(Doesn't Crowe look like Brad Pitt? Click on the link above and see if you agree.)
By Mark Sauer and John Wilkens
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITERS
May 14, 2002
Union-Tribune
Richard Tuite, 33, faces charges in the murder of Stephanie Crowe, sources tell the Union-Tribune.
Four years after 12-year-old Stephanie Crowe was stabbed to death in her bedroom, a transient seen in the neighborhood but dismissed by Escondido police as a "bungling prowler" is expected to be arrested today in the slaying, The San Diego Union-Tribune has learned.
Richard Raymond Tuite, 33, is to be charged with murder later this week by the state Attorney General's Office, sources said. County sheriff's detectives plan to take him into custody at Donovan State Prison, where he is concluding a three-year sentence for an attempted burglary unrelated to the Crowe case.
Tuite was scheduled to be released Friday. He has denied any involvement in the killing.
The arrest would open a new chapter in one of the most dramatic and controversial homicide investigations in county history. Initially, the victim's 14-year-old brother, Michael, and two of his high school classmates faced trial for murder.
That trial was derailed three years ago when last-minute DNA tests found Stephanie's blood on a red sweat shirt Tuite was wearing the night of the killing. Charges against the boys were dismissed, and the case has been under review since.
Michael Crowe and his parents, Steve and Cheryl, said they feel vindicated by the decision to prosecute Tuite – and gratified that, finally, they may be able to grieve for Stephanie.
"We are very happy and relieved," Cheryl Crowe said. "It's sad that it has taken this long and hurt so many people to get justice in this case.
"I just wish the Escondido police and the district attorney had done their jobs right in the first place. We are very thankful for the sheriff's detectives who worked so long and hard to finally get this right."
Sheriff's detectives and the state Attorney General's Office declined to comment on the case yesterday. A key question is whether any additional evidence tying Tuite to the killing has been developed.
Stephanie, a popular seventh-grader fond of church and the film "Titanic," was found dead on the morning of Jan. 21, 1998, at the Crowes' home in northeast Escondido, near Lake Wohlford. She had been stabbed nine times.
Five other family members were in the house, but none said they heard anything. Puzzled by that, and unable to find any sign of forced entry, detectives focused almost immediately on the girl's brother. They thought Michael, who had been home two days with the flu, seemed oddly unemotional about his sister's death.
During the next two days, Crowe was interrogated for 10 hours. Detectives lied about evidence against him – a legal interviewing technique – and arrested him after they said he confessed. He quickly recanted.
Within weeks, detectives also arrested two of his friends at Orange Glen High School, Joshua Treadway and Aaron Houser, both 15. Treadway, interrogated for 20 hours over two days, insisted initially that he knew nothing about the stabbing.
He wavered when detectives lied about evidence and told Treadway the other two teens were setting him up. Eventually he gave a detailed story about how Crowe and Houser stabbed Stephanie while he acted as the lookout. He, too, recanted.
The case collapses
For the next year, Escondido police and the District Attorney's Office argued the three teens killed Stephanie in a conspiracy hatched by sibling rivalry and a fascination with violent role-playing video games. Detectives and prosecutors scoffed when the teens' attorneys said Tuite was the more likely killer. The transient was wandering near the Crowes' house that night, banging on doors and looking in windows in search of a woman named Tracy, an old friend.
Tuite was well-known to police. He has a long string of mostly minor, nonviolent arrests. Tuite was a "bungling prowler," detectives concluded, too addled by drugs and mental illness to have committed the crime without waking anyone else in the house or leaving obvious clues behind.
"Mr. Tuite didn't have it in him, even if he wanted to," the lead detective, Ralph Claytor, said.
Yet cracks emerged in the foundation of their case. No blood or fingerprint evidence tied the teens to the crime.
At one hearing, Superior Court Judge Laura Palmer Hammes criticized the prosecution's evidence: "If this were a court trial, these boys would be found not guilty." Later, Superior Court Judge John Thompson threw out most of the teens' statements, ruling police had illegally coerced the confessions.
The case collapsed in January 1999, on the eve of Treadway's trial, when DNA tests found Stephanie's blood was on Tuite's sweat shirt. Charges against the trio were dismissed, but prosecutors deemed the case "a mystery" and said the teens remained suspects.
The families, in turn, filed federal lawsuits, accusing the authorities of bungling the homicide investigation and violating their constitutional rights. Those suits have been on hold while the criminal investigation continued.
With word of Tuite's impending arrest, the families said they may finally get the chance to clear their names.
"They've finally done the right thing," said Tammy Treadway, Joshua's mother. "Unfortunately, it doesn't suddenly take away everything they did to us, the Housers and the Crowes. You can't imagine what the Crowes have gone through."
Cheryl Crowe said she has "always tried to hold out a bit of hope in the system. But it has been very hard for us."
"If Richard Tuite is convicted at trial," Steve Crowe added, "we can finally start putting some of this behind us."
Fresh look at evidence
Formal charges against Tuite will set the stage for an unusual trial in which Escondido detectives, the once-accused teens and their family members might be called as witnesses.
David Druliner, a deputy attorney general based in Sacramento, will prosecute. Legal experts said he may have to show the jury the county prosecutors' earlier case against the teens and then explain why he believes they erred.
That could mean introducing such evidence as Treadway's disputed confession; a knife found under Treadway's bed that one expert concluded was probably the murder weapon; and an FBI report claiming the killing was committed by someone familiar with the house.
Mary Ellen Attridge, Treadway's attorney, said building a case against Tuite will be challenging.
"But I believe the attorney general will get a conviction," she said. "They can show Richard Tuite did it, and that it was virtually and factually impossible for those three kids to have done it."
The prosecution of a local case by the Attorney General's Office is rare. It's happening here after more than three years of impasse over how to proceed.
When the case against the teens was dismissed, Escondido police reopened the investigation. After 13 months, detectives decided "fresh eyes" were needed and handed it over to the Sheriff's Department.
After more than a year, sheriff's detectives concluded Tuite was the killer. They took their findings to District Attorney Paul Pfingst.
Last June, Pfingst and Sheriff Bill Kolender asked the attorney general to intervene. The case, which includes more than 7,000 pages of reports and transcripts, was assigned to Druliner. Sources said he made the decision late last month to charge Tuite.
Attempts to reach Pfingst and the Escondido Police Department for comment last night were unsuccessful.
Blood revelation
The red sweat shirt figures to be a key piece of evidence. Several witnesses saw Tuite wearing it the night Stephanie was slain.
Escondido police questioned Tuite the next evening and confiscated his clothes, including the heavily soiled sweat shirt. They also clipped hair and fingernail samples and took photographs. One photo was of a fresh cut on his hand.
Barry Sweeney, the detective who interviewed him, wrote in a report that he "told Tuite that he definitely was not under arrest and that we were taking these samples as possible evidence to clear him of being involved in this serious crime."
The sweat shirt was not examined thoroughly until April 1998, three months after the slaying. By then authorities had charged and jailed the teens.
George Durgin, head of the Escondido crime lab, said he used three techniques to search for blood and found none. Three months later, Attridge got her first look at the sweat shirt in a heavily monitored viewing at the Escondido Police Department. She saw what she thought might be bloodstains and asked that the shirt be tested by an independent lab.
The district attorney agreed and the shirt was sent to Ed Blake, a nationally known forensic scientist in the Bay Area. His tests identified spots of Stephanie's blood in three areas on one sleeve. Tuite's blood also was found on the shirt.
Durgin, who retired from the Escondido department two years ago and now works for the Orange County Sheriff's Department, has defended his work. He and others have suggested privately that the sweat shirt was inadvertently contaminated with Stephanie's blood, but have offered no proof.
Blake has pointed out on several occasions that the blood is a "spatter" stain, which means it was projected onto the shirt by force, not through accidental contact.
Tuite's trial could be more than a year away, considering how long it might take for a defense attorney to master the case's history. The families are used to waiting, but time, they said, has taken its toll.
In the four years since the killing, Cheryl Crowe's mother, Judith Kennedy, has died of cancer. Kennedy found Stephanie's body on the bedroom floor, and it was her hope to see justice done before she passed away.
Cheryl Crowe, 38, recently was diagnosed with cancer, too. Steve Crowe, 40, has suffered vision problems doctors have linked to stress.
Shannon Crowe, who was 10 when her sister died, attends Orange Glen High, the same school where county prosecutors once said Michael Crowe, Treadway and Houser hatched their murderous plot. Shannon said teachers sometimes call her Stephanie.
Michael Crowe attends Palomar College, as does Treadway. Houser is at the University of California San Diego. They remain friends, but are not as close as they used to be. All have said they would testify at Tuite's trial.
"The Escondido police and Paul Pfingst will never apologize for what they did to us," Michael Crowe said. "Even if they did it would be empty. They have no remorse."
Back in the familiar 14-by-14-foot interrogation room at Escondido police headquarters, Joshua Treadway remembered what Detective Ralph Claytor had told him during the overnight interrogation 13 days earlier.
"The evidence is going to screw you to the wall," Claytor had said during the videotaped interrogation. "I'm gonna' have a murder weapon under your bed. So now I have to be thinking about Josh. What do I do with Josh? I charge Josh with the murder of 12-year-old Stephanie Ann Crowe...
The parents asked that Michael be allowed to attend the funeral service, but authorities declined for security reasons. Let him come in shackles, then, his parents begged. Still the answer was no...
As they were packing their belongings, Steve Crowe ran into the Rev. Gary West at the roadside mailbox.
The Crowes' nearest neighbor expressed his condolences and wondered whether the police were sure that the guy pounding on his door that night had nothing to do with it.
What guy? Crowe wanted to know. He said he had heard that a transient, Richard Tuite, was in the neighborhood around the time of the killing, but not that he was on the Crowes' side of Valley Center Road, bothering the next-door neighbor.
"That's when I stopped believing what the police were telling us," Crowe said.