How attention to detail solved a 30-year old murder in Navarro

The Victim Didn't Smoke

by Mark Scaramella

On September 16, 1975, an unidentified elderly man who was taking a shortcut home through the woods came across the body of a 20-year-old hitchhiker in a stand of redwoods across the street from the Navarro Store. The hitchhiker's body was half in and half out of a sleeping bag. He had been shot through the head. The victim was wearing a full leg cast and his crutches were leaning against a nearby tree.

Sheriff's investigator Grover Bethard soon arrived. Although Sullivan's wallet and most of his meager possessions were missing, Bethard found papers identifying the victim as Gerard Vincent "Jerry" Sullivan. Based on the level of decomposition, Bethard estimated that the body had been there for a number of days.

Deputy Bethard proceeded to carefully process the crime scene while Detective Ralph Maize began an investigation.

Deputy Bethard, an experienced crime scene investigator, found several small items on the scene, including a cigarette butt and other discarded items. The bullet recovered from the body was determined to be from a .38 caliber pistol.

There wasn't much to go on.

Seeing that the victim was probably a hitchhiker, Detective Maize put out feelers, asking locals what they had seen or heard, and issued a press release about the murder.

Several people said they remembered seeing the victim hitchhiking — his large leg cast being easy to identify. People remembered seeing "the guy with a cast" and another young man hitchhiking together. Maize got calls from four people who had given the pair rides. Talking to the witnesses who had given the pair rides, Maize theorized that Sullivan had met up with someone on Highway 101 somewhere between Santa Rosa and Cloverdale. The witnesses remembered the guy with the cast much more than the guy who was with him. The descriptions of the second man from the people who had given the pair rides were inconsistent and vague.

Shortly after Mr. Sullivan's body was found, his family in Long Island, New York, contacted the Sheriff's Department to say that somebody had dropped Sullivan's wallet into a mailbox in Fort Bragg where postal employee had mailed it to the family. Nobody knew who had dropped the wallet off in Fort Bragg. The family mailed the wallet to the Sheriff's Department. It was processed and a fingerprint was obtained off of it.

Unfortunately, in 1975 there was no computerized latent print system and it could not be identified. But the print was maintained.

Using the descriptions given by each of the ride-givers, Maize had four separate composites drawn based on the descriptions of the other hitchhiker. The descriptions differed — the four composites could have been four different people. One of the people who had given the pair a ride remembered that the other hitchhiker had said something about being familiar with the Caspar area, and that he mentioned having lived in some sort of commune in that area at the time. Maize checked the area for places that might meet that description. Given the relatively young ages of the hitchhikers, Maize came up with the Summer Hill School outside of Caspar, one of the many hippyish "alternative schools" in Mendocino County at the time run by 70s-era new arrivals. This particular "school" was a loosely run combination group home/school where juveniles on probation were placed.

Maize spoke to a number of people at the school, showing them the four composites to see if anybody recognized any of them. A female student at Summer Hill School thought that one of the composites looked a little like one of her former "classmates" by the name of "Bob Holdt." Although the Summer Hill School was loosely run and poorly documented, Maize eventually figured out that the girl was referring to a former classmate listed as "Robert Holt." But most of the other people at the school said that the composites didn't really look like Bob Holt. Besides, they all thought that Holt had gone into the Navy and wouldn't be out hitchhiking around.

Maize continued checking. But after several months, he ran out of options. None of the leads had panned out.

* * *

During the course of the investigation, working with the family, Maize determined who the victim was.

Jerry Sullivan had grown up in New York City, graduating from high school in Brooklyn in 1973 having participated in the usual high school sports.

After high school and a short stint in college, Sullivan decided he wanted to see the world. "In the spring of 1974, Jerry took off," wrote Sullivan's father in an article published on the east coast soon after his son's death. "He left us a note and told us not to worry. We were only a telephone call away. He promised to keep in touch with us and he did."

Unable to decide where to take his life, Sullivan, the youngest of four sons of a New York newspaper copy editor, briefly attended college in Nebraska but dropped out, saying he preferred working with his hands more than his head. After working some odd jobs in Nebraska, Jerry Sullivan hitchhiked to California and ended up as a ranch hand at a horse ranch. The horse ranch suited the young Sullivan who learned to ride and take care of the thoroughbreds.

Somehow while working at the horse ranch Sullivan suffered a major leg fracture requiring that he wear an ankle-to-hip cast. Frustrated at being unable to work with the horses, Sullivan took to the road, heading for Bay Meadows racetrack in San Mateo, where a horse he liked was entered.

Finishing up with Bay Meadows, Sullivan told his family that he had decided to thumb his way to Oregon.

It was his last contact with his family.

* * *

Having exhausting his leads, Detective Maize declared the case inactive, but still open. And it remained that way until 1993.

"A homicide case is never closed unless it's solved," said Lt. Kurt Smallcomb, now the Sheriff's Department's Chief of Detectives.

In 1993 the case had been assigned to Smallcomb, a line detective at the time.

"What we have is called a cold case file," said Smallcomb. "Detectives are assigned to work the cold cases if they have idle time with what's going on currently. That involves them looking through the cold case files and making sure all evidence has been checked for fingerprints or DNA testing, as well as making sure all possible suspects have been talked to."

Smallcomb had been called by the family who had inquired whether the fingerprint on the wallet had produced any leads. Smallcomb immediately entered the print into the Automated Latent Print System and got a hit on it. The computerized fingerprint system kicked out the name of a suspect in Oregon who had lived in Navarro and worked as a fisherman on the coast at the time of the murder.

Detective Frank Rakes and Smallcomb went to Oregon and asked that suspect about his involvement in the case. The man denied everything. He said he was never hitchhiking with the victim. Although the Oregon man was suspicious, the detectives still had no hard leads and nowhere else to go. The case was put on hold again.

But Smallcomb was now very familiar with the case, and retained a nagging feeling that the case was solvable.

In April of this year, Smallcomb asked Detective Kevin Bailey to take another look at the Sullivan case. Smallcomb thought that maybe another check of the fingerprint found on the wallet could produce new leads with the latest ID technology developments.

"At first I noticed that there was this guy in Oregon," said Bailey. "That suspect looked good for the case. However, in reviewing the case file, I saw that Grover Bethard made a note after processing the scene that he had recovered a cigarette butt. As I continued reading the case I saw that the father of the victim had said that his son did not smoke. So I immediately thought that perhaps the cigarette butt was left by the person who was with him."

Bailey then called Mendocino County evidence technician Debbie Foster and asked her if she still had that cigarette butt.

"Lo and behold she did!" said Bailey. "So kudos to Grover Bethard for recovering it in 1975 when there was really no technology to deal with it. And kudos to Debbie Foster for keeping it in condition that it could be tested. It was properly packaged and properly preserved in a refrigerated vault. That was done on their own initiative. That says a lot about their skills."

The cigarette butt, which was hand-rolled and licked by the smoker, was sent to the state-run DNA laboratory in Richmond where DNA Technician Deanna Kacer began the detailed processing of the DNA recovered from it. "We do not have a DNA lab locally that I can just walk over to," added Bailey. "A lot of people in this area who watch some television and some of the crime shows think that it's very easy to just pick something up and get it tested for DNA, but it's not. It's a time-consuming process and there's a big backlog."

Meanwhile DA Investigator Tim Kiely accompanied Bailey to Oregon to talk to the suspect there.

"We went to Oregon for two reasons," said Bailey. "First, to lock him into a statement. And, second, to obtain a DNA sample — a swab.

"I obtained a search warrant in advance. It was obtained through Port Orford authorities in Curry County, Oregon. We did not know at that time if he would cooperate in providing a sample, so we got the search warrant in advance in case we needed it. If we had not received consent, we would have had to obtain one and that would have wasted time. We wanted everything ready when we went up there. The sheriff's department in Curry County was very cooperative in helping us get the search warrant through a judge in their jurisdiction. They also assisted us in serving that search warrant. We contacted the suspect in Oregon and obtained a statement and we obtained a cheek swab of his DNA.

"We returned to Ukiah and submitted those swabs to Richmond for DNA testing. About six weeks later Deanna Kacer called. She said, 'I have good news: we have a hit on the DNA from the cigarette butt.' I was expecting that the good news would be that it matched our suspect in Oregon.

"But the curve ball in the case was that the DNA did not match our suspect in Oregon. It came back with a match to Mr. Robert Vaughan. The match was obtained from the state's DNA database which contains samples of individuals who have committed serious felonies. We had never heard of anyone named Robert Vaughan. I had been through the case file extensively before the DNA testing was done, and that name was never mentioned. So I pulled all the case notes and files and evidence together in a determined effort to find the name Robert Vaughan somewhere in there. That's when I noticed that Mr. Vaughan's criminal history record included that he had an aka of Robert Holt."

Vaughan had been in prison since 1991 for a murder that he did in South Lake Tahoe in El Dorado County.

"Vaughan spent most of his life in some type of correctional facility," said Robert Dougherty, an investigator with the El Dorado County District Attorney's Office, which prosecuted Vaughan for a 1991 South Lake Tahoe slaying.

Vaughan "strangled, stomped and stabbed" a 32-year-old South Lake Tahoe woman, Dougherty said. A jury convicted Vaughan of second-degree murder in that case, for which he has been serving a 15-year to life sentence at Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga. The victim, Shellie McClure, met her killer at a local Burger King where she worked, Dougherty said. Vaughan, a transient, would come around the restaurant for coffee and the two began talking. They met one day outside the Burger King, and McClure's body was later found in a meadow near Blue Lake and Highway 50, according to the police report.

Vaughan turned himself in when he heard police were looking for him, Dougherty said. Vaughan did not deny killing the woman. He claimed he could not recall the incident because he blacks out when enraged, Dougherty said. "The guy basically blacks out, then he comes to and realizes what he's done," Dougherty said, adding that Vaughan can be nice and calm one minute, outraged the next. "He has anger issues," Dougherty noted with typical cop understatement.

Bailey continues: "So we put together the fact that Mr. Vaughan had an aka of Robert Holt which was mentioned in the original case file. Then we found the woman who had been interviewed in 1975 at the Summer Hill School and gave us the name of Robert Holt. I located her in Washington state and e-mailed her a photograph of Robert Vaughan. She said that it looked like the person she remembered as Bob Holt."

Kiely and Bailey next went to South Lake Tahoe where Vaughan had been arrested and convicted for murder.

"We wanted to be fully prepared about Mr. Vaughan before we went to visit him in prison so that we could know who we were dealing with," said Bailey. "We reviewed copious files and notes in South Lake Tahoe. We saw his criminal history, what he had done based on their investigation and what he had done for the current conviction. We immediately saw that he was more than capable of being responsible for our murder.

"We could not yet rule out our suspect in Oregon. But now we had information placing a career criminal at the scene of the crime. You never want to narrow your scope too soon. If you eliminate something too soon, you will miss it."

Finally Bailey and Kiely were ready to talk to Vaughan.

"When we went to interview Mr. Vaughan, we did not know exactly what part he played in this," said Bailey. "We only knew that he was probably at the scene. You have to be careful. Sophisticated inmates can get more information than they give. Mr. Kiely and I are experienced interrogators. So we approached Mr. Vaughan in a manner which made him comfortable. We did not advise him that there was a second suspect in Oregon. We did not advise him of any previous information that we had in the case. We simply allowed him to tell us what had occurred, using the background we obtained in South Lake Tahoe.

"In the course of that discussion, Mr. Vaughan made it quite clear that there was no one else involved. We had no reason not to believe what he told us. His entire history indicated that he was a loner. That is his makeup. That's who he was. He does not involve himself in crowds of people or groups of people. He does not have close friends or close associates. He is a drifter who travels from place to place by himself. That's what he does. He had been arrested prior to his incarceration in 1991. ... And, essentially, he confessed to the crime."

* * *

There's always a lot of focus on the whiz bang DNA technology. But in a lot of these cases it comes down to evidence handling and police procedure which can be more important than the technology itself — DNA is just another investigative tool. Prosecutors have to be able to prove that the sample they have belongs to the person in question. They have to make sure that the chain of custody is maintained, and that the evidence and samples are properly handled and stored. There's much more to DNA cases than the match itself.

"The investigator who collected the cigarette butt in 1975 with no technology to do anything with it had to realize that it did not belong there," said Bailey. "He deserves a lot of credit. As does our evidence staff who preserved the cigarette butt in a state which allowed it to be tested almost 30 years later."

"It's possible that we could have gone to the evidence locker and found material that isn't testable or material that's missing. It depends on how the crime scene is handled, how the evidence is collected, how it is preserved.

"In my experience there is no such thing as good luck. But there is the whole heck of a lot of bad luck. In this case it was just good police work. You don't put something in a proper package and properly preserve it out of a good lock. But if you haven't done that, it would be bad luck."

"Everything had to fall into place," added DA Investigator Kiely. "Discovery and collection of the cigarette butt, preservation of it, identification of it, the hit on the DNA testing, the fact that Vaughan's sample was in the DNA bank, and all the detectives' interest in the case and their ability to see that there were possible leads... And then to retest the available evidence... Each lead had to be pursued in detail."

Finally, Bailey ruled out the Oregon suspect.

"I would not like to speculate on how his fingerprint could have gotten on that wallet," said Bailey. "But when Tim Kiely and I interviewed the guy in Oregon the first time, we both left his place thinking that if he did it, he did not do it alone. He did not have the balls to do it alone, nor did he have a violent criminal history. He was in the area of the crime at the time and was a suspect, but now that we had Vaughan's confession we eliminated him from consideration.

"Another factor in this case," adds Bailey, "is that we would not have been able to file this case without Vaughan's confession. The DNA is a very good tool — we could put him at the scene. But that by itself does not convict him. It's one piece of the puzzle. Without the confession we still would not have been able to file charges. A cigarette butt in the forest is not going to send somebody away for life for murder."

Vaughan's confession described things in the Navarro murder case that only the perpetrator would know.

"He knew very specific details about the scene which only the murderer would have known — things that the even the family members of the deceased person didn't even know," said Kiely.

"Most people think that we just went down there and spoke to him and it resulted in an arrest. But there was a lot more to it than that. Certainly, Mr. Vaughan would never have been on our radar without the DNA. But the DNA in and of itself does not convict him of homicide."

Until recently, DNA samples were collected on people convicted of any of 36 serious felonies in California. Proposition 69, approved last month by California voters, will expand the testing to anyone arrested for a felony starting in 2009. The expanded database will also exonerate people, as it did with the Oregon suspect, as well as lead to convictions. "There's hope for all cold cases with the help of DNA," Lt. Smallcomb said. "It's the greatest tool of law enforcement since latent prints."

"Law enforcement is a team sport," Bailey emphasized. "You need a good mix of people with different skills. And we had a good lineup here."

Kiely also gives some of the credit to the Sheriff's and DA's Offices. "We have had support and assistance from several others along the way. When we came to the Sheriff or the DA with the case and explained what needed to be done — manhours, travel, testing, etc. — they said, Go do it."

* * *

Before Jerry Sullivan's father died last year, he described him as "very well mannered and polite; very considerate of other people. He was also a talented athlete. He was MVP on his high school baseball team." Jerry Sullivan is still honored each year with a sportsmanship award in his name at Our Lady of Grace school in Howard Beach, New York.

"I was astonished, and so was my brother," said Dr. Michael Sullivan, the victim's brother, now a clinical psychologist in Washington DC, after hearing the news that his brother's alleged killer had been located after nearly thirty years. "After so many years to have a break like this — it's almost a miracle.

"My brother was a wonderful young man and he had so much potential and so much promise that he never had the chance to fulfill because he was murdered. How grateful my surviving brother and I are to Detective Bailey and the Sheriff's Department. Unfortunately my parents are not alive to see this. My dad had done a lot over the years to try and help detectives with their investigation. The murder of my brother had a totally devastating impact on my family and my brother's friends. My parents were very religious people and sustained by strong religious faith but they lived with broken hearts every day of their lives ever since this. It's hard to put into words the total turning your world upside down that this does. My parents suffered terribly; we all did. ... We are very grateful to the police and the outstanding work they have done — and that they have never given up."

Before he died, Jerry Sullivan's father described his son as "everyone's best friend."

"The Sullivan family was a very good family to work with," said Bailey. "They never gave up on the Sheriff's Department. They have supported the Sheriff's Department for 30 years. They had nothing but positive things to say, even though they might have thought that we were dragging our feet or letting the case lapse. They know the volume of work that has been done on this case. They knew that this was a tough case. They have been 100% supportive. They could easily have turned around and gone public with complaints. But they didn't."

* * *

As best can be determined now, somewhere between Santa Rosa and Cloverdale Sullivan hooked up with Vaughan and together they headed north taking Highway 128 to the Coast where Vaughan had previously lived in Caspar. At one point they decided to camp out across the street from the Navarro Store.

Bailey wouldn't say what may have triggered Vaughan to shoot Sullivan, other than to mention his tendency to "snap," and a substance abuse problem. "More about that will come out as this case proceeds," said Bailey.

"Mr. Vaughan did not have to talk to us," conceded Bailey. "He had nothing to gain."

"He's a different person now as he sits in jail at age 48," added Kiely. "I don't know if you'd say he deserves credit exactly, but in fairness, part of his reason for telling us that he did it was that he had some remorse at this point. He had never provided a statement to other law enforcement officers who have contacted him in prison on other cases. But he provided a statement to us. He said it was time for closure for the family and maybe for himself in a way."

"When you go talk to someone in prison in a case like this, it's a crap shoot," Bailey continued. "He could just as easily tell you to get the hell out. He had already seen the parole board. He was eligible for parole. You do not know what you're going to get when you deal with someone like that. For him to take the road he took to cooperate with us deserves a certain amount of credit."

An arrest warrant for Jerry Sullivan's murder has been issued for Robert Vaughan. In early November, Mendocino law enforcement picked up Mr. Vaughan and brought him back to the Mendocino County Jail where he was booked for the murder of Jerry Sullivan.

Arraignment was set for November 29th.