On the evening of Saturday, December 3, 1988, Warren Fulton III and his girlfriend, Rachael Raver, had dinner with his parents. Afterward they went to a Christmas party and then to a bar in Washington, D.C. They left after midnight. Their bodies were found days later in a field off Hunter Mill Road in Reston, in Fairfax County, Virginia. Both had been shot in the head, and Rachael Raver had been raped. Investigators believed the couple had been abducted and forced to drive to the field.
For seventeen years nobody was charged. In 2005, a match came back from a national DNA database. It named a man who had been on California's death row since 1992 for the rape and murder of a fifteen-year-old girl. He had never been a suspect in Virginia. His name was Alfredo Rolando Prieto, and the DNA that tied him to Reston also tied him to a killing in Arlington seven months earlier.
Prieto was born in El Salvador. He was 49 when he died in October 2015 and 40 when he was brought to Virginia in April 2006, so he was born around 1966. What is known about his early life comes almost entirely from testimony offered in mitigation at his trials, by his family and by mental health experts.
His mother, Teodora Alvarado, testified in California about the violence of the country her children grew up in. His sister, Yolanda Loucel, told the California jury that the children lived amid constant warfare and killing, that their father beat their mother, and that their grandfather was murdered in front of Prieto. His brother, Guillermo Prieto, described the same violence. The Fourth Circuit, summing up the defense case in Virginia, listed childhood trauma, "abandonment by his mother," and exposure to violence during El Salvador's civil war. Experts called for the defense in Virginia described a boy who stuttered, wet the bed, played in regressive ways, disliked bathing and was frightened by ghost stories. One expert linked a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder to what he had seen in El Salvador.
He came to California as a teenager. According to the Fourth Circuit, he began abusing drugs and alcohol after the move, and the Virginia mitigation case described his exposure to gang violence as a teenager there. The Supreme Court of Virginia noted that by the time of his intelligence testing he had lived in the United States for more than twenty-four years and spoke English more fluently than Spanish. His elementary school grades were mostly good or very good. His family testified that his first wife, Sandra Figueroa, was a gang member who introduced him to gangs. His brother-in-law, Hector Loucel, described him as a dependable worker, and his sister said he was a good father; he had a daughter. He held jobs, operated heavy equipment, opened bank accounts and held driver's licenses in California and Virginia.
There was violence before 1988. In 1984, according to testimony at his California penalty trial, he drove by a house and shot at a group of men in the front yard, wounding Mario Naranjo and Elias Vera in the legs. His former wife testified that he hit her, threw their daughter toward her, forced sex on her, pointed a gun at her head and stabbed her in the back. A corrections officer testified in rebuttal about an escape from a California prison.
Veronica Lynn Jefferson, called Tina, worked as a finance officer at the Central Intelligence Agency. News reports at the time of the Virginia proceedings gave her age as 24. In May 1988 she was raped and shot to death, and her body was found behind an elementary school in Arlington County, Virginia. Her mother, Velda Jefferson, later testified about her at Prieto's 2010 sentencing hearing.
For years, according to a Fairfax County police report described by Connection Newspapers in 2006, investigators believed the Arlington killing and the Reston killings were unrelated. In 2000, DNA evidence confirmed that the same man had attacked both women. They still did not know who he was.
Rachael Raver grew up in Yorktown, New York. She played Division I soccer at George Washington University for all four years she was there, graduated in 1988 and was living in Alexandria, Virginia. Warren H. Fulton III was a senior at George Washington and the captain of its baseball team, and he was from Vienna, Virginia. They were both 22. "Rachel Raver and Warren Fulton were wonderful student-athletes who made a positive impact on GW," Mary Jo Warner, the university's senior associate athletic director, said in 2010.
The bar they left that night was Mister Days, according to FOX 5 DC. Connection Newspapers, citing police, said they were last seen leaving a Washington sports lounge around midnight on December 2; the GW Hatchet, citing the prosecutor, gave December 3. A Washington Post report reproduced by Hands Off Cain dated the murders December 4. Their bodies were found on December 6, 1988. The Fairfax indictment later included a count of grand larceny, and the Supreme Court of Virginia described the evidence as overwhelming that Prieto alone committed the murders.
When the case reached its final sentencing jury in 2010, members of both families testified. Among them were Rachael's sister, Major Deidre Raver, and Matthew Raver, whom FOX 5 DC identifies as her brother, along with Elizabeth and Veronica Raver and Dr. John Fulton.
In 1989 Manuel Sermeno, 27, was found shot to death in a burning car in Prince William County, Virginia. NBC4 Washington reported in 2015 that he was linked to Prieto, and a 2010 Washington Post report said ballistics tests tied Prieto to a 1989 homicide in Prince William County. He was never charged.
By 1990 Prieto was in Southern California. In May 1990, in Riverside County, Stacey Siegrist and Tony Gianuzzi, a young couple, were shot, and Stacey Siegrist was raped. Their bodies were left in Rubidoux. In June 1990, in Ontario, in San Bernardino County, Herbert Farley, 65, and his wife, Lula, 71, were returning recyclables to a grocery store when Lula Farley was shot to death and her husband was abducted. His body was later found in Rubidoux too.
These four deaths stayed unsolved for twenty years. On October 4, 2010, Riverside County sheriff's cold case detectives matched DNA from the place where Siegrist and Gianuzzi were found to Prieto. Sgt. Scott Brown of the sheriff's department told The Press-Enterprise that ballistics showed the gun used to kill the Farleys was the gun used to kill Siegrist and Gianuzzi. The match was not announced until November 16, so that it would not affect the jury then deciding Prieto's sentence in Fairfax. The Riverside County district attorney was to decide whether to file charges. Prieto was never charged in any of the four deaths.
Yvette Woodruff was fifteen. Late on the night of September 1, 1990, she was with a friend, Lisa, and Lisa's mother when the three of them arrived at a house in San Bernardino County where a robbery was under way. A man named Anthony Rangel had just been robbed there. According to the California Supreme Court's account, the robbers turned to the women. One of them, Vincent Lopez, robbed Lisa's mother at knifepoint. The women were forced into Lisa's car with Prieto and another man, Danny Sorian. Lopez asked to be let out because he did not want to go back to prison, and Prieto stopped and let him go. After several stops in what looked like a search for someone to replace him, a fourth man, Ricardo Estrada, joined them.
They drove the women to a dark, isolated field in the city of Ontario. There Sorian raped Lisa's mother and Estrada raped Lisa, and the court found that Prieto raped Yvette Woodruff. Prieto shot her in the head, and the jury found that he personally used the gun. Estrada stabbed Lisa repeatedly in the neck and hands, and Sorian stabbed her mother until she lost consciousness. Lisa survived by lying on the ground and pretending to be dead. When the car drove off, she went to help her mother and Yvette. The two women ran for help and found a security guard at a Kmart distribution center, who called the police. Yvette Woodruff died of the gunshot wound. The California corrections department's summary dates the police response to September 2 and describes the scene as an abandoned building near a warehouse; the court describes a field.
At first Lisa told police she had been blindfolded, a lie her mother urged her to tell. She later told the truth to the police and at trial. On September 5 she picked Prieto out of a photo lineup. About a week later she identified him again in a live lineup, where her mother identified him by sight and voice; her mother had first said that he was the man who left the car, and changed her account after she recognized his voice. Prieto had a large "PNS" tattoo on his neck.
On September 6, 1990, he was arrested at his home without incident. On a wall heater in his apartment police found a ring of five keys. Lisa identified four as the keys to her car and its gas cap, and the fifth opened her friend's building gate. Semen was found in the evidence from Lisa's mother, but no serological test connected Prieto to the crimes; the case rested on the survivors' identifications and the keys. His girlfriend, Lillian Gutierrez, testified that he had been home with her and her children that night and that she saw no scratches on him that week.
Five days after the murder, according to penalty-phase testimony from a woman named Stella Quinones, Prieto pointed a gun at her husband. While he awaited trial, a deputy found two sharpened metal shanks hidden under his bunk. Prieto said they were his and that he kept them for protection.
A San Bernardino County jury convicted Prieto on January 21, 1992, of first-degree murder with special circumstances of rape, kidnapping, robbery and attempted robbery, and of attempted murder, robbery, kidnapping, rape and possession of a firearm by a felon. It acquitted him of attempted forcible rape. On March 13, 1992, the same jury returned a death verdict. In mitigation his mother, sister, brother and brother-in-law testified. James Park, a psychologist and former prison official, said he would adjust well to prison. A clinical psychologist, Richard Hall, found no psychosis, post-traumatic stress disorder or antisocial personality disorder. The judge imposed the death sentence in June 1992, along with 47 years and four months and additional life terms, and Prieto was admitted to death row at San Quentin State Prison on June 30, 1992.
The California Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and death sentence on April 21, 2003, in an opinion by Justice Brown. It found error in an instruction that let jurors draw inferences from his possession of the keys in deciding the rape and murder counts, but held there was "no reasonable likelihood the jury would have reached a different result," since "Both surviving victims identified defendant." It struck one enhancement and modified some life terms. His California appeals were still continuing in 2015, according to Reston Now.
In 2005 the DNA from the Reston case was resubmitted. At about the same time, DNA samples from California prison inmates were added to the national database. "His DNA was added and it matched," a Fairfax County police spokeswoman, Mary Mulrenan, said in 2006. A verification test was performed. The same profile matched the 1988 Arlington case.
A Fairfax County grand jury indicted Prieto in November 2005 on two counts of capital murder, one count of rape, two counts of using a firearm in the commission of a felony and one count of grand larceny. An Arlington grand jury indicted him the next month in the death of Veronica Jefferson on one count each of capital murder, rape, use of a firearm in a felony, robbery and abduction. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger gave permission for him to be moved to Virginia; according to The Washington Post, California officials agreed to send him on the reasoning that Virginia was more likely to carry out an execution. Fairfax and Arlington officers traveled to California to bring him back, and on Friday night, April 28, 2006, he arrived at the Fairfax County Adult Detention Center. "He's still on death row [in California], but he's been released to go through the court system here," Mulrenan said.
The case was prosecuted by Fairfax Commonwealth's Attorney Robert F. Horan Jr. and his deputy, Raymond F. Morrogh, and defended by Jonathan Shapiro and Peter D. Greenspun. At a hearing in June 2006 before Judge Dennis J. Smith, Shapiro asked for a mitigation specialist and an investigator. "From the little we know, we have a sense there is going to be a trove of mitigating evidence," he said, pointing to Prieto's upbringing in El Salvador.
The first trial opened in June 2007. Horan told the jurors that his case would rest largely on the DNA link. Shapiro said there were many unanswered questions and that "evidence of rape does not prove murder." The jury convicted Prieto of capital murder and rape. During the sentencing phase a juror refused to continue deliberating, saying he had been pressured, and Judge Smith declared a mistrial.
A second trial began in January 2008 before Judge Randy I. Bellows. On January 9, during jury selection, Bellows jailed a prospective juror for contempt after he was caught discussing a Washington Post article about the case with another prospective juror. The case rested almost entirely on DNA. By early March 2008 the jury had convicted Prieto of both capital murders and recommended death on both.
The question of intellectual disability was close, and it followed the case to the end. Under Virginia law as the state's courts then read it, a defendant had to show an IQ score of 70 or below. Amnesty International later counted three scores in the record: 64, 66 and 73. A defense neuropsychologist, Dr. Ricardo Weinstein, gave Prieto a Spanish-language intelligence test and reported a score of 66 using American norms; under the test's Mexican norms the score was 75. The Commonwealth relied on a score of 73 on a standard American test and argued that the Spanish-language test was not an approved one and had been scored improperly. A defense expert, Dr. Merikangas, testified that brain scans showed damage to the areas that "control one's emotions, [and] control one's impulses." Three California prison psychologists had found that he was not intellectually disabled. Prosecutors put before the jury his work history, his licenses, his cross-country flights, the housing and the car purchase he had arranged for himself, his use of aliases, and the grievances and legal papers he had written in prison using accurate legal terms. The jury found that intellectual disability had not been proved.
In 2009 the Supreme Court of Virginia upheld the convictions but set aside the death sentences because of defects in the verdict forms given to the jury, and sent the case back for a new sentencing.
A third jury, empaneled only to decide the sentence, heard the case in the fall of 2010. Members of the Raver and Fulton families testified. So did Lisa, the survivor of the California attack, and Velda Jefferson. For the defense, Teodora Alvarado and Yolanda Loucel described his childhood, and the psychologist James Garbarino testified. This time his lawyers did not relitigate intellectual disability, a choice the Virginia court later called reasonable. The jury was not told that ballistics linked him to the Prince William County killing or that California detectives had just linked him to four more. On November 5, 2010, the jury unanimously found both aggravating factors, future dangerousness and vileness, and recommended death on both counts. On December 16, 2010, Judge Bellows imposed two death sentences.
Morrogh said in 2015 that Prieto "has no conscience and could care less about anyone's life, especially women."
In October 2008, after the second Fairfax verdict, Arlington prosecutors dropped the capital murder indictment in the death of Veronica Jefferson. Chief Deputy Commonwealth's Attorney Theo Stamos said the cost of seeking a fourth death sentence was not warranted, and prosecutors noted they could indict him again if he won his appeals in the other cases. Evidence of her death was put before the 2010 Fairfax jury as an unadjudicated crime.
On January 13, 2012, the Supreme Court of Virginia, in an opinion by Justice Leroy F. Millette Jr., affirmed both death sentences. It rejected claims about the victim-impact testimony, the Jefferson evidence, the judge's refusal to step aside, the jurors' visit to Red Onion State Prison, the appointment of a Commonwealth mental health expert, the jury instructions and the proportionality of the sentence.
On September 12, 2013, the same court dismissed his state habeas petition. It rejected claims that his lawyers should have pursued a stray DNA reading in the evidence from Rachael Raver, which a forensic scientist and a second laboratory concluded was a testing artifact rather than a sign of a third person; that a juror did not live in Virginia; that another juror had concealed childhood abuse; and that counsel had failed to present evidence of brain damage. It held that the loss of some hairs collected in the case, which disappeared before Prieto was a suspect, involved no bad faith. "The evidence was overwhelming," the court wrote, "that Prieto was the sole perpetrator of the murders." His claim that he was intellectually disabled was barred because it could have been raised on direct appeal.
In 2014 the U.S. Supreme Court held in Hall v. Florida that a rigid IQ cutoff of 70 was unconstitutional. On June 30, 2015, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Diana Gribbon Motz joined by Judges Shedd and Diaz, agreed that "the Supreme Court of Virginia's prior interpretation of the first prong of the Virginia statute violates the Eighth Amendment." But it held that Prieto's claim was procedurally defaulted and that he had not shown that no reasonable juror would find him eligible for death. "Absent some new 'smoking gun,'" the court wrote, "evidence of Prieto's adaptive functioning deficits is at best inconclusive," and the Commonwealth had offered "compelling evidence refuting the existence of any adaptive deficits."
Prieto's execution was set for Thursday, October 1, 2015. Amnesty International issued an urgent appeal on September 23 asking Governor Terry McAuliffe to commute the sentence, arguing that procedural rules had kept his intellectual disability claim from a full hearing. The apostolic nuncio in Washington wrote on behalf of Pope Francis "asking that Mr. Prieto not be executed." McAuliffe's office said he personally opposed the death penalty but would not let his personal feelings stop him from upholding the law, and he declined to intervene.
The last days turned on the drugs. Virginia's supply of the sedative midazolam expired on Wednesday, September 30, and the state obtained pentobarbital from Texas. Prieto's lawyers said the state would not disclose information about the drug's quality and warned it could cause "gratuitous and unnecessary pain." On September 30, U.S. District Judge Anthony J. Trenga in Alexandria temporarily halted the execution and, at the state's request, moved the case to Richmond. On Thursday, Judge Henry E. Hudson lifted the order, finding the lawyers had not shown the drugs were unsafe. Delay, he said, would harm those victimized by Prieto's crimes, a harm "magnified here by the appalling number of people that Prieto has killed, raped, or otherwise injured." Margaret O'Shea, for Attorney General Mark Herring, said Texas had used the same drug in twenty-four executions over two years without problems. "It is time for this to end," she said. "It is time for the carousel to end." The Fourth Circuit rejected a last-minute appeal over the drug, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to stay the execution on his intellectual disability claim.
Matthew Raver had told the Associated Press that the delays felt like "salt in the wound." "I look forward to it as a relief that this individual ... and all his games, his plotting, his violence has ended," he said. He and his sister planned to attend, and Morrogh said he would witness the execution.
Prieto entered the execution chamber at the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt at 8:53 p.m., wearing jeans and a light blue shirt, and showed no emotion as he was strapped to the gurney. He thanked his lawyers, his supporters and his family, then said, "Get this over with." Virginia's three-drug protocol used pentobarbital, rocuronium bromide and potassium chloride. The warden stepped behind the curtain at 9:09 p.m., and Prieto was pronounced dead at 9:17 p.m. He was 49. NBC4 Washington reported that his last words were the first and only time he spoke publicly about his crimes. A clergy member, Brent Epperson, who spoke with him beforehand, said he had asked whether Prieto had offered or asked for absolution for his sins or crimes, and that Prieto would neither confirm nor deny it.
"Today ends a long and painful ordeal for my family, that has haunted us for over 26 years," Deidre Raver said in a written statement. His lawyer, Robert Lee, said: "Tonight the Commonwealth executed a man without knowing whether he has intellectual disability or not."
Alfredo Prieto was executed on October 1, 2015. He was the first person executed in Virginia in nearly three years, since Robert Gleason Jr., and the 111th since the state resumed executions in 1982, according to the Associated Press and Hands Off Cain. His California death sentence was never carried out. None of the six other killings linked to him by DNA or ballistics was ever charged, and with his death none can be.
The case turned on a cold hit made once California inmates' DNA reached the national database, and it showed the cost of prosecuting a man who was already condemned. Fairfax tried him twice and empaneled a third jury to sentence him, and Arlington decided that a fourth death sentence was not worth the expense. It also became part of the national argument over IQ cutoffs after Hall v. Florida and over the supply of execution drugs.
On March 24, 2021, Governor Ralph Northam signed a law abolishing the death penalty in Virginia, at the Greensville Correctional Center where Prieto was executed. Virginia became the first state of the former Confederacy to end capital punishment. CBS News reported that the commonwealth had carried out 113 executions since 1976 and that the two men left on its death row would have their sentences reduced to life.
Convictions. Prieto was convicted of three murders: Yvette Woodruff in California, and Rachael Raver and Warren Fulton in Virginia. He never confessed to any killing.
Veronica Jefferson. He was indicted in her death, and DNA from her case matched the Reston DNA and Prieto's profile. The indictment was dropped for reasons of cost, not evidence, and he was never tried. Her death was put to the 2010 jury as an unadjudicated crime.
The other killings. The links to Manuel Sermeno (ballistics), Stacey Siegrist and Tony Gianuzzi (DNA), and Lula and Herbert Farley (ballistics tying the Farley gun to the Siegrist and Gianuzzi gun) were made by investigators and reported in the press. None was charged or tested in court. The figure of nine killings in a little over two years is an investigators' count reported by The Washington Post in 2010 and repeated by prosecutors in 2015; the Associated Press said he was linked to as many as six killings beyond those he was convicted of.
The California identification. The case for the Woodruff murder rested on the survivors' identifications and the car keys, not on physical evidence. One survivor first lied to police at her mother's urging, and her mother first gave a different account of his role. The California Supreme Court called the evidence overwhelming.
Intellectual disability. A Virginia jury rejected the claim in 2008 under an IQ rule the Fourth Circuit later said violated the Eighth Amendment, and no court decided it under the correct standard because the claim was procedurally barred. His scores ranged from 64 to 75 depending on the test and the norms used.
Dates. Sources give December 2 or 3, 1988, for the night Raver and Fulton were last seen and December 4 for the killings; the bodies were found December 6. The Woodruff crime began late on September 1, 1990; the corrections department dates the police response to September 2.
About 1966: Prieto is born in El Salvador.
1984: He shoots and wounds two men in California, according to penalty-phase testimony.
May 1988: Veronica Jefferson is raped and shot in Arlington, Virginia.
December 1988: Rachael Raver and Warren Fulton III, both 22, are abducted after leaving a Washington bar; their bodies are found in Reston on December 6.
1989: Manuel Sermeno, 27, is shot in Prince William County, Virginia.
May and June 1990: Stacey Siegrist and Tony Gianuzzi, and Lula and Herbert Farley, are killed in Riverside and San Bernardino counties.
September 1, 1990: Yvette Woodruff, 15, is killed in Ontario, California.
September 6, 1990: Prieto is arrested.
January 21, 1992: Convicted in San Bernardino County. March 13, 1992: Death verdict. June 30, 1992: Admitted to death row at San Quentin.
2000: DNA shows the Arlington and Reston killings were committed by the same man.
April 21, 2003: The California Supreme Court affirms.
2005: The national database matches Prieto to Reston and Arlington; indictments in November and December.
April 28, 2006: He arrives in Fairfax County.
June 2007: First Fairfax trial; conviction, then a mistrial in the sentencing phase.
January to March 2008: Second trial; conviction and death verdicts.
October 2008: Arlington drops the Jefferson indictment.
2009: Virginia Supreme Court orders resentencing.
October 4, 2010: Riverside County detectives match his DNA to the Siegrist and Gianuzzi case (announced November 16).
November 5, 2010: Third jury recommends death. December 16, 2010: Sentence imposed.
January 13, 2012: Virginia Supreme Court affirms.
September 12, 2013: State habeas petition dismissed.
June 30, 2015: Fourth Circuit affirms denial of federal habeas.
October 1, 2015: Executed at Greensville Correctional Center.
March 24, 2021: Virginia abolishes the death penalty.