Man Gets Life in First Case Solved by State DNA Lab

MARTINEZ, Calif. — The first case solved by the state’s DNA crime lab has led to a life sentence for a repeat sex offender convicted of strangling and sexually assaulting a 76-year-old woman.

James King, 41, covered his face with his hands when the jury returned its verdict Monday in the death of Leathia Taylor, a retired beautician whose body was found by her nephew in 1992 sprawled on the living room floor of her home in Richmond, north of Oakland.

King had two previous rapes on his record--an assault on a Richmond high school teacher when he was 16 and the rape of a 16-year-old girl eight years later.

Taylor’s slaying had gone unsolved until Richmond police, having learned about a new state Department of Justice DNA computer database, delivered a sample of semen left at the scene to the state crime laboratory in Berkeley nine months after the crime.

Like all sex offenders, King had been required as a condition of his parole from prison in 1991 to provide prison authorities with blood samples.

Prison authorities send the parolees’ blood to the Berkeley lab. There, scientists draw DNA profiles of the parolees and feed them into a computer. More than 10,000 such profiles are in the system. Those known profiles are compared on a regular basis against about 150 DNA samples left at the scenes of killings in which there are no suspects.

On Sept. 2, 1994, the computer got what the lab’s criminalists call a “cold hit,” tying the Taylor slaying to King.

King’s lawyers attempted to bar evidence obtained by the DNA profiling, contending that the technology is unproved. The question of the admissibility of the DNA evidence is certain to be an issue in an appeal. Defense lawyers, however, have been largely unsuccessful in limiting the use of DNA as evidence in criminal cases.

The 1992 murder of Leathia Taylor is one of three previously unsolved crimes in which suspects have been arrested as a result of work by the California lab.

Last year, technicians at the lab helped bring about the arrest of Gerald Parker in connection with six killings dating back to the 1970s in Orange County. Parker is awaiting trial for murder.

Another man, Kevin Green, had been convicted of one of those murders, and spent 17 years in prison before the technology pointed police to Parker and resulted in Green’s being freed last June.

The California lab, which also assists other states, made a third match earlier this year, leading to the arrest of a man in San Jose for the killings of five women in Oklahoma City in 1992.

In King’s case, prosecutors had asked for the death penalty, and Deputy Dist. Atty., Brian Baker, said he was “real disappointed” by the life sentence. “This is one that really deserved the death penalty,” he said.

But the jury foreman, Rick Cotruvo, said that “it was very clear to us right from the beginning that justice wouldn’t be served by killing” King. The jury returned its verdict after one hour of deliberation.

According to testimony, psychologists said King had abnormal sexual urges.

DNA database programs were developed throughout the country in the 1990s and have led to arrests in cases in which the only evidence was the perpetrators’ genetic material.