A 34-year-old inmate is being charged with the murder of a Big Island man last month in a New Mexico prison.
Daniel Thomas Hood is accused of murdering Frank Pauline Jr., who was found dead on his 42nd birthday, April 27, in a remote section of the recreation yard at Southern New Mexico Correctional Facility.
Hood is charged with first-degree murder and possession of a deadly weapon by a prisoner, according to a criminal complaint filed Thursday in Dona Ana County Magistrate Court in New Mexico.
The Las Cruces (N.M.) Sun-News reported Tuesday that a New Mexico Department of Corrections spokeswoman said Hood had been incarcerated on first- and second-degree murder convictions since 2002 but didn’t know where Hood originally is from.
Pauline was serving a life sentence with a 180-year minimum for the Christmas Eve 1991 abduction, rape and beating death of Dana Ireland in lower Puna. The murder of the 23-year-old Ireland, who had recently graduated from college in her native Virginia and moved to the Big Island to live with her older sister, remains one of the most notorious crimes in Hawaii history.
Hood allegedly confessed to killing Pauline, according to a police statement and the criminal complaint. The complaint states Hood told an investigator May 7 he hit Pauline in the head with a rock wrapped in a green shirt.
“Mr. Hood said Mr. Pauline dropped straight forward. Mr. Hood recalls that he stood over him and hit him two more times in the back of the head then he threw the rock and kept walking,” the complaint states.
“Mr. Hood claimed he killed Mr. Pauline because he thought Pauline was a snitch and he walked around like he owned the place,” the state police statement said.
Charlotte Decker, aka Charlotte Pauline, a Kona prison minister, said she’s happy charges were filed in Pauline’s slaying but described Hood’s alleged motives for killing Pauline as “such a lie.”
“I know Frank turned his life over to the Lord, and he really changed,” said Decker, who has maintained that Pauline was innocent of the deadly attack on Ireland.
The complaint states Hood told the investigator he intended to “seriously injure him or kill him (Pauline).”
“Mr. Hood added that he did not want Mr. Pauline to walk the line again,” the investigator wrote.
According to the complaint, Hood told the investigator “tension with Pauline had been building up for a few months.”
“Mr. Hood said there had been an altercation with Mr. Pauline in the past, but he did not go into details,” the investigator wrote.
Decker said she doesn’t buy that version of events either, and thinks someone outside the New Mexico prison ordered Pauline murdered.
“I’m wondering who told him (Hood) to do that because Frank had not had any confrontations on the grounds,” she said. “… We’d been talking for weeks, actually months, and I just talked to him (the day before Pauline’s death). Because if anything had been going on with him, he would have let me know because we always prayed about everything.”
Pauline’s homicide came a day after the Tribune-Herald broke a story about the Hawaii Innocence Project’s efforts to exonerate Albert “Ian” Schweitzer, a co-defendant of Pauline’s in the Ireland case who’s serving a life sentence with a 130-year minimum in an Arizona prison.
Pauline confessed in 1994 to the fatal attack on Ireland and implicated Schweitzer and Schweitzer’s younger brother, Shawn. He later recanted that confession, claiming he fabricated the story to help his half-brother, John Gonsalves, receive a lighter sentence on a drug charge.
“If that is true … then he (Pauline) would probably be an important witness down the road in our efforts to vindicate Albert Ian Schweitzer,” Brook Hart, a prominent Honolulu defense attorney and a volunteer lawyer for the Hawaii Innocence Project, said in April.
Hart called Pauline’s death a day after the story about the group’s involvement “an extraordinary coincidence,” but stopped short of saying Pauline was killed because of the story.
Shawn Schweitzer was 16 when the Ireland murder occurred. In a deal with prosecutors, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to a year in jail, already served, and five years probation.
Another group, the Seattle-based Judges for Justice, also has taken up the cause of overturning convictions in the Ireland case. Michael Heavey, a retired King County Superior Court judge who heads the group, said circumstantial evidence and DNA evidence in the case points to a single attacker in the case and away from Pauline and the Schweitzers.
A Tuesday phone call to Heavey was not returned in time for this story.
Hawaii Department of Public Safety spokeswoman Toni Schwartz said she couldn’t confirm a Hawaii News Now report in April that local corrections officials transferred Pauline in December 2012 from an Arizona prison to the New Mexico facility because he was a “problem inmate” involved in prison gangs.
“I can tell you that he was a validated member of a Security Threat Group (STG). STG’s (sic) are gangs,” Schwartz wrote in an email Tuesday.
The Las Cruces Sun-News reported in April that Pauline had no disciplinary record at the New Mexico prison.
Email John Burnett at jburnett@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
