital.

Doctors warned Navarro that if she survived, his daughter would have brain damage. It was after that, he said, that he somehow found himself wandering into a chapel across the street from the hospital.

Although not a praying man, Navarro said he started beseeching God for something unimaginable: The death of his own daughter.

When he returned to the hospital, he added, Veronica was dead.

Eight days later, hundreds of friends, relatives and co-workers filled Alhambra’s All Saints Church for the funerals. Ultreras and her daughter were laid out in one casket, the mother hugging her daughter, but Navarro decided not to view them in death.

“I wanted to remember them as I had seen them on New Year’s Eve,” Navarro said.

Stolen Purse Discovered

During the first months after the murders, investigators tried to find the motorist who alerted the neighbors, but without luck. Then they found a purse that had been stolen from Ultreras months before the killing.

Detectives said what caught their attention was that someone had cut up and removed photos of Ultreras from the identification cards in her purse, which was otherwise left intact. That has led them to speculate that because Ultreras had been a pretty woman, the killer might have stalked her.

The veteran detective said that the lack of progress in the case has become frustrating and that he and his partner, Det. Kent Anderson, “think about it every day.”

Some weeks ago, Spear and Anderson contacted FBI headquarters for help from profilers, psychological experts who gave the detectives an idea of what sort of person might have committed the crime. The detectives said they plan to devote new attention to the case, and will once again interview neighbors with hopes that someone will provide new information.

Meanwhile, Navarro says he will continue his personal quest. And on a recent day, as he placed some flowers at the graves in Glendora’s Oak Dale cemetery, he said the hope of finding an answer sustains him.

“It’s the only thing that keeps me going,” he said.