Tales of True Crime, episode 17: DNA Gone Wrong and the Suicide of Kevin Brown | The Mighty 790 KFGO | KFGO
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Tales of True Crime, episode 17: DNA Gone Wrong and the Suicide of Kevin Brown

Fargo, ND, USA / The Mighty 790 KFGO | KFGO
Troy Larson
Mar 9, 2020 | 8:00 AM

In every time and every culture, there are secluded places, locations undisclosed to adults, where young people go for privacy… places where they go to smoke cigarettes, maybe more, take a nip out of a bottle stolen from Dad’s liquor cabinet, or to meet up with a love interest, out of range of the prying eyes of parents. It’s a rite of passage. In a big city, it might be the dark confines of a seldom-used alley, a park only dimly lit after dark, or a friend’s basement, provided parents don’t poke their heads in too often. On the rural plains, it might be a bonfire pit in a shelter belt of trees. And in San Diego, that place is the beach.

If I can take one moment to relay my personal San Diego memories, I would tell you that my experience as a young musician took me to San Diego on a number of occasions… once to pick up a Rickenbacker bass that my friend had his eye on, and another time to impress a girl with a trip to Sunset Cliffs, a neighborhood and park on Point Lo ma where one can witness a spectacular sunset nearly every clear night. And as my later time in San Diego as a Navy recruit would teach me, those clear nights happened all the time. San Diego has weather which is as close to perfect as I have ever experienced.

The weekend of August 12, 1978, was a prime example. The weather was great. Jack Nicklaus had just won the British Open. News on the burial of Pope Paul the VI dominated newspapers, and the Commodores’ “Three Times a Lady” was all over the radio. Barbara Nantais, 15, and Jim Alt, 17, went to Torrey Pines State Beach with friends. As the night progressed, Jim and Barbara left to get some privacy on the beach. There, as the waves crashed along the shore, they regarded the beauty of multiple bonfires stretching into the distance on the beach. They zipped two sleeping bags together and, according to an account Jim gave later, held each other, talked and looked at the stars.

It’s the last thing he remembers.

Barbara Nantais (Photo Lorraine Thall)

Sometime later, the young couple were attacked by an unknown assailant.

Jim Alt regained consciousness the following morning, freezing and wet. He could hardly see, and his long blonde hair was soaked in blood. He could barely stand and he did not know where Barbara was. He managed to crawl, stagger his way back to the parking lot where his friends had parked their car, and knocked on the window. They were shocked at his appearance. He was scarcely recognizable through a bloody mat of hair.

“Find Barbara,” he said. 

His friends went back to the beach and found Barbara a short distance away, dead on the sand behind Lifeguard Tower 7. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled, her breast mutilated with a knife, her body dragged and left behind the lifeguard tower in a lewd position to shock whomever might find her. She had likely tried to scream and her killer had silenced her by packing handfuls of sand into her mouth.

Jim Alt was so severely beaten he could not be considered a suspect in Barbara’s murder. He was in a coma for days and barely survived. A metal plate was implanted in his head to replace part of his shattered skull. When he regained consciousness, he had no memory of what had happened.

The San Diego Police Department processed the scene in accordance with the standard procedures of 1978 and collected the evidence, including the sleeping bags, bloody rocks used to bludgeon the victims, and Barbara’s clothing and jewelry. Biological evidence was collected and analyzed. A two-thousand dollar reward was offered. Despite the investigation, there was no break in the case. Barbara’s murderer remained unidentified.

Six years later, in August, 1984, Claire Hough was murdered in almost the same location at Torrey Pines Beach, just a short distance from where Barbara Nantais was found. Her breast had been mutilated and her mouth was packed with sand, just like Barbara Nantais. 

Tales of True Crime, episode 17:
DNA Gone Wrong and the Suicide of Kevin Brown

Claire Hough was just 14 and she lived in Rhode Island. She and her brother were visiting their grandparents in San Diego on their summer vacation and a friend from school, Kim Jamer, had accompanied them on the trip. Claire spent a lot of time on the beach at Torrey Pines. One night, they snuck out the sliding glass door of Claire’s grandparents’ home and went to the beach to smoke cigarettes and listen to music. In a story by CBS news in 2018, Kim said she got a little panicky on the beach that night. Maybe it was sensory overload, the sound of the wind and surf and music from Claire’s boombox. Maybe it was that uneasy feeling we sometimes get… the spooky, extrasensory sensation that we’re being watched. “Somebody could just walk right up and by you without you even knowing they were there,” Kim said. She got scared, had a bad feeling, and began to cry, and Claire agreed to go home.

Soon after, Kim flew home to Rhode Island while Claire remained behind with her grandparents. She went to her bedroom Thursday night, August 23rd, and her grandparents assumed she had gone to bed. Instead, Claire again stole away after dark to go to the beach. She was alone, so there are no witnesses to say what happened to her on the beach that night, who she might have run into. We just know that her body was found around 5 am the next morning by an eccentric beachcomber named Wally Wheeler, on the beach near Soledad Creek, under the Old Highway 101 Bridge.

Claire Hough (Photo: The Hough Family)

When interviewed later, Wheeler said “I was in the habit of shining my flashlight over the beach to see if cans or anything else was in range of the light.” Then, he spotted Claire’s body. “It appeared someone was sleeping so I  quickly turned my light off and moved toward her. I had not taken many steps when I realized I had seen her exposed left hip and back, and people, with rare exceptions, do not sleep on the beach that way. […] I was sure from the color of her flesh that she was dead.”

Claire had been murdered in a similar fashion to Barbara Nantais, more than similar some would say. It could have been the fear that a serial killer with a standard modus operandi was stalking San Diego’s beach community… maybe the San Diego Police were still self-conscious that they hadn’t solved Barbara Nantais murder six years earlier, a killing that happened in a similar fashion and just a short distance away… there were critics who said they had bungled the investigation… whatever the reason, investigators went to work with diligence.

At risk of being too graphic in describing Claire Hough’s injuries, it is necessary to tell you what the coroner found in her autopsy because it becomes very important later on in the investigation.

Claire’s autopsy revealed she had been strangled, sand stuffed in her mouth. She was mutilated on her left breast and also her genitalia, and the investigators were left with some question about whether she had actually been raped. The coroner reported he found no semen on one of the two vaginal swabs that were taken from  Claire’s body.

The other swab was transported to the San Diego Police Department’s crime lab and stored.

In the days after Claire’s body was found, the man who found her, Wally Wheeler, presented himself as a suspect with his own odd behavior. Claire’s parents visited the crime scene and Wheeler approached them on the beach and introduced himself, claiming to be psychic. He was an Army veteran, having served in World War II, and once had a career as an insurance salesman, but by 1984, he was living with his sister, just a stone’s throw from Claire’s grandparents. Most say he was suffering from mental illness and he spent most of his days collecting cans on the beach. He spoke to the Houghs for half an hour, claimed to have been a night pilot and said he could see in the dark, but at no time during the half hour did he mention he had found Claire’s body. Claire’s parents told investigators they found him suspicious and the authorities agreed.

Shortly after they met, Wheeler began corresponding with Claire’s parents. His letters to them were odd, rambling notes. He talked of Claire coming to him in visions, how she had a smiling face and radiant eyes, the kind of thing Claire’s father, Sam, found disturbing.

“This is a guy who found a bloody, mutilated body and he’s talking about a smiling face and radiant eyes,” he said.

In one letter, Wheeler claimed to witness the murder in a psychic vision. He described the attacker as a long-haired man with a high forehead and a missing ear. “I believe he immediately attacked and strangled her.” “He was crouched over her shoulders and I just don’t have a clear picture of what he was doing but would think it was when he mutilated her.”

Without question, Wally Wheeler was investigators’ prime suspect and they tried everything to build a case against him, even going so far as to set up a microphone in a memorial to Claire that had been erected on the beach. They thought there was a possibility he might visit and say something incriminating. Claire’s dad kept corresponding with Wheeler and tried to trick him into saying something that would show he had killed Claire. They spent years trying to build a case against Wally Wheeler. No matter what they tried, Wally Wheeler did not say or do anything that implicated him in Claire’s death.

Several years after Claire’s death, Wheeler reportedly tried to commit suicide by driving his car over a cliff. Some would say it was a sure sign of his guilt. Others would say he was driven to it by the scrutiny from law enforcement. And another point-of-view held he was simply mentally ill and his condition was deteriorating. In 1988, Wheeler made another attempt, this time successful. He jumped from the 13th floor of an apartment building, and for anyone who still believed he had killed Claire Hough, the chance to bring him to justice was lost.

Wally Wheeler had been the San Diego Police Department’s most promising suspect, but with his death, the quest to discover who killed Claire Hough hit a roadblock and there were very few credible leads for almost two decades.

#####

There’s little information available about what happened in the investigation between the years of 1988 and 2008, but with Wally Wheeler out of the picture, investigators began pursuing a new avenue of inquiry. According to a report by CBS News, the San Diego Police revamped their website with a list of cold cases in 2008, and for the first time they publicly admitted Barbara Nantais and Claire Hough might have been murdered by the same person. Considering the similarity of the two crimes, it was a theory that, in hindsight, seems perfectly logical. That investigation, however, also went nowhere.

It was 4 years later, 2012, when the cold case–who killed Claire Hough–turned hot.

Two DNA Profiles

If you think back on the history of DNA, the first time most of us saw the technology used in a criminal case was as evidence against OJ Simpson in the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. It didn’t prove to be very useful to prosecutors in that case, partly because the technology was in its infancy. It wasn’t uncommon in the early days of DNA analysis for evidence like blood or tissue to be entirely consumed by the testing. By the time the DNA testing was done, there was no physical evidence left to test. With repeated advancements in the technology of DNA over the years, though, more sophisticated techniques allowed investigators to develop DNA profiles with smaller blood and tissue samples, and even to recover DNA from objects a killer had simply touched where no blood or tissue was visible–so-called “Touch DNA.” Using the evidence stored in the crime lab evidence locker, police were able to recover DNA profiles that would previously have been impossible.

It was the break they were waiting for.

I want to take a moment here to explain, most published accounts claim two DNA profiles were recovered from Claire’s body, but one source claims three DNA profiles were found, with the third frequently-unreported profile being that of her boyfriend in Rhode Island. He was not in San Diego at the time of her murder, however, so the presence of his DNA profile is considered irrelevant to the crime.

That left the DNA of two individuals as suspects in the murder of Claire Hough.

Ronald Clyde Tatro

The blood spots on Claire Hough’s blue jeans contained the DNA of a suspect who seemed to be a likely perpetrator. 

Ronald Clyde Tatro (Photo: San Diego Police Department)

Ronald Clyde Tatro was the kind of heavy you’d see in a movie–square jaw, weathered, leathery skin, with slicked-back hair. When I first saw his mugshot, he reminded me of DeNiro’s villain in Martin Scorcese’s Oscar-nominated 1991 remake of Cape Fear. He just looked like a bad dude. And he was a convicted rapist. 

In 1975, he kidnapped a woman in Arkansas, threw her in the trunk of his car, drove her to a remote spot in the country and raped her at knife point. According to a story by James Vlahos published in The Atlantic in 2015, Tatro spoke with a psychiatrist prior to his trial and said he had no control of his violent urges toward women, a problem he said went back to his childhood.

Tatro’s ex-wife told investigators he was a violent man who used to regularly tie her up and rape her, and that he had once confessed to raping and murdering a woman on his way home from Fort Lewis, Washington. She didn’t believe him at first, but later went to the authorities with what he’d said.

He was paroled in 1982 and decided he needed a change of scenery. He moved to San Diego.

According to a 2015 story in the San Diego Reader, just 6 months before Claire Hough was murdered, Tatro was a suspect in the murder of prostitute Carol Defleice on El Cajon Boulevard. The year after Claire’s murder, in 1985, Tatro was convicted of attempted rape when he tried to lure a San Diego-area teenager into his van and incapacitate her with a stun gun.

When the police discovered Tatro’s DNA in a blood spot on Claire Hough’s jeans in 2012, for the obvious reasons, it seemed like the break they were looking for. Imagine being a detective, banging your head against the wall for decades trying to solve the murder of an innocent teenager only to discover hard physical evidence that a convict like Tatro’s blood was on her clothes. For an investigator, that is a big moment. You’re ready to grab your keys and cuffs and go lock somebody up.

Except, you can’t, because Ronald Tatro died the previous year in what was initially deemed a boating accident on the Holston River in Tennessee.

CBS News 8 in San Diego reported two fishermen found his body floating face down in water just three feet deep. His 12-foot boat was found six miles upstream, stuck in the brush along the riverbank.

Nobody would blame you for thinking Tatro fell overboard and drowned, especially in a river, where currents can quickly separate a person from their boat.

However, the Tennessee Wildlife and Resources Agency took photos of the boat when it was found, and it didn’t look like Tatro had fallen overboard. The seat on the fishing platform was found folded down over his wallet and driver’s license and his hat and glasses had been left on the floor, as if he intended to go in the water. 

His body was found on August 25th, 2011, but investigators believed he had been in the water for a day when he was found. Which means, the day Ronald Tatro went into the Holston River was August 24th, 2011, 27 years to the day after Claire Hough’s murder.

Medical records indicated Tatro had suffered from depression and had previously tried to kill himself, by slitting his wrists, as he awaited trial for his stun gun attack on a La Mesa teenager in 1985. Toxicology reports from Tatro’s autopsy revealed he had sleeping pills in his system on the day he died. Although the medical examiner ruled his death an accident, the TWRA report concluded Tatro’s death may not have been.

One More DNA Profile

With Clyde Tatro already dead, San Diego Police, with due diligence, had to investigate the origin of the remaining DNA profile recovered from Claire Hough’s body. In this case, the San Diego Police said the DNA was from semen on the second vaginal swab which had been in storage at the lab since 1984.

The donor of the DNA profile was known to San Diego Police, but they kept his identity private initially while they did the groundwork, old fashioned detective stuff. They visited with Claire’s friends and family and showed them photos of Clyde Tatro and the other suspect… asked them if they had ever seen either of the men. Nobody had seen them before.

Investigators attempted to be particularly careful in investigating the man who was responsible for the DNA profile found on the vaginal swab, because he was one of their own. He was a criminologist, a since-retired forensic investigator named Kevin Brown who had worked for the San Diego Police Department from 1982 until 2002.

Operating under the assumption that Kevin Brown may have been involved in the murder of Claire Hough, investigators began to question his friends and former co-workers.

You heard that right. The San Diego Police department assumed a forensic investigator with no criminal record had conspired with a known rapist to assault and murder Claire Hough on the beach in 1984.

Confirmation bias is defined as “the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories,” and everywhere investigators looked for incriminating evidence on Kevin Brown, they believed they were finding it.

Co-workers reported they had a nickname for Kevin in his early days–”Kinky”–because he frequented strip clubs. As a teenager, he had taken up photography as a hobby, and when he arrived in San Diego as a young, single criminologist, he joined a group of amateur photographers who specialized in boudoir photography. A local man, Rocky Forguson, would arrange shoots with local models–swimsuit models and sometime exotic dancers–and the sessions were purportedly for the mutual benefit of the photographers and models. The photogs got to practice their skills, market themselves to models who might be interested in buying the photos for their portfolios, and, they got to see young, scantily clad women in various states of undress. The models often got paid a small fee and got some free photos for their own marketing purposes.

Detective Mike Lambert and a team of investigators took Brown’s photography habit as a sign of something more sinister. In an affidavit, Detective Lambert recounted one former female colleague who claimed Brown had asked her to model for him. Another said she saw him come out of the F-Street Adult Bookstore on his lunch break with his zipper down. Still another reported that Brown had watched a pornographic movie with a mutual co-worker at work, although that co-worker later claimed it never happened.

Intriguing, right? To investigators, it was confirmation that Kevin Brown–Kinky, as some of his co-workers called him–was a pervy sort of character, and that they were on the right track.

Was it possible, though, that the hit on Kevin Brown’s DNA was the result of contamination? It was a question investigators were forced to confront because Kevin Brown worked in the same lab where Claire Hough’s evidence had been processed. If the authorities were to make a compelling case against Kevin Brown, they needed to be able to convince a jury that Kevin Brown’s DNA appeared on Claire Hough’s body because he raped her, not because of lab contamination.

The Crime Lab

The lab where Kevin Brown worked was known as Criminalist Row at the old San Diego Police Headquarters near Seaport Village and has been described as a big open room, about the size of a double stall garage, lined by long tables. Brown’s job involved testing blood samples, photographing crime scenes, and occasionally, testifying in court cases, which was not his forte. He was described as meek, nerdy, and nervous. Colleagues reported he would crumble under the pressure of aggressive questioning and stumble in his responses.

In the 1980s, they were not testing and amplifying DNA like we do today. They were doing things like blood-typing and other analysis which would be considered primitive by today’s standards, and the methods employed were comparatively undeveloped as well. For example, Jim Stam, Kevin Brown’s former boss in the SDPD Crime Lab said, at the time, the criminalists working in the lab did not wear masks, and the choice of whether to wear gloves was up to the individual examiners. Evidence swabs were sometimes dried in the open air. A scissors used to cut the tip off a swab for testing might be used to cut another swab for a different case, unsanitized. A criminalist who worked in the lab said they would regularly handle multiple swabs without changing their gloves.

Furthermore, examiners in the labs often used their own semen as reference samples… a tactic a judge would later call “a stupid practice.”

Once the evidence in Claire Hough’s murder had been analyzed under those conditions, using the technology of 1984, it went into storage. When it was taken out of storage for DNA testing in 1999, 2000, and subsequent years, any contamination that might have been present on the swabs would still be there. And DNA testing involves so-called amplification of the genetic material, so even a tiny amount of contamination would be amplified and would show up in the final analysis.

It would later be revealed that two of the swabs taken out of storage for further analysis of Claire Hough’s murder were stuck together.

Detective Lambert needed to know, before he went any further, if cross-contamination of the forensic evidence was possible. Despite the lab conditions I’ve just described to you, lab manager Jennifer Shen reportedly told Lambert it was impossible that Brown’s DNA hit was the result of contamination because Kevin Brown had not personally worked on Claire Hough’s case.

That was enough for Detective Lambert.

Interrogating Kevin Brown

On the morning of Thursday, January 9th, 2014, Detectives Mike Lambert and Lori Adams knocked on Kevin Brown’s door at 8 am. They were friendly and made small talk for about an hour before they got down to business.

Unbeknownst to Kevin Brown, who assumed they had dropped by to get his take on an old case, they were actually there to try to connect him to Ronald Tatro and gather any other incriminating statements they could before serving a search warrant for his property.

Very early on in the discussion, they presented a false premise, a ruse intended to show that Kevin Brown knew Ronald Tatro and that they may have murdered Claire Hough together. The investigators told Kevin Brown that, in 1984, the San Diego PD was working a surveillance operation in a district known for prostitution. 

Detective Lambert presented Brown with an F.I. card, police terminology for a field interview, and claimed a uniformed police officer had stopped Ronald Tatro on El Cajon Boulevard to question him as a potential john.

That much of the story might be true.

However, Detective Lambert then told a lie to see if Kevin Brown would admit to knowing Tatro. He presented Kevin Brown a photo of Ronald Tatro and claimed the police officer made a note on the back of the FI card.

“But what he did was he wrote on the back of the… on the back of the FI card, said this guy said he knows a PD employee named Kevin Brown,” Lambert said.

“So when I researched Kevin Browns during September of ‘84, the only one that I could find that was working for the department was you. So I thought, this guy might just be an acquaintance that you met somewhere. I mean, maybe you were buddies at the time or something like that,” Lambert said.

It was a lie. Ronald Tatro never said he knew Kevin Brown. The trap had been set. If Kevin Brown admitted knowing Ronald Tatro, Lambert’s case likely would have been a slam dunk.

“Doesn’t ring a bell,” Brown said.

Detective Lambert asked again. “So you don’t recognize him from anywhere or anything?”

Detective Lori Adams said, “You must have some kind of interaction with him.”

“I don’t know how he got to know me,” Kevin Brown answered.

The investigators backed up and circled back around to it, and that’s when Kevin Brown began to make mistakes. In an effort to be helpful, he mentioned his old photography hobby, suggested that maybe Ronald Tatro had met him at a photography gathering and he just didn’t remember it.

They showed him a picture of Claire Hough and he said “Oh sure, I remember her.” It wasn’t clear whether he meant “I remember seeing her picture in the paper,” or something more. 

They told him she had been murdered on the beach and that his DNA had been found. Kevin Brown said he couldn’t imagine how.

If you’re listening to this, you’ve probably heard and seen enough true crime to know that was the moment Kevin Brown should have ended the interview and called his attorney.

He didn’t. Later that day, the San Diego Police descended on the home Brown shared with his wife Rebecca and served a search warrant. They took 14 boxes of evidence, numerous bags of things, family photo albums… more than seemed to even make sense. It was clear to everyone, including Kevin and Rebecca Brown, that he was a suspect in a murder investigation. 

The next day the San Diego police returned to his house for another round of questions and Kevin Brown still did not summon his attorney. He had slept on it. The events of the previous day had been a whirlwind, but he was still trying to be helpful and only hurting himself.

He volunteered that he had dated a woman in the mid-80s named Claire, and had sex with her. He offered to take a polygraph test, and the same day, Detectives Lambert and Adams took him to a police station and hooked him up.

They asked him if he knew Ronald Tatro and he said, “No.”

The polygraph result on the question came back as inconclusive.

They asked him if he had sex with or killed Claire Hough and he said, “No.”

The polygraph indicated deception.

After the test, Detective Lambert left the room and Detective Lori Adams took a sympathetic tone with Kevin Brown.

“I don’t believe for a second that you thought she was 14. I really don’t,” she said.

“Well I didn’t,” Brown said. “I had no idea.”

Later, it would become clear that Kevin Brown was mixing up his people. His old friend Mike Newquist would later say Kevin did meet a girl named Claire in the 80s in San Diego, but it was not Claire Hough. This Claire was in her upper-twenties, approaching 30 years old. And he had not met her on the beach, but at a hotel get-together among friends, with Mike and another woman.

It didn’t take long before Kevin Brown began to insist his DNA on Claire Hough’s body had to be the result of cross-contamination in the old criminalist’s row lab, and there were people who supported his contention, but by then he had done incredible damage to his own credibility by making reckless statements without an attorney, and the authorities turned up the pressure and continued to investigate him over the course of 2014.

Brown suffered from depression. His wife Rebecca says it was partly due to the terrible things he had seen in his career as a criminalist. A number of published accounts say he became fixated on the return of his possessions which Detective Lambert would promise to return, only to back out. Rebecca Brown said as the year progressed, Kevin got worse… he wouldn’t get out of bed. “He turned into a zombie,” she said. “We lived in a constant state of fear that cops would knock on our door at any minute, to search our house or arrest him for a murder he didn’t commit.”

Rebecca Brown became so worried about her husband, she called her brother and asked him to come over and remove all the guns from the home.

The Suicide of Kevin Brown

In late October, Kevin Brown drove to the couple’s lake cabin and loaded a white plastic deck chair into the back of his truck. He drove a short distance up Highway 79 until he found what he was looking for… a tree. He fastened a rope over a branch, climbed onto the chair, tied the rope around his neck, and kicked the chair out from under himself. He was 62 years old.

In their home, Rebecca Brown found his Bible, it was open and he had underlined Psalm 109:26 through 31… a passage about being wrongfully accused.

Help me, Lord, my God;

    save me in your mercy.

Make them know this is your hand,

    that you, Lord, have done this.

Though they curse, may you bless;

    arise, shame them, that your servant may rejoice.

Clothe my accusers with disgrace;

    make them wear their shame like a mantle.

I will give fervent thanks to the Lord;

    before a crowd I will praise him.

For he stands at the right hand of the poor

    to save him from those who pass judgment on him.

#####

I think this is the appropriate time to point out, when Wally Wheeler flung himself from the 13th floor of a San Diego-area apartment building, many took his suicide as an admission of his guilt. When Ronald Tatro’s body was found in the Holston River in Tennessee, on the day after the 27th anniversary of Claire Hough’s murder, there were those who believed it was suicide, and an unspoken admission of his guilt. And when Kevin Brown’s body was found hanging from a tree near Lake Cuyamaca, less than a mile from the Brown’s lake cabin, some believed it was an admission of his guilt.

The next day, police issued a search warrant for the Brown’s lake cabin, hoping to find evidence that Kevin Brown had been “monitoring the progress of the investigation of the murders of Claire Hough, Barbara Nantais, and anything related to the name of Ronald C. Tatro.”

They didn’t find anything. As a matter of fact, they never found anything to connect Kevin Brown to Ronald Tatro. The only piece of physical evidence the San Diego Police ever had to incriminate Kevin Brown was one DNA sample, taken from a swab processed in the lab where Kevin Brown worked.

That didn’t stop them from publishing a press release the day after his suicide claiming they had solved the case. Police still insisted that Kevin Brown and Ron Tatro murdered Claire Hough.

About nine months later, in July of 2015, Rebecca Brown filed suit against the city of San Diego, Detective Lambert, and the District Attorney Investigator Sandra Oplinger, for the wrongful death of her husband.

Vindication for Kevin Brown 

In most cases, law enforcement officers are protected from lawsuits arising over events that took place in the course of their duties. It’s called “qualified immunity,” and the San Diego Police argued for it in the investigation of Kevin Brown. In May of 2017, a US District Judge ruled they were not entitled to qualified immunity for wrongful death and violating Kevin and Rebecca Brown’s civil rights. They appealed the decision.

In November of 2018, a panel of Judges at the Ninth Circuit court heard the appeal. It was not kind to the City of San Diego. They questioned whether a judge would have issued a search warrant for the Brown’s property if the judge had known contamination was a possibility, despite claims to the contrary. Again, the court ruled against the defense, and Rebecca Brown’s suit was allowed to proceed.

The case against law enforcement exposed a number of unflattering things and painted a picture of investigators with tunnel vision. Attorneys for the Browns questioned the accuracy, some would say the honesty, of the affidavits Detective Lambert filed to secure search warrants.

According to a cover story in the San Diego Reader, in the affidavit for the first warrant to search the Brown’s home, and in the second for the lake cabin, investigators said one of the things they were seeking was information about the murder of Barbara Nantais in 1978, a murder which they had publicly speculated might have been perpetrated by the same person as Claire Hough’s. They weren’t fully forthcoming, however.

Maybe you caught it earlier.

Barbara Nantais was murdered in 1978. Ronald Tatro was in prison in 1978. He was locked up in 1975 and paroled in 1982. Kevin Brown was a college student in Sacramento, ten hours away. He had not yet graduated or been offered a job in San Diego. It was impossible that Ronald Tatro had killed Barbara Nantais, and very, very unlikely that Kevin Brown had. The authorities knew these facts, but included the murder of Barbara Nantais in their request for search warrants anyway. And did not share those facts with the judge.

Did they actually believe Kevin Brown had something to do with the murder of Barbara Nantais, or did they just include her case as a way of strengthening their request to the judge?

We get our answer from an AP story published in the Palm Springs Desert Sun just three days after Kevin Brown’s body was found. Lieutenant Paul Rorrison, asked about the similarity between the murders of Barbara Nantais and Claire Hough said, “We are not treating them as related cases.” They had filed an affidavit for a search warrant claiming they were looking for evidence related to Barbara Nantais murder. Now, like a week later, they were saying the two cases weren’t related.

In his defense, attorneys for by-then retired Detective Michael Lambert said he was not given all the information he needed, that he relied on what he was told by DNA experts, and that he was not aware criminalists stored their own semen in the lab until after he had filed his affidavits.

In February of 2020, a jury ruled for Rebecca Brown and awarded her more than 6-million dollars. For illegal search and seizure, 3 million dollars, plus another 3 million dollars for abuse of power leading to the death of her husband. Attorneys for the Browns offered to limit their demand for punitive damages to a single dollar if Detective Lambert would simply apologize to Rebecca Brown. He refused, and the jury ordered him to personally pay 50-thousand dollars in punitive damages.

A story from the San Diego Union Tribune said the jury found the affidavits to secure search warrants relied on “judicial deception” in minimizing the likelihood of contamination, with one juror saying, “We thought (the affidavit) wasn’t a fair and balanced approach to the situation.”

Detective Lambert characterized the judgement as a gut punch that would forever hurt his reputation as a cop. 

After the judgement was read, Rebecca Brown spoke to the media:

[soundclip: Rebecca Brown]

I’m very relieved and I know that Kevin was finally vindicated. My voice was heard and his voice was heard.

I believed I had to fight for my rights and Kevin’s… and anybody else, because I knew, if this could happen to us, it could happen to anyone.

The city attorney’s office released a statement after the judgement was announced:

This was a unique case largely based on circumstantial evidence. The jury did not have the opportunity to consider information that would have negated or eliminated taxpayer liability. The City is exploring its options for appeal.

Thomas Fuller wrote “Even doubtful accusations leave a stain behind them.” 

That was certainly the case for Kevin Brown. His reputation was smeared with salacious rumors about strippers and risque photo shoots which led to accusations that he had done the most unforgivable thing… rape and murder a young girl.

Detective Mike Lambert’s reputation was also stained, and it’s a shame when you think about it. The truth is, he did solve Claire Hough’s murder when he found Ronald Tatro’s DNA on the evidence collected from her body. Reasonable people, when they hear the story, accept that Tatro, a violent convicted rapist, was almost certainly Claire’s murderer. The Detective’s mistake was in either disregarding or allowing himself to be ignorant of overwhelming evidence that Kevin Brown was the victim of a simple mistake in a forensic lab.

Unfortunately, we also live in a world today where people feel compelled to inject political ideology into non-political matters. There will be people who answer this jury’s decision with “I support law enforcement.” And there will be others who believe all police are inherently bad, and that this is just one more example. I would contend the two things are not mutually exclusive. You can be for law enforcement, and also for civil liberties. Just because you are for one, does not mean you are against the other.

What about the murder of Barbara Nantais? As of today, the case is still unsolved, and puzzling. How could there be so many similarities between Barbara’s murder and Claire’s? Some have suggested Ronald Tatro may have been a copycat. Perhaps he saw news coverage of Barbara Nantais’ murder and he mimicked her killer’s M.O. when he murdered Claire Hough. Others point out mutilation of the breasts is nauseatingly common in sexual assaults, not necessarily the hallmark of a single attacker. And what about the sand in Barbara and Claire’s mouths? If I can be so rude as to suggest you put yourself in the shoes of their attackers, if you’re assaulting a woman on the beach at night and she starts screaming, a handful of sand would be the most readily available gag. It might simply be a coincidence.

Let’s hope the Nantais family gets the answers they deserve.

 

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