Justice at last for slain woman

In a mostly empty courtroom in downtown Los Angeles on Monday, Richard Vos faced the man he’d spent a quarter of a century searching for.

Vos, a Downey firefighter, was 19 when his wife Theresa, 22, left their Norwalk house in 1982 to walk a couple of blocks to buy groceries.

Theresa Vos, mother of a 3-year-old, never returned home. Two children on bicycles found her strangled body a day later stuffed in an irrigation ditch in Fontana.

From there, the trail went cold. For the next two decades, authorities tried on and off to solve the case, with little success.

But thanks to a chance meeting and DNA evidence, police in 2003 arrested Lawrence Hybarger in connection with Theresa Vos’ killing. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder Monday. Vos wanted to be there to see Hybarger face-to-face.

“We could have filled the courtroom,” Vos said. “But we chose not.”

Vos said he hoped to look Hybarger in the eyes -- but his wife’s killer avoided eye contact.

“It took 25 years, but finally he has been punished. He won’t harm another woman,” Vos said. “There’ll never be justice for what he did.”

Hybarger, 53, was described by authorities as a serial sex offender with arrests stretching back to the 1970s in Texas. He lived in Hawaiian Gardens in 1982, but police then didn’t connect him with Vos’ death.

For Vos’ family, weeks of wondering turned into months and years. “After a while you kind of lose hope,” he said.

Vos remarried.

The trail went cold until Vos by chance met a secretary in the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department homicide unit eight years ago. He told her about his wife’s cold case, and the woman told her superiors about it.

Detectives again began by questioning Theresa Vos’ old boyfriends, neighbors and relatives, hoping to come across some clues. She had had her hands and feet bound, and her body was bruised, suggesting she had put up a fight, detectives said.

With such a cold case on their hands, they turned to the new technology of DNA.

Sheriff’s Det. Tom Kerfoot and his partner took the biological evidence from the body of Theresa Vos and had criminalists submit the DNA to the state database, which has become part of the FBI’s national offender database.

Then one day in 2003, as he was working at his Downey firehouse, Richard Vos saw Kerfoot and his partner enter.

“They gave me news I’d been waiting for,” Vos recalled. “A positive match. A guy in Alabama.”

Hybarger was working as a concrete mason in Flat Rock, Ala. His DNA from a 1983 sex-offender conviction in Arizona, a year after Theresa Vos’ slaying, tied him to the crime.

Detectives built their case and in 2003 arrested Hybarger on his way home from work. Modder said that when authorities interviewed Hybarger’s wife, she said she was unaware of any of his past crimes, which include sexual assault convictions.

Vos knew then he would face the man who “took my first love.”

But he also worried about a long and bruising trial, particularly if Hybarger’s attorneys attempted to sling mud at the woman he remembers as a “happy, smiling and caring person.”

As prosecutors geared up for trial, they said they would call as witnesses several other women who say they were attacked by Hybarger. Just before trial was to begin, both sides reached a plea agreement. A judge sentenced Hybarger to 15 years to life in prison.

After the sentencing, Vos hoped he could put the 25 years of wondering behind him. But he said he knows it will be hard.

“The anger never goes away,” he said.

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richard.winton@latimes.com