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DNA links killer to '88 slaying of local woman
jbandler@thejournalnews.com
THE JOURNAL NEWS
WHITE PLAINS — A Yorktown woman's 17-year quest to learn the identity of her daughter's killer may finally be over.
DNA testing has linked a California death row inmate to a pair of slayings in Virginia seven months apart in 1988, according to court documents, including the deaths of Yorktown native Rachael Raver and her boyfriend, Warren Fulton, who disappeared after leaving a Washington, D.C., bar.
"I'm relieved," Veronica Raver said from her home yesterday. "We can finally put an end to all this wondering."
Further tests must be conducted to confirm the match. Virginia police would say only that they have developed a person of interest in the investigation into the couple's December 1988 killing and the death of Veronica Jefferson, a CIA accountant who was killed in a neighboring county in May that year. Court documents in California have identified the suspect as Alfredo Rolando Prieto.
Police learned from a DNA match in 2000 that the same man had sexually assaulted the two women 12 years earlier. But it wasn't until samples from California's death row inmates were added to the national DNA database in the last few years that they could be compared to evidence from the Virginia killings.
"We knew the DNA databank was going to solve the case eventually; we just didn't want it to take too long," said Deirdre Raver, Rachael's sister. "I was jumping up and down when they told me they got a hit."
Rachael Raver was a standout soccer player for Yorktown High School, where she graduated in 1984. She went on to play soccer at George Washington University, where she met Fulton, a baseball player. She had finished college that year, was working as an administrative assistant for the American Council on Education and planned to attend law school.
Their bodies were discovered Dec. 6, 1988, in a field in Reston, Va., in Fairfax County. They had disappeared a few nights earlier. Police suspect they were carjacked after meeting friends for drinks at the bar in Washington and were driven to the secluded field, where Raver was raped, and both 22-year-olds were shot to death.
Police did not realize it then, but the slayings were connected to the killing of Jefferson in Arlington County. She was raped and shot to death May 10, 1988, and her body left behind an elementary school.
Prieto, 39, has been on California's death row in San Quentin prison since 1992, when he was sentenced in the September 1990 slaying of a 15-year-old girl. He and two other men kidnapped the girl, a woman and the woman's daughter from their Ontario, Calif., home and raped and beat them in a warehouse. The two other women were stabbed but managed to get away, and the girl, Yvette Woodruff, was fatally shot.
An affidavit in Marin County Superior Court, near San Quentin, sought a new sample of Prieto's DNA to confirm the match. Virginia police obtained that sample last week.
Fairfax County police Lt. Richard Perez would not confirm Prieto as the suspect. He said detectives had executed a search warrant in California, but no charges have been filed in the case.
Veronica Raver said the loss of her daughter was still painful, but there was some satisfaction in learning that the suspect has been in custody for more than 15 years.
"One of my big fears all these years has been that the monster who did this has been out there free to do it again," she said. "I don't have that fear anymore."
Deirdre Raver said she was told that Prieto lived in Virginia at the time of her sister's murder and that his girlfriend had relatives in Jamaica, Queens, where her sister's 1980 Toyota Corolla was discovered in February 1989. It had been ticketed there Dec. 5, 1988, the day after the couple were killed.
Deirdre Raver is a New York City schoolteacher on leave while serving as a training officer with the Army Reserves. She had devoted several years after the killing to push for gun-control legislation and advances in DNA testing, but she slowed those efforts in recent years when she realized they had begun taking over her life.
"I made a choice a few years ago that I was going to move on with my life because (Rachael) would have never wanted me to miss out on the things I wanted to be doing," she said. "I wasn't forgetting her or ever giving up hope that her killer would be caught, but I had to move on."
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