Cleophus Prince Jr. killed six women in San Diego County between January 12 and September 13, 1990. He was convicted in July 1993 on six counts of first degree murder with special circumstances and sentenced to death on November 5, 1993. He remains under sentence of death in California. The San Quentin condemned unit was closed in 2024 and those under sentence of death were transferred to other prisons; executions have been under moratorium since 2019. The San Diego press called him the Clairemont Killer, after the neighbourhood where most of the killings happened.
He was born in Birmingham, Alabama on July 24, 1967 and joined the United States Navy, serving at San Diego. His service ended badly: he was court-martialled for larceny in 1989 and it was recommended that he be discharged once the sentence was served. He then worked as a welder and moved into the Buena Vista Gardens apartment complex in Clairemont.
How he chose the women is the whole shape of this case. He used the swimming pools and gymnasiums of apartment complexes, and later joined the health club where his girlfriend Charla Lewis worked, listing himself on her membership. He attacked women in their own apartments in the middle of the day, timing it for when they had come back from the gym and would be in the shower and least attentive. He either lived near each scene or had friends who did.
The six were Tiffany Schultz, twenty; Janene Weinhold, twenty-one; Holly Tarr, eighteen; Elissa Keller, thirty-eight; and Pamela Clark, forty-two, with her daughter Amber, eighteen. All were stabbed, most of them many times. The jury later found that he had used a knife in every one of the murders.
Elissa Keller was killed in an apartment about a block from the one he had moved to in eastern San Diego. Pamela and Amber Clark were the last, on September 13, 1990, in University City; he was living next door with his girlfriend. Pamela Clark had left home that morning for the Family Fitness Center on Miramar Road, the club his girlfriend had joined in July and listed him on, a membership cancelled ten days later.
He bragged about the double killing to a friend afterwards, and wore a ring taken from one of the dead women on a chain around his neck. Jewellery from the victims was given away to women he knew, which is part of what convicted him.
By the middle of 1990 the city was frightened and the press had a name for him. What ended it was a woman getting ready to shower in February 1991 who heard someone picking her lock, went out of a back window, and found a friend who came and confronted the man at her door. He made an excuse and left. She had the sense that he might have followed her from her gym. Her description and a licence plate given by witnesses led to him. They called him the Clairemont Killer, and the Clairemont Ripper.
He was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama on March 3, 1991, having been picked up there on a theft charge shortly before and released on bail. Blood at several of the scenes matched his DNA profile, and an opal ring taken from one of the victims was recovered.
The trial in San Diego County Superior Court ran into July 1993. On July 13 the jury convicted him of all six first degree murders, five burglaries and one rape, and found true both a rape-murder and a multiple-murder special circumstance. It also convicted him of six attempted burglaries, nine further burglaries of homes belonging to other people, and perjury. After a day's deliberation it fixed the punishment at death, and Judge Charles R. Hayes imposed the sentence on November 5, 1993.
The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment on April 30, 2007. He remains on death row, which in California is now a sentence of imprisonment rather than a scheduled execution: the state has carried out none since 2006 and has had a formal moratorium since 2019. Thirty-five years after the killings, no execution date has been set.