Hawaii Police Department Chief Benjamin Moszkowicz said Monday that his department didn’t have probable cause to arrest the former “Unknown Male No. 1” for the Christmas Eve 1991 murder of Dana Ireland in lower Puna.
Ireland, a 23-year-old recent college graduate from Virginia, was run over by a vehicle in Kapoho Kai Drive — which was covered by lava in 2018 — then abducted and taken to a remote fishing trail in Waa Waa where she was beaten, raped and left to die.
Police said the man recently identified by DNA as the suspect in the heinous crime was 57-year-old Albert Lauro Jr. of Hawaiian Paradise Park.
Lauro was 25 and a resident of the Kapoho area at the time of the crime, which received statewide and national media attention. Lauro’s was the only DNA found, other than the victim’s, on numerous pieces of evidence collected by investigators at the time.
Lauro committed suicide on July 23, a day before a DNA test of Lauro’s saliva on a swab taken by court order on July 19 returned as a match for Unknown Male No. 1.
“Our goal, when we went to talk to this guy, was to figure out what his involvement was — to figure out whether his involvement implicates or exculpates the other people who were previously tried and convicted for this crime,” Moszkowicz said. “There’s no way we would’ve been able to charge him. Could we have arrested him? I guess. But the problem is that we didn’t have probable cause that he committed the murder.
“We certainly had probable cause that he may have committed the rape … but the statute of limitations on that charge had run. So, we would have to have shown that a reasonable person would’ve believed that this Unidentified Male No. 1 intentionally or knowingly caused her death.
“And the fact that the DNA was at the scene and was collected from inside the victim’s body — while again, certainly evidence of his presence, or his being around the victim at some point around the time of the murder — is not evidence that he intentionally or knowingly caused her death.”
The chief said Lauro was arrested only once, for shoplifting in 1987, when he was 21.
Investigators weren’t able to find DNA that matched any of the three Native Hawaiian men convicted and imprisoned for Ireland’s kidnapping, rape and murder — Albert “Ian” Schweitzer, his younger brother Shawn Schweitzer and Frank Pauline Jr. — on any evidence at either crime scene associated with the Ireland case.
Both Schweitzers were exonerated of the crime in separate court hearings last year. Ian Schweitzer, who was sentenced to life plus 20 years, was freed at age 51 after 26 years in prison.
Shawn Schweitzer was 16 when the crime occurred. After seeing his older brother convicted by a jury and sentenced, the younger Schweitzer pleaded guilty to manslaughter and kidnapping and was sentenced to five years of probation with a year in jail, time he had already served.
Both have a court hearing today before Hilo Circuit Judge Peter Kubota regarding their claim for monetary compensation from the state under a wrongful conviction statute.
Pauline, who had implicated the Schweitzers in a confession he later recanted, was sentenced to life plus 40 years in the case. He was murdered in a New Mexico prison yard on his 42nd birthday in 2015.
Lauro’s DNA was taken from a fork he used to eat a plate lunch outdoors in public, according to Moszkowicz. A court document filed by the New York and Hawaii Innocence Projects, which represent the Schweitzers, states the fork was collected by authorities while Lauro was under surveillance by an FBI agent and HPD Detective Derek Morimoto.
According to the document, Lauro was identified by Steve Kramer of Indago Solutions, who cracked the Golden State Killer case in 2018, as a possible match for Unknown Male No. 1 “based on his genetics, ancestry, age, and address history, among other factors.” Kramer is a pioneer in forensic genetic genealogy, also known as family-tree building.
The profile Indago came up with, the document states, said the DNA belonged to a man who was about “80% Filipino.” Lauro had three Filipino grandparents, according to the filing.
According to Moszkowicz, he was given a list of “about a half-dozen” individuals who might be the unknown male. One, he said, was immediately eliminated from consideration because he was a convicted felon whose DNA was in the FBI’s CODIS database, which didn’t register a match for the suspect.
“We ended up on the person we eventually identified because he … lived relatively close to where the murder scenes were — scene one and scene two. He looked like as good a candidate as any to start off with,” Moszkowicz said. “Based on that, we did some surveillance, and we collected a surreptitious sample to determine, at least preliminarily, whether this person was the same person as Unidentified Male No. 1.”
The court document criticizes HPD, which it said continues to espouse the theory that the unknown male could have been a fourth culprit. Moszkowicz said the department doesn’t yet know whether Lauro acted alone or if there were others.
“Certainly, at this point, all things are possible,” Moszkowicz said in a press conference late Monday afternoon. “I wish we had been able to get that information from Mr. Lauro. … It’s certainly something that we’re investigating as a possibility.”
Retired judge Mike Heavey of Seattle-based Judges for Justice had long stated the Schweitzers and Pauline were wrongly convicted and that there was only one perpetrator — an unknown man who lived in the area and was obsessed with Ireland.
“It’s a great day,” Heavey said Monday, and again stated his belief in the innocence of the convicted men. He said that while Lauro wasn’t brought to justice, after the brutal crime he “lived in fear every day of his life.”
Lauro’s body was found at his home and an autopsy was done, Moszkowicz said. The home wasn’t searched by police prior to Lauro’s death, according to the chief.
“The Fourth Amendment requires us to, very specifically, list what it is that we’re looking for,” he said. “In this case, there was no murder weapon. It’s very unreasonable to believe that there is still bloody clothes evidence 33 years later. So, we would have to not only have established probable cause for a search, but what we were searching for. We didn’t know.
“We hoped, as we developed the case and looked at records and talked to witnesses and talked to this particular male, that we could determine if there was something in his residence that we could search for. But absent that, and absent writing down a very specific thing we were searching for — which is required under the case law — you can’t get a search warrant.”
Email John Burnett at jburnett@hawaiitribune-herald.com.