Juan Chavez pleaded guilty in Los Angeles in March 1999 to murdering five men between 1986 and 1989. The pleas came about a week and a half into his trial and spared him a possible death sentence. In June 1999 he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, once for each of the five killings, and he was sent to Folsom State Prison. About three months later he died there by suicide.
The men he admitted killing were described in reports at the time as gay men. Chavez said he had killed them to stop the spread of AIDS. A lawyer for a gay rights legal group rejected that explanation as an expression of a damaging stereotype and said the Los Angeles Police Department had been slow to connect the deaths. After his death, a DNA project pursued by prosecutors in Sacramento and Los Angeles linked him to a further killing, an unsolved 1990 case; the match was reported in 2013. That killing was never charged against him; it rests on a DNA match described by a Los Angeles County prosecutor.
Little about Chavez's background was made public. He was described as 34 years old when he changed his plea in March 1999 and as 35 when he was sentenced that June. His date and place of birth, his family and his schooling were not reported, and neither were his work or his life in Los Angeles before the killings.
The five men were killed in the Los Angeles area over a span of about three years, between 1986 and 1989. Reports published when Chavez pleaded guilty said he strangled the men and robbed them. Writing in 2013, the journalist Michelle McNamara described the five victims as men who lived alone.
The 1999 coverage of the plea and sentencing spoke of the five men only as a group and did not name them. Their ages, their work and the people who mourned them went undescribed.
The five deaths were not connected at first. According to POZ, the magazine that covers HIV and AIDS, it took the Los Angeles Police Department five years to link Chavez to the killings. Gay Today, an online gay news magazine, reported in an item by Jack Nichols that the killings came to light after Chavez had been charged in a separate kidnapping case. Gay Today gave the year of that kidnapping charge as 1996, which does not fit with POZ's report that the murder charges were filed in 1994, and the details of the kidnapping case were not given.
In 1994 Chavez was charged with killing the five men.
The case went to trial in Los Angeles in 1999, with Chavez facing a possible death sentence. In March 1999, about a week and a half after the trial began, Chavez stopped it by changing his plea. He admitted the five killings and pleaded guilty, and in exchange he was spared the possibility of execution. Gay Today reported at the time that his confession would allow him to avoid the death penalty and that his sentencing had been set for June 21.
Chavez offered an explanation for the killings. Gay Today reported that he said he had hoped to stop the spread of AIDS. POZ quoted him as saying of the men, "I wanted to get them before they got me," and, "They're spreading AIDS."
The prosecutor, Michael Duarte, told POZ that Chavez did not fit the usual profile of a serial killer. "He didn't take souvenirs from the crime scene," Duarte said.
On June 21, 1999, in a courtroom just outside Hollywood, Chavez was sentenced to life in prison five times over. McNamara, writing in 2013, described the sentence as life without the possibility of parole. He was sent to Folsom State Prison.
The case drew comment from gay rights lawyers. Jon Davidson of the Lambda Legal Defense Fund told POZ that the five years it had taken police to connect Chavez to the killings showed serious problems in how the department dealt with hate crimes. He dismissed the prosecutor's remark about souvenirs. "What is this, Silence of the Lambs?" he asked. In Davidson's view, Chavez had killed the men because of the lasting stereotype that all gay men have AIDS.
Gay Today reported the plea alongside the killing of a gay man in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and protests in New York against anti-gay violence and police conduct.
Chavez did not live long in prison. About three months after he was sentenced, he died by suicide at Folsom. His DNA had not been collected before he died, so his genetic profile was not in the system and was not available for comparison with evidence from other unsolved crimes.
That gap was closed years later through a project aimed at a particular group of offenders: people convicted of serious crimes who had died in custody without giving a DNA sample.
The work began in Sacramento County. Anne Marie Schubert, then a deputy district attorney there, had grown up in Sacramento in the years when the offender known as the East Area Rapist was active there. When she began working on DNA and cold cases as a prosecutor, she wondered whether that offender might have been arrested and convicted of something else and then died in prison without giving a sample. She found that many inmates had died before their DNA was collected, and she set out to find genetic material for them.
Carol Burke, who headed the sex crimes division of the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office and had earlier led its forensics division, joined the work after taking a DNA class that Schubert taught in January 2011. Burke pursued it in her spare time. In an interview with McNamara published in Los Angeles magazine in July 2013, she called the effort "Dead Man Talking."
Because the people on the list had died without giving a sample, the investigators had to look for other biological material: tissue kept from an autopsy, blood or saliva taken at an arrest, or items that had been entered as evidence in court. No central database showed what material existed. Burke described calling arresting agencies, checking evidence lockers, asking court clerks to pull files, and going through decades-old boxes of evidence by hand. She noted that the longer police and courts keep evidence, the further back the search can reach, and that limited storage space pushes agencies to throw it away. Los Angeles County had ten death row inmates who had died without giving a sample, and Burke said she had found material for six of them. She said the work could later be extended to people serving life sentences and to registered sex offenders.
Chavez's case became the project's first success. Schubert went to Folsom State Prison to look for autopsy samples and found about 40 of them. She had genetic profiles developed from the samples, and one of them was Chavez's. Once his profile was entered, it matched DNA found on a cigarette butt at the scene of an unsolved 1990 killing, in which a man had been found strangled.
"That was a very exciting moment," Burke told McNamara. "We want to have more moments like that."
The 1990 killing was never charged against Chavez, who was dead when the match was made. It is attributed to him on the strength of that DNA match, as described by Burke in 2013; no court heard the evidence. The victim of the 1990 killing has not been publicly named, and where in the region it took place has not been reported.
His motive. Chavez himself said he killed the men to stop the spread of AIDS. That explanation was never tested at a trial, because his guilty pleas ended the case before a jury heard evidence. Advocates such as Davidson saw in it a stereotype about gay men rather than any real reason, and treated the killings as hate crimes.
The 1990 killing. The DNA link to the 1990 killing came after his death and was never tested in court. It is an attribution by prosecutors, not a conviction.
The kidnapping case. Reports differ on the case that first brought Chavez to the attention of investigators. Gay Today dated a kidnapping charge to 1996, while POZ reported that the murder charges were filed in 1994. The kidnapping case itself was not described in detail.
His age. Gay Today gave his age as 34 in March 1999; POZ gave it as 35 at the time of his sentencing in June 1999. His date of birth was not reported.
1986: The first of the five killings to which Chavez later pleaded guilty.
1989: The last of the five killings.
1990: A man is found strangled in an unsolved killing later linked to Chavez by DNA.
1994: Chavez is charged with the five killings.
March 1999: About a week and a half into his trial in Los Angeles, Chavez changes his plea and admits all five killings, avoiding a possible death sentence.
June 21, 1999: He is sentenced to life in prison without parole, five times over, and is sent to Folsom State Prison.
About three months later: He dies by suicide at Folsom, before his DNA is collected.
January 2011: Carol Burke of the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office joins the deceased-inmate DNA project begun by Anne Marie Schubert in Sacramento County.
July 2013: Los Angeles magazine reports that Chavez's DNA, recovered from an autopsy sample at Folsom, matched evidence from the 1990 killing, the project's first solved case.