Ohio Inmate Charged in 1972 Slaying, Rape of Stanton Woman

Prosecutors said Monday they had charged a suspected serial killer from Ohio with the rape and murder of a 23-year-old Stanton mother in a 1972 case -- the oldest to be revived in Orange County through use of DNA analysis.

The announcement also offered a measure of relief to family members who had struggled since the death of Marla Jean Hires -- including her husband, Martin, who had been dogged by suspicions that he was guilty of murder and estranged from her family for more than three decades.

“We’ve been praying for reconciliation for years,” Hires said in a phone interview from his home in Surprise, Ariz.

Hires was the last family member to see his wife, kissing her goodbye before she left for work at Southern California Edison headquarters in Rosemead on the morning of Oct. 29, 1972. Her body, wrapped in curtains and carpet, was found the next day dumped near the Yorba Linda Country Club.

Living at the time in Anaheim, authorities say, was Edwin Dean Richardson. In a news conference Monday, Orange County Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas announced that Richardson -- now serving a life sentence for the murder of a 21-year-old woman in rural Belmont County, Ohio -- has been charged in the slaying.

As part of an effort that began in the late 1990s to solve cold murder cases, Orange County investigators regularly search a national database for DNA comparisons. In October, shortly after Ohio authorities added Richardson’s DNA sample to the collection, they got a “hit” in the Hires case.

Richardson, 68, has a criminal history that stretches to his childhood, authorities said, with convictions for robbery, burglary, drug possession, rape and kidnapping. Between prison stints, Richardson is believed to have traveled around the country and is suspected of killing other women in Arizona, Oklahoma and West Virginia, said Belmont County Sheriff Thomas McCort.

“Authorities do not know how Richardson would have come into contact with Hires, but McCort said the suspect had in the past used hard-luck stories about broken-down cars or empty gas tanks to wheedle his way into his victims’ cars.

Richardson, convicted in 1980 in the Ohio case, suffers from terminal emphysema, and it is unclear when he will go to trial, authorities said.