On the morning of January 12, 1990, Tiffany Paige Schultz, twenty-one by most accounts and twenty in the court record, was seen sunbathing in the doorway of her second-floor apartment at Canyon Ridge in the Clairemont neighborhood of San Diego at about ten o'clock. She was later found inside, stabbed to death. Her live-in boyfriend was arrested for the murder and released a few days later. Over the next eight months five more women were stabbed to death in their homes, in daylight, in Clairemont and nearby neighborhoods, and San Diego police mounted what they called the largest manhunt in the department's history. The man convicted of all six, Cleophus Prince Jr., was a twenty-two-year-old former Navy sailor who lived among them.
Prince was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on July 24, 1967. When he was two his father was convicted of murder and went on to serve eleven years in prison. He joined the Navy and was stationed at San Diego, but in October 1989 he was court-martialed for larceny, and it was recommended that he be discharged once he had served his sentence. Two months later he moved into the Buena Vista Gardens apartment complex in Clairemont, where he lived until May 2, 1990. In each killing the man came in by day through an unlocked door or window, caught the woman during or just after a bath or shower, and stabbed her with a knife from her own kitchen.
The first three women lived in or near that complex. Janene Weinhold, twenty-one, a student at the University of California, San Diego, shared a second-floor apartment there with a roommate. On the morning of February 16 she drove the roommate to work at nine, said she was going home to do laundry and homework, and never came back at two to pick her up. She had been raped and stabbed. Her parents later paid for playground equipment at the South Clairemont park in her memory. Holly Suzanne Tarr, eighteen, a high school senior from Okemos, Michigan, visiting her brother at his Buena Vista Gardens apartment, who had been profiled a few months earlier on her hometown television station for her plans to go to college and become an actress, was killed on April 3. Her death was the one that convinced police a serial killer was at work, and a maintenance worker who saw a man run from the complex gave them a composite sketch that April. Her brother's name and hers were on the weight-room sign-in sheet that day, and so was a third: C. Prince. Detectives questioned him within a day; he said he had worked out until about noon and gone home, refused to be fingerprinted, and could not be held. Between those two killings a woman who lived at Buena Vista Gardens noticed a man following her home and staring at her; she later identified him as Prince.
Late that April Prince twice tried to get into apartments belonging to young women at the Torrey Pines Village complex, and in early May he followed a woman from the beach to a house in La Jolla Shores and tried to force his way in. He had by then moved to the Top of the Hill apartments in eastern San Diego with his girlfriend, Charla Lewis. On May 20, 1990, Elissa Keller, thirty-eight, was stabbed to death in her apartment on Trojan Avenue, about a block away. Keller had a daughter, who later testified about her mother's life at his trial. In August he burglarized an apartment in his own complex that three young women shared and exchanged the Italian lire he stole at a Thomas Cook foreign exchange office.
He met some of the women, or at least watched them, where they exercised: apartment pools and gyms, and later the Family Fitness Center on Miramar Road, where Charla Lewis worked and where he was listed on her membership. Pamela Clark, forty-two, went to that club regularly before noon. On September 13, 1990, she and her daughter Amber, eighteen, were stabbed to death in their home in University City. Prince was living nearby. At the time, police had not yet connected Keller's death to the others.
In January 1991 police were concentrating on an accused rapist. In February Prince followed a woman home from the Miramar Road club to a house in Scripps Ranch; she was about to shower when she heard a noise at the door, ran to a neighbor, and the neighbor confronted him. He said he was looking for a female friend, walked off, and the witnesses took down his license plate. Police picked him up in the parking lot of a health club on February 4, 1991, after asking club workers to watch for his car, and he agreed to give a blood sample. He then went home to Birmingham, where he was arrested on a theft charge and released on bail, and on March 3, 1991, after six hours of telephone calls with Birmingham police, he walked into a precinct house with his mother and was taken into custody for the six San Diego murders. The DNA from his blood and saliva matched evidence from Janene Weinhold's murder, and the pattern of that killing tied it to the others. Holly Tarr's opal ring was found with Charla Lewis, to whom he had given it as a Christmas present in December 1990. Elissa Keller's gold nugget ring was traced to him, and two roommates testified that he had Pamela Clark's wedding ring, which he wore on a chain around his neck. A swimming pool attendance log placed him near Tarr. In April 1990 he had told two friends about a date with a woman whom he said he forced himself on, twice, while she wept; early in 1991 he told a coworker at a cable company about a woman named Janene he worked out with and visited at home, and said the police would never catch the Clairemont murderer.
In March 1992 a judge ordered him to stand trial, rejecting a defense argument that three of the murder charges lacked evidence. His trial in San Diego County Superior Court ended on July 13, 1993, with guilty verdicts on all twenty-seven counts. The jury convicted him of six counts of first degree murder, five burglaries and the rape of Janene Weinhold, and found true a rape-murder special circumstance and a multiple-murder special circumstance, and that he had used a knife in every killing. It also convicted him of six attempted burglaries, nine burglaries of other homes, and perjury. At the penalty phase the parents of Tiffany Schultz, Janene Weinhold and Holly Tarr testified, as did Elissa Keller's daughter, and the prosecution played the twenty-five-minute television interview in which Tarr talked about her future. The defense called members of his family and a friend to describe his childhood. The jury returned a death verdict after a day of deliberation, and on November 5, 1993, Judge Charles R. Hayes sentenced him to death.
The California Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and the sentence on April 30, 2007, rejecting his argument that press coverage had made a fair jury impossible. California has carried out no execution since 2006 and has been under a formal moratorium since 2019, and the condemned unit at San Quentin has since been closed and its prisoners moved to other institutions. As of June 2026, state corrections records showed Prince still under sentence of death and held at California State Prison, Sacramento.