A Cold Trail Ends at the Coroner’s Office

She was hunted by the state for 30 years, a wily prison escapee featured prominently on California’s 10 Most Wanted list.

Annette Hernandez, a tattooed convicted murderer, jumped a fence at the Corona women’s prison in 1972, disappearing into the surrounding cow fields. The breakout appeared effortless, perhaps because Hernandez had been a trapeze artist for most of her life.

Years slipped by, and the fugitive’s file grew thick. Tips poured in and fizzled, the trail grew hot and then cooled again.

Last week the mystery finally ended at the Los Angeles County coroner’s office: Hernandez, it turns out, committed suicide in 1985, swallowing fistfuls of prescription pills in a Bellflower apartment.

News of her fate capped a long, strange odyssey for Cindy Tigh, one of an elite team of agents who track escapees and fugitive parolees for the state. Like her brethren on the force, Tigh had hoped one day to slap handcuffs on Hernandez, ending the escapee’s life on the run. Instead, she can only tie up a few loose ends and move on to another case.

“You never know what you’ll find,” Tigh said. “At least we can close this one now.”

Relatives of the murder victim, Stephen Paul Smith, are sorting through a mix of emotions as they confront the news that Hernandez has been dead all this time. For three decades, they coped with the belief that Smith’s killer was out there, somewhere, escaping justice. Now, in an instant, it’s over.

“I feel a little cheated, finding out she’s dead,” said Rhonda Smith-Hosler, a dental hygienist who was an infant when her father was killed. “But I suppose this brings some sort of closure to the whole thing.”

The bizarre saga of Hernandez is a rare one, in part because it is unusual for a California prisoner to escape and avoid discovery for so long. Breakouts were more common in the 1970s and 1980s -- there were 81 statewide in 1985 -- but even then most fugitives were rearrested, usually because they broke the law again or were turned in by spurned lovers. Last year, 14 inmates escaped, and all were recaptured.

Hernandez, however, was different, managing to live in the shadows -- briefly in the Bay Area but mostly in Southern California. Details of her life as a fugitive are sketchy, in part because those family members who could be found wouldn’t say much.

There are tantalizing rumors -- that the Hells Angels broke her out of prison, paid for plastic surgery and burned her fingertips to change her prints, for example -- but such stories have not been confirmed, Tigh said.

What does seem certain is that Hernandez, a mother of five, lurched from one failed relationship to another and fought a drug addiction that took hold of her early and lasted until her death at what officials believe was the age of 53. She may have been free for 13 years, Tigh said, but they weren’t very happy years.

Prison documents portray Hernandez as an only child whose life began with promise and unraveled with the help of a heroin needle.

Born to parents who were traveling circus performers, she grew up under the big top, with her father, Bernard Griggs, performing as a clown and her mother, Leta, as an aerialist, or trapeze artist. After dropping out of school at 17, Hernandez, too, joined the Ringling Bros. circus trapeze troupe, specializing in the daring ladder act, documents say.

She married young and had her first three children quickly, developing her addiction along the way. By the 1960s, heroin was her narcotic of choice, and she bounced in and out of prison for a string of burglaries, forgeries and other offenses to support her habit.

The murder came one December night in 1970, at the San Bernardino house that Hernandez shared with her second husband, Arthur Hernandez, documents say. Smith, a brakeman for the Santa Fe railroad, had gone Christmas shopping with a friend and stopped by the Hernandez place for a party.

Inside, two gunmen demanded money from them, and Smith, a 24-year-old father of two, was shot to death in a scuffle. Hernandez denied any involvement, but investigators concluded that the robbery had been a setup that she had masterminded. Convicted of second-degree murder, she was sentenced to five years to life in prison.

Lockups for women were different then. At Hernandez’s new home, the California Institution for Women, there was one fence, with no razor wire, and inmates were allowed to wear street clothes.

One warm May morning two months after her arrival, Hernandez and another convicted murderer, Susan Sutcliffe, were assigned to water plants outside the prison’s administration building. They were wearing shorts and multicolored blouses, and were last seen by guards at 10:40 a.m., a prison report says.

Twenty-five minutes later, a local dairyman phoned, saying he had seen two women hitchhiking near his place. An inmate count was taken. Two were missing.

Sheriff’s deputies in a helicopter and three squad cars scoured the area, while investigators searched the prison’s perimeter for clues. They found footprints, a cigarette case and some cosmetics near the fence. Caught in the wire was a shred of fabric from Hernandez’s blouse.

Despite reports that two women matching the inmates’ description had bought tickets at the local bus depot, officials never turned up a trace of Hernandez. Sutcliffe was arrested four months later and was in and out of prison for the next decade. She refused to answer agents’ questions about the escape or Hernandez’s possible whereabouts, Tigh said.

A few years ago, the Department of Corrections assigned a team of parole agents to tackle some of the system’s coldest cases, an effort dubbed Operation Manhunt. Among those given to Agent Tigh was one marked with the case number W08905. Thus began her connection with Hernandez.

While some fugitives leave paper trails that a computer-savvy agent can follow, the Hernandez case yielded little in the way of clues. The escapee’s three Social Security numbers led Tigh down some fruitless alleys. Checks of the dozen or more aliases Hernandez had been known to use also failed to pay off.

“It was cold, very cold,” she said. “She had been gone a long, long time.”

Help finally came from the victim’s daughter, Smith-Hosler, who lives in Colorado and was haunted by the death of the father she had never known. Frustrated and hoping for a break, she contacted the TV crime show “America’s Most Wanted.” On Dec. 7, the program aired a segment on Hernandez, asking the public to call with tips on the fugitive.

Apparently, Richard Pena Jr. of Van Nuys is a fan of the show, because he called in with some startling news: That’s my grandmother on your program, he said, and she died in Los Angeles 17 years ago.

Armed with that information, Tigh called the coroner’s office. The files showed no record of Hernandez, but using her aliases, her tattoos -- including one on her hip that read “Property of the Hells Angels” -- and a distinctive scar on her right hand, a student worker prowled the old records and made a possible match.

The body in question belonged to Shelli Jane Aucoin, who was found by her apartment manager amid a sea of prescription pill bottles and several suicide notes to her children Aug. 26, 1985. A daughter confirmed her identity as Aucoin, as did her driver’s license. She was later cremated.

Tigh believed she had finally found Hernandez, and a fingerprint expert confirmed it a few days later. That left the agent wondering: Why hadn’t the coroner’s office compared the prints with those in the state Department of Justice database 17 years ago, enabling officials to close the case then?

David Campbell, a coroner’s spokesman, said the answer is simple: There was no reason to believe Aucoin wasn’t the person her identification and relatives said she was.

“The law does not require us to send fingerprints to the Department of Justice unless we have a concern about the identification,” he said. “In this case, there was no dispute.”

Campbell added another twist to the Hernandez tale. At the time of her death, he said, neighbors told sheriff’s detectives they believed Aucoin was an escapee, information that was passed on to the Department of Corrections. A check by prison officials at that time, however, made no match because the name was wrong, he said.

The suicide notes Hernandez left behind, Tigh said, were mostly the sad ramblings of a mother who was not well and felt unloved by most of her children. Hernandez was tired of her struggle, and feared she might someday land back behind bars, Tigh said.

Reached at his home in Van Nuys, Hernandez’s grandson declined to comment. Efforts to reach Hernandez’s children were unsuccessful.

In San Bernardino, Smith’s relatives recently marked the 32nd anniversary of his murder. His mother, Grace Smith, said news that Hernandez had died doesn’t help much, and “sure doesn’t bring my son back.”

Smith’s former wife, Jeanne Smith, remembered the difficulties of raising two children alone, without the man she said she loved like no other. She said she always resented Hernandez through the years, “going fancy free while we were struggling,” and wondered whether the fugitive ever felt sorry for the killing.

“When I heard about the suicide,” Jeanne Smith said, “I thought, ‘Did Steve’s death bother her to the point that it drove her to this?’ I guess we’ll never know.”