On Friday, November 15, 2019, Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey stood before reporters with the families of two young women who had been dead for decades. Selena Keough had been killed in July 1981. Mary Duggan had been killed in June 1986. Their deaths had happened five years and about thirty miles apart, in two different counties, and for most of the time since, nobody had known who was responsible. Lacey announced that a 64-year-old man from Bakersfield had been charged with both murders. His name was Horace Van Vaultz Jr.
The case had been solved with a method the county's prosecutors had never used in court before. Investigators had uploaded a DNA profile from the crime scenes to genealogy databases, found relatives of the man who had left it, built a family tree and narrowed the list to one person. Then a detective took an item from that person's trash. "Murderers should not get a free pass because their DNA is not in a criminal database," Lacey said that day. Nearly three years later a jury convicted Vaultz of both killings, and in 2024 the state's appeals court upheld the verdict. A third woman, Janna Rowe, is part of this story too. Vaultz was tried for her death in 1988 and acquitted.
Little about Vaultz's early life appears in the public record. He was 64 when he was arrested in November 2019 and 67 at his trial in 2022, which places his birth in the mid-1950s. He served in the Marine Corps, according to reports from his trial. In the 1980s, according to Burbank police Detective Aaron Kay, he was a peripheral figure in the early days of the Los Angeles hip-hop scene, and his access to large dance events and parties put him in contact with hundreds, if not thousands, of young women. Kay said he had moved "all over Southern California" since the 1980s and had "a connection to Texas" that investigators planned to explore.
On the witness stand in 2022 Vaultz described himself as a "swinger." "That's my lifestyle," he told jurors more than once. He acknowledged that he had cheated on his wives and girlfriends and said he had had dozens or even hundreds of sexual partners in the 1980s. At the time of his arrest his permanent home was in Bakersfield, in Kern County. His defense lawyer, Damon Lamont Hobdy, described him in 2019 as a retired widower. "He was enjoying his life, enjoying his family," Hobdy said. A sister, Cheryl, wrote a statement that was read at his sentencing.
Vaultz was not unknown to the courts. Court records reviewed by NBC Los Angeles in 2020 showed he had been arrested for a number of sexual assaults. In one, in 1984, a 22-year-old woman accused him of choking and sexually assaulting her, and he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor. In 1988 he was tried in Ventura County for the murder of Janna Rowe and acquitted, as described below.
Later records involve domestic violence. The Los Angeles Times reported that in 1996 he was granted probation in a plea deal with the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office after being charged with domestic abuse and assault. In Kern County he was charged in September 2005 with two misdemeanor counts of spousal abuse and one peace-disturbance count, according to Superior Court records cited by KERO-TV in Bakersfield; the Times reported that prosecutors later dropped those charges. In April 2007 he was charged again with misdemeanor spousal abuse, assault with a deadly weapon other than a firearm and a peace-disturbance count. KERO reported that he received two days in jail and two years of probation; the Times reported that he was allowed to plead to a lesser peace-disturbance charge. A woman also sued him in civil court alleging domestic violence in 2005 and 2007.
That woman's parents spoke to the Times in 2019 on condition that their names not be used, saying they feared retaliation. They said their daughter had met Vaultz in the early 2000s, soon after her divorce, and that during a relationship of about a year he hurt her badly enough on at least one occasion to put her in the hospital. They said he kept harassing her after it ended, until she moved away from Bakersfield. She died of a heart attack in 2011, at 43. "I just hope and pray he never gets out," her mother said.
None of these earlier cases had put Vaultz's DNA into the criminal databases. "Because his criminal history goes back so far, it predates the advent of these (criminal) DNA databases that we have," Detective Kay said after the arrest.
Selena Keough was 20 years old and the mother of a young child, according to the district attorney's office and the Associated Press; City News Service reports from the trial give her age as 21. She had a sister, Sabrina, now Sabrina Plourde, who attended the trial four decades later, and a mother who, Plourde said, never recovered from the loss. Her mother died of a massive stroke at 54, five years after Selena was killed, and Plourde told reporters she holds Vaultz responsible for that death too.
Keough was killed on July 16, 1981. Her body was found that day under bushes near an apartment building on a street in Montclair, a small city in western San Bernardino County, just over the line from Los Angeles County. She had been bound, sexually assaulted and strangled, according to prosecutors and police. The Montclair Police Department investigated. No one was charged, and the case went cold.
Mary Duggan was 22 and lived in Reseda, in the San Fernando Valley, with her father. Her family described her to Burbank police as "the life of the party," and she often went to venues in the Southern California music scene, a police spokesman told the Los Angeles Times. Her mother, Maureen, wrote at the sentencing in 2022 that the family missed her "every day, at every family gathering and holiday."
On the night before she died, Duggan was seen at a bar on Vanowen Street in Reseda and at a pizza restaurant nearby on Saticoy Street, according to Burbank police. She was killed on June 9, 1986. Her body was found in the trunk of her own car, a 1980 Ford Mustang, parked in an empty lot near Glenoaks Boulevard and Cohasset Street in Burbank, close to the 5 Freeway. It had been covered with newspapers, according to a contemporary Times account of a reward the Burbank City Council offered for information. She had been bound and sexually assaulted, and she died of asphyxia after a tissue was stuffed down her throat, prosecutors said.
"The leads ended up running cold," Kay said in 2020. "There was very little to follow up on." Evidence from the scene was kept. Kay later credited the original investigators for preserving it at a time when, as he put it, "DNA wasn't even a thing back in 1986, 1981."
Six months after Mary Duggan died, a third young woman was killed. Janna Rowe was 25. She was last seen at a motel in Thousand Oaks, in Ventura County, around Christmas 1986, and several days later her body was found partially clothed on a pile of trash at a dump site in Ventura. She had been strangled. Police learned at the time that Vaultz had rented the motel room for her several days earlier, and a piece of custom-made jewelry she had worn was later found in his mother's jewelry box, according to evidence described at the 2022 trial. Law&Crime reported that prosecutors also tied him to her car.
Vaultz was charged with Rowe's murder and tried in Ventura County Superior Court. In 1988 a jury acquitted him. DNA evidence was not yet in use at trial. The constitutional protection against double jeopardy means he cannot be tried for her death again, however the evidence has changed since.
Rowe's family never accepted the verdict. Her brother, Jeffry Rowe, said in 2022 that he had "despised the defendant since he was acquitted of murdering my sister Janna in 1988, knowing full well in my mind he was guilty." Her mother, Marcia Conner, said the family "has had to live with the knowledge that we would never find justice."
The first link between the cases came in 2006. That year a DNA profile developed from evidence in Mary Duggan's case was uploaded to a law enforcement database. It did not identify anyone, but it matched a male DNA profile from the 1981 killing of Selena Keough in Montclair. The two cases, in two counties, had been committed by the same man. "That was a big deal, because it opened up a whole new avenue of leads that we didn't know about," Kay said. None of those leads produced a name.
For another twelve years the profile sat unmatched. Whoever had left it had never been required to give a DNA sample to the state, or had given one before the databases existed.
The change came in 2018, when authorities arrested the man accused of being the so-called Golden State Killer and revealed that they had found him by searching genealogical databases for relatives of the man whose DNA had been left at the crime scenes. "That was big news, because now there was a different way of using the suspect's DNA to try to identify him," Kay said.
Kay, a young Burbank detective who had been 2 years old when Mary Duggan was killed, had by then been handed her case to re-investigate. With the approval of his supervisors and prosecutors, the combined Duggan and Keough profile was used to search for relatives, first in law enforcement DNA files and then in genealogical data online. The Federal Bureau of Investigation's genetic genealogy team worked on the case with the Burbank and Montclair police departments, according to the district attorney's office. Investigators built a list of possible suspects, and one man fit by sex, age and where he had lived at the times of the killings. "I remember when I saw his name, then I saw some of the things that were contributing to my suspicion of him, I got excited," Kay said. Investigators said they became aware of Vaultz in September 2019.
A genealogy match is a lead, not proof, and it cannot be used by itself to charge anyone. Detectives began watching Vaultz at his home in Bakersfield. One day an investigator took his trash before it could be collected. "Based on the match, the detectives then collected DNA from the defendant's trash," Lacey said later. "The DNA matched the forensic evidence found in both crimes, giving us the evidence we needed to file murder charges against the suspect." The trash was collected in October 2019, according to the Times.
On Thursday, November 14, 2019, Burbank police stopped Vaultz's car in the Inglewood area of Los Angeles County and arrested him. He had been under surveillance. He was held without bail, and he remained in custody from that day on.
The next day Lacey announced the charges with members of both families beside her. "As district attorney one of the most frustrating aspects of my job is being unable to provide comfort and closure to the families of murder victims in cases that have gone unsolved," she said. "But thanks to the advances in technology and forensics, we are now able to virtually reach back in time and find those responsible for these very vicious crimes." She said the case was the first criminal prosecution in Los Angeles County to rely on investigative genetic genealogy, which she described as loading DNA material from a crime into commercial databases and finding a relative's match that could point toward a suspect. "These cases would have remained unsolved," she said. "The suspect is 64 years old; the chances of him doing something that would get him arrested are pretty slim."
Burbank Police Chief Scott LaChasse credited "more contemporary technology" with identifying Vaultz and said there "may be several other cases out there that need to be investigated based on who the suspect is and what the circumstances of the crimes were." The department set up a tip line, and the district attorney's office said it had contacted other agencies to determine whether Vaultz was responsible for other unsolved murders in California. Investigators declined to say whether he had known either woman.
Vaultz was charged with two counts of murder. The complaint carried seven special-circumstance allegations, including multiple murders, lying in wait, and murder during the commission of rape and sodomy. Special circumstances in California make a defendant eligible for death or for life in prison without the possibility of parole, and Lacey's office said it would decide later whether to seek the death penalty.
Keough had been killed in San Bernardino County, not Los Angeles County. San Bernardino County District Attorney Jason Anderson agreed to let both murders be tried together in Los Angeles. "The Keough family has waited for 38 years to get justice and we don't want them to wait any longer," he said.
Vaultz made his first court appearance on Monday, November 18, 2019, in downtown Los Angeles without entering a plea, and his arraignment was reset. On December 19, 2019, he pleaded not guilty to both murders.
When Vaultz was arrested, police searched his home and found a collection of photographs of women. In March 2020 Burbank police made the photos public in the hope of identifying the women in them. Kay said the women looked similar to one another: young, white, with light brown or blond hair. "I don't know who they are," he told NBC Los Angeles. "My concern is that either they're missing or dead. They could be the victim of something."
Kay said many young women vanished from the Los Angeles area in the same period and were never found, and that in other cases bodies had been found but DNA could not be collected for comparison. "I want to make sure that people see his picture, that they understand what he was doing back then, to see if we can get some resolution to some other families," he said. "That's my biggest concern. I don't want to leave anyone behind who's a victim." No source found for this bio reports that any woman in the photographs was identified as a victim, and no further charges were filed.
In April 2021, after a hearing on whether the evidence was sufficient, Vaultz was ordered to stand trial on two counts of murder with special-circumstance allegations of multiple murders and sexual assault, the district attorney's office announced. He was due to be arraigned in Superior Court that month. At that stage he still faced either the death penalty or life without parole if convicted as charged. By the time of trial in August 2022, George Gascón had replaced Lacey as district attorney, and the maximum penalty reported was life without the possibility of parole.
The trial was held in the summer of 2022 in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom. Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman prosecuted. Hobdy defended.
The prosecution's case rested first on DNA: Vaultz's DNA was found on or in the bodies of both women, who were found fully or partially nude. The jury also heard about Janna Rowe. Silverman told jurors that a recent re-examination of evidence in the Rowe case had found Vaultz's DNA there too, evidence that had not been available for testing when he was acquitted in 1988. She said he could not be retried for Rowe's death, but jurors could consider it as "pattern evidence." All three women had been strangled and tied up in similar ways, the prosecution said.
Two living women also testified against him. Vaultz's former wife told the jury that he had been violent and had bragged of killing women. Another woman testified that she had reported to police in the 1980s that Vaultz tried to strangle her, and that she had feared she would be raped.
Vaultz testified in his own defense. He did not deny that his DNA was on the women. He said he could not remember meeting Keough or Duggan, but that it was possible, given the number of women he had slept with. He said he had known Rowe. He denied killing any of them. "My semen means I may have had sex with the person. It doesn't mean I killed them," he said. "I'm telling you I didn't kill anyone." He told the jury he had spent the previous two years and nine months "courtesy of the L.A. County jail."
Closing arguments ended on Wednesday, August 17, 2022. Silverman called the killings "sexually motivated homicides" that were "committed by the same serial killer between 1981 and 1986." She said Vaultz had been "unable to explain any of the evidence tying him to the murders," and that "a ton of evidence" pointed "only to the defendant." "The defendant chose these victims," she said. "The defendant is sitting here because he's a serial killer ... a sexual predator."
She took on the defense theory directly. "To believe the defendant's story, you'd have to throw out all your common sense," she said. "You'd have to believe this defendant is the most unlucky person on the planet, to have three women all turn up dead with the defendant's semen inside them. That the defendant, who's having sex with all these women, is just being followed around by a serial killer." She asked the jurors to "hold him accountable" and to "tell him that his reign of terror ends now."
Hobdy argued that the sex had been consensual and that someone else had killed the women afterward. "Yeah the DNA is pretty strong," he told the jury. "But DNA doesn't cry out to you and say, 'Oh, this by the way is the person who committed this crime.'" He said it was "reasonable to conclude that sex happened, and sometime later, these women were killed." He acknowledged that his client was "not perfect" but said that did not make him a serial killer. He urged the jury to disregard the testimony of the former wife and the woman from the 1980s. "These people, with all due respect, are still living!" he said. "That's not the M-O of a serial killer." He closed by telling jurors: "If the evidence shows he's not guilty, which it does, do your duty."
On Thursday, August 18, 2022, the jury of nine men and three women found Vaultz guilty of two counts of first-degree murder. It found true the special-circumstance allegations of multiple murders and of murder during the commission of rape; reports differ on whether the sodomy finding applied to both women or to Keough only. City News Service reported that the jury deliberated about three hours. Vaultz showed no reaction as the verdicts were read, KNBC-TV reported.
"Using the latest in technology and forensics, we were able to secure a conviction against someone who targeted young women," Gascón said in a statement. "I hope that today's guilty verdict provides some comfort to the victims' families who have waited more than three decades to see this result." Silverman called it a "great moment to see the end of this reign of terror."
Outside court, Sabrina Plourde thanked the investigators. "You think for so many years nobody cares," she said. "They do care and they won't forget and they won't forget about the family if you're missing someone." She said it had been "heart-wrenching" to hear in court what had happened to her sister.
Sgt. Aaron Kay, by then promoted, said there had been "two times when my heart pounded in this case": when he first identified Vaultz as a suspect, and when he heard the verdict read. "It's been incredible to be able to deliver something to the victims' families," he said. One juror, Tyler Razo, said he felt fortunate to be part of the verdict, knowing the families had been "waiting so many years for this moment." Hobdy told City News Service that what had happened was a "tragedy" and that his heart went out to the families of both the victims and the defendant.
On Monday, September 19, 2022, the court sentenced Vaultz to two consecutive terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole. The hearing was set for the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center in downtown Los Angeles.
Silverman read a statement from Mary Duggan's mother, Maureen. "When you get past the shock of hearing your daughter is dead, you wonder who is out there that did this," she wrote. "Then you just miss her so much, every day, at every family gathering and holiday... It's one thing that your child dies at only 22 years old. It's a whole other thing to know she suffered in dying." Sabrina Plourde said it had been difficult to sit through the trial. "I didn't know how bad it was until I came to court," she said, and she asked the judge to impose the strongest sentence available.
Janna Rowe's parents and brother came to the sentencing as well, though Rowe's case was not part of it. Her mother, Marcia Conner, called the result "bittersweet." She thanked "everyone involved in solving this case and bringing it to trial" and said she hoped the verdict "brings some closure to the families that have suffered through these past long years of heartbreak." Jeffry Rowe said it made him ill to speak Vaultz's name. "How unjust to have him alive and free on the same Earth as us for the last 37 years," he said. "I'm actually sad that he is not being sentenced to death."
Hobdy read a statement from Vaultz's sister Cheryl, who wrote that he had been a good brother and friend. "We will always love him as Jesus Christ loves him," she wrote.
Vaultz appealed to the California Court of Appeal, Second Appellate District, arguing among other things that the prosecutor had committed misconduct. In a ruling dated April 12, 2024, a three-justice panel affirmed the convictions, according to a City News Service report published in the Burbank Leader. The panel said it "cannot condone" comments the prosecutor made while cross-examining Vaultz, but found the evidence of guilt "overwhelming." "Vaultz's testimony was anything but credible," the justices wrote, and "given the insurmountable evidence against Vaultz, no miscarriage of justice occurred." The opinion also referred to the fact that three women who had been strangled to death were found to have the defendant's DNA inside them.
The California Supreme Court then declined to review the case, the same report said. It was first printed in the Burbank Leader's June 29, 2024, issue. The report did not give the date of the Supreme Court's order, and the full text of the appeals court opinion could not be retrieved for this bio, so the specific comments the panel criticized are not described here.
As of the Burbank Leader report first printed June 29, 2024, Vaultz's convictions had been affirmed on appeal and the California Supreme Court had declined review, which ends the ordinary direct appeal in the state courts. He is serving two consecutive terms of life without the possibility of parole. Whether he has filed any later petition, such as a habeas corpus petition in state or federal court, and where he is held, was not checked for this bio; no source found reports any further proceedings.
The acquittal in the Rowe case stands. No charges have been reported in any other case, and no source found reports the outcome of the 2019 and 2020 efforts to link him to other unsolved killings or to identify the women in the photographs.
The Vaultz case was a first for Los Angeles County: the first prosecution there built on investigative genetic genealogy, a method that had become public only the year before with the Golden State Killer arrest. Law enforcement agencies have used it more and more since, searching databases in which people volunteer their genetic information to find relatives and tracing family trees until a suspect emerges. In this case, as in others, the genealogy search did not convict anyone by itself. It produced a name, and a conventional DNA comparison, made from a discarded item and then confirmed, produced the evidence.
The case also showed what the method could not do. It could not reopen the Rowe case. Her family heard the 2022 jury told that Vaultz's DNA had been found on her body, and heard the appeals court refer to three strangled women, while the 1988 verdict of not guilty remained final.
For the Keough and Duggan families, the convictions came more than thirty-five years after the killings. Selena Keough's mother did not live to see them. Mary Duggan's mother did, and wrote that the family still missed her daughter "every day."
Proven: Vaultz was convicted by a jury of the first-degree murders of Selena Keough (1981) and Mary Duggan (1986), with special-circumstance findings, and the conviction was affirmed on appeal in 2024. He has always denied killing them and maintains that any sexual contact was consensual.
Acquitted: Vaultz was tried for the murder of Janna Rowe (1986) and acquitted by a Ventura County jury in 1988. Prosecutors said in 2022 that a re-examination of the evidence found his DNA on her body, and the appeals court opinion, as reported, referred to three strangled women with his DNA. He has not been convicted of her death and cannot be retried. This bio does not treat him as her killer.
Prior record: a 1984 misdemeanor no-contest plea after a woman accused him of choking and sexually assaulting her; domestic-violence cases in Los Angeles County (1996) and Kern County (2005 and 2007), with dispositions reported differently by different outlets.
Suspected only: in 2019 and 2020 police and prosecutors said they were checking whether Vaultz was linked to other unsolved crimes and asked the public to help identify women in photographs found in his home. No further victim has been named and no further charge filed in any source found. His former wife testified that he bragged of killing women; that testimony was disputed by the defense and is not evidence of any specific killing.
Prosecutors and some news reports call him a serial killer. That description rests on the two convictions and on the prosecution's pattern argument.
Mid-1950s: Horace Van Vaultz Jr. born (age 64 at his November 2019 arrest).
July 16, 1981: Selena Keough, 20, killed; found under bushes in Montclair, San Bernardino County.
1984: Vaultz pleads no contest to a misdemeanor after a 22-year-old woman accuses him of choking and sexually assaulting her.
June 9, 1986: Mary Duggan, 22, of Reseda, killed; found in the trunk of her car in Burbank.
December 1986: Janna Rowe, 25, killed; found in Ventura days after she was last seen at a Thousand Oaks motel.
1988: Vaultz acquitted of Rowe's murder in Ventura County Superior Court.
1996: Granted probation in a Los Angeles County domestic-violence plea deal.
2005 and 2007: Domestic-violence charges in Kern County.
2006: DNA profile from the Duggan case matches the Keough case.
2018: Golden State Killer arrest makes investigative genetic genealogy public.
September 2019: Genealogy search points investigators to Vaultz.
October 2019: DNA from his trash matches both crime scenes.
November 14, 2019: Arrested at a traffic stop in the Inglewood area.
November 15, 2019: Charged with two counts of murder with special circumstances.
December 19, 2019: Pleads not guilty.
March 5, 2020: Burbank police release photographs found in his home.
April 2021: Ordered to stand trial.
August 17, 2022: Closing arguments end.
August 18, 2022: Convicted of two counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances.
September 19, 2022: Sentenced to two consecutive terms of life without parole.
April 12, 2024: Second District Court of Appeal affirms.
By June 29, 2024: California Supreme Court declines review (date of order not given in the source).