Jury Convicts Man of 2 Murders in Trial That Almost Didn’t Happen

A Los Angeles County Superior Court jury convicted a 34-year-old man Thursday of strangling two West Los Angeles women, one of them an actress who appeared as a body double for Janet Leigh in the horror movie “Psycho.”

Kenneth Dean Hunt, who now faces a possible death sentence, was found guilty of two counts of first-degree murder after a two-week trial that, because of a blunder by the Los Angeles Police Department, almost never took place.

For a decade, Hunt avoided suspicion in the 1988 death of his neighbor, 71-year-old actress Myra Davis, who was found strangled and raped in her West Los Angeles home in the 2900 block of South Beverly Drive.

Then on March 29, 1998, the second victim, Jean Orloff, a 60-year-old woman for whom Hunt performed odd jobs, was found dead in her West Los Angeles apartment on Bentley Avenue.

LAPD investigators told her family she had died of a heart attack and her body was shipped to a mortuary.

Orloff’s grieving family, shocked that the seemingly fit 60-year-old had died unexpectedly, held a memorial service and prepared to have her body cremated.

But a coroner, called in at the insistence of a county health department official who wanted his signature on the death certificate, soon discovered that Orloff did not die of natural causes.

Marks on her neck showed that she had been strangled.

Police soon linked the killing of Orloff to the decade-old unsolved killing of Davis, whose stage name was Myra Jones. The women were close in age, lived only two miles apart, had similar markings on their necks and had been raped

Investigators found that the two had something else in common: They both knew handyman Kenneth Dean Hunt.

“We are very, very happy with this verdict,” said Lois Bachrach, Orloff’s sister, shortly after the jury reached its decision.

“We memorialized her, thinking she died of natural causes.”

The jury is scheduled to return Monday for the penalty phase of the trial. Since Hunt also was convicted of special circumstance allegations because the murders involved rapes and multiple victims, he is eligible for the death penalty.

Thursday’s verdict came after a two-week trial in which half a dozen women testified that they had been groped and accosted by the defendant in the past.

Despite the testimony, and DNA evidence indicating he had raped both victims, Hunt’s wife and several other relatives remain convinced of his innocence. DNA testing showed that the possibility of finding another Caucasian with similar genetic markers was one in 2.4 million.

As the verdict was announced, Hunt’s wife, Eileen, cried uncontrollably and then collapsed onto the courtroom floor.

“He didn’t do it,” she sobbed, as the courtroom was cleared by deputies. “They lied.”

The defense argued that Hunt was home at the time of Orloff’s killing. His sister-in-law testified that she and his wife were with him.

The defense claimed that Hunt was unfairly singled out because of his criminal record. At the time of Orloff’s death, Hunt was on parole after being sentenced to six years in prison for voluntary manslaughter for killing a neighbor by knocking him to the ground during an argument. Hunt also has served jail time for several misdemeanor sexual offenses involving young women in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Prosecutors Laura Maglinger-Kessner and John Gilligan, however, said investigators began to suspect Hunt after getting a tip from his brother-in-law. DNA results confirmed their suspicions.

They argued that Hunt’s alibi was weak. Prosecutors believe Orloff was cooking a chicken for dinner when she was attacked between 4:15 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. They argued that Hunt had more than enough time to leave his home in West Los Angeles, go to Orloff’s apartment and kill her without his family’s noticing his absence.