DNA evidence from the 1984 slaying of a Santa Ana baby sitter doesn’t match the man who has spent more than two decades on death row for the killing, authorities say.
Tests recently ordered by the Orange County District Attorney’s Office indicate Kenneth Clair, awaiting execution for the death of Linda Faye Rodgers, is not the source of DNA found on the victim’s body and on some nearby clothing, prosecutors said Friday.
But prosecutors were adamant Friday that the lack of a DNA match does not exonerate Clair, who was convicted in 1987 of beating, stabbing and strangling Rodgers while the woman’s child and four others slept in another room. Clair was convicted entirely on circumstantial evidence, including testimony by an ex-girlfriend that he showed her jewelry that police said was taken during the assault.
“There’s nothing that changes the jury verdict,” said David Brent, assistant district attorney in charge of homicide prosecutions. “If we felt Mr. Clair was innocent, it’s something we wouldn’t turn our back on.”
But prosecutors say the DNA results create serious questions about the Nov. 15, 1984, slaying in a home on Wilshire Avenue.
Who left the male DNA? And how did it get there?
C.J. Ford, an Anaheim private investigator hired by Clair, now 48, called Friday for prosecutors to aggressively seek answers.
“Now they can find out who did it,” Ford said.
Clair, a transient with an armed robbery conviction in Louisiana, has argued for his innocence, but has lost in appeal after appeal.
“I am fighting the state every step of the way and am hoping that someone will realize that the wrong man is locked up,” Clair wrote on a prison pen pal Web site.
What prosecutors say is an open-and-shut case might have morphed into a mystery with the DNA results.
Clair was living in 1984 in an abandoned house next door to the home shared by live-in baby sitter Rodgers and another family. Santa Ana homicide detectives initially focused on Clair because he had burglarized Rodgers’ home a week earlier. A few hours after Clair was released from jail, Rodgers, 25, was dead.
She was found in a master bedroom, nude from the waist down, on a waterbed.
Although there was no physical evidence tying Clair to the killing, prosecutors said he was convicted mostly on the strength of a taped conversation between him and ex-girlfriend Pauline Flores. In the recording, Flores repeatedly tries to get Clair to admit he killed Rodgers.
At one point, a frustrated Clair responds: “Will you leave that alone, please? You don’t have to rub that in my … soul.”
Although Clair denies the killing, prosecutors say his answers come close to a confession:
“They can run hair fibers until the cows come home, they’re not going to walk away from that tape,” said Michael Jacobs, who prosecuted the case.
Flores told police she saw Clair with items – such as a six-pack of beer and turquoise jewelry – that Rodgers’ roommates reported missing after the killing.
Julian Bailey, the lawyer who represented Clair at trial, said Friday the evidence against Clair was tremendous at the time and remains so.
“I’ve told Kenny and his family and his friends I will do everything I can to help him avoid execution, but the facts are that the evidence against him was pretty overwhelming,” Bailey said. “The jury really didn’t have a lot of problem convicting him, and the courts haven’t had a lot of problems affirming the convictions.”
Clair’s uphill battle continued even after ex-girlfriend Flores recanted much of her testimony, saying a head injury had affected her memory. Clair’s defense team found evidence that one of the children at the scene of the slaying described the killer as a “white man,” before recanting and describing the attacker as a “black man.” In an affidavit filed in Aug. 2004, the now-grown Jerrod Hessling, testified that he changed his description at the behest of his mother’s boyfriend, who was a member of a white motorcycle club.
Hessling added that methamphetamine was sold from his home and that Rodgers had threatened before her death to go to Child Protective Services, which Ford says could be an alternate motive for the killing.
Clair’s team, lead by attorney John Grele, caught a break in November when authorities sought DNA analysis on a Huntington Beach killing in 1984 that was similar to Rodgers’ slaying. Clair’s defense team had long argued that the unidentified killer in the Huntington Beach case could have committed the Rodgers killing.
Three hairs found on the body of Elizabeth Hoffschneider, 38, were matched to Gerald Su Go, a 51-year-old Canadian man.
After Go was arrested and held in Canada, prosecutors decided to re-examine several items preserved from the Rodgers crime scene to see if there were genetic materials that could be extracted and compared to Go and Clair.
An investigator from the District Attorney’s Office hand-delivered five items of evidence from the Rodgers crime scene to a private DNA lab in Richmond along with the DNA profiles from Go and Clair.
DNA was obtained from two items – one from the victim’s body and a piece of clothing. None of the DNA matched Clair or Go, said Deputy District Attorney James Mulgrew. Authorities say regulations prevent them from comparing the DNA to other samples in an FBI database, which requires that prosecutors believe the DNA comparison could lead to the culprit.
In this case, they believe the culprit is already in prison.
Clair’s wife, Elizabeth, who married him on the day of his sentencing in 1987, believes he will be exonerated.
“I’m always going to have hope. I said that from day one, the truth will be revealed.”
