CLAIRE HOUGH - 14 yo (1984) - / Suspect, Kevin Charles Brown, a suicide - San Diego, CA

Police Criminalist Investigated for '84 Murder Commits Suicide


                 


Kevin Charles Brown
San Diego Police Department

  
10/30/2014 AT 04:45 PM EDT

It's a case that sounds like it was ripped from a CSI script – a veteran crime lab worker for the San Diego Police Department, who police believe brutally murdered a 14-year-old girl three decades ago, hangs himself before the authorities can arrest him.

"He knew he was under investigation," San Diego Police Department Lt. Paul Rorrison tells PEOPLE of retired criminalist Kevin Charles Brown, 62. "Unfortunately, he committed suicide before we could take him into custody."

Brown first came under suspicion in the unsolved, gruesome 1984 murder of Claire Hough, who had been beaten, strangled and stabbed – and had one of her breasts cut off – then left under a bridge. Investigators eventually got a break in the cold case in 2012 after getting a "DNA hit" on a piece of evidence that linked Brown and Ronald Clyde Tatro, 67, an ex-con with a string of sexual assault convictions who was killed in a boating accident in 2011.

Detectives, armed with a search warrant, descended on Brown's house last January and carted off computers and other evidence. Police insist that the DNA sample allegedly connecting Brown to the murder couldn't have come from an oversight in the department's crime lab, where he spent 20 years working before his retirement in 2002.

"He didn't work with any of the evidence in this case and we have absolute confidence that there is no basis for any cross-contamination or anything of that sort," says Rorrison.

One person not convinced that Brown is responsible for Hough's murder is his wife Rebecca, a high school teacher.

"He was just a nice, gentle, quiet man and they pushed him over the edge," she tells PEOPLE, insisting that the stress of being viewed as a murderer "took its toll" on her husband, leading to his suicide on Oct. 21.

Her husband, she says, was convinced that his DNA somehow got onto evidence in the Hough case by mistake while he was working in the crime lab.

Police can't explain how Brown might have known Tatro, who had spent years in prison on various sexual assault charges.

"That's one of our mysteries," says Rorrison. "What links them together is their DNA at the crime scene."

The murder Brown is suspected of committing is eerily similar to the 1978 killing of Barbara Nantais, who was 15 years old at the time her body was discovered 600 ft. from where Hough's was found six years later.

Nantais had also been beaten, strangled and her breast mutilated.

"At this point," adds Rorrison, "we have nothing linking that other case – the Nantais murder – with this one."


http://www.people.com/article/kevin-charles-brown-suicide-murder