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Jury Convicts Horace Van Vaultz Jr. of 1981 and 1986 Murders of Selena Keough and Mary Duggan

Genetic genealogy, used for the first time in a Los Angeles County prosecution, tied him to two women strangled five years apart.

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Illustration: faded anonymous polaroids and old notebook on a table

For more than three decades, the deaths of Selena Keough and Mary Duggan sat in two separate police files, in two counties, five years apart. On Thursday, August 18, 2022, a Los Angeles County jury convicted Horace Van Vaultz Jr., 67, of murdering them both. Jurors found him guilty of two counts of first-degree murder and found true the special circumstances of multiple murders and of murders committed during a rape and sodomy.

Keough was 20, a young mother, when she was killed on July 16, 1981, in Montclair, in San Bernardino County. Her body was found under bushes near an apartment building, and she had been strangled. Duggan was 22 and lived in Reseda. She was killed on June 9, 1986, and her body was found in the trunk of her car in an empty parking lot in Burbank.

Both cases went cold. What reopened them was DNA, and a technique that had never before been used in a Los Angeles County prosecution. Investigators ran the genetic profile left at the scenes through genealogy databases to find relatives of the man who left it, and the family tree led to Van Vaultz. Burbank police arrested him during a traffic stop in Inglewood in November 2019. The Burbank and Montclair police departments built the case, with help from the FBI's Forensic Genetic Genealogy Team.

At trial, Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman told jurors that the defendant had chosen his victims and that he was "a serial killer" and "a sexual predator." His DNA had been found on or in both women. Van Vaultz, a former Marine, took the stand in his own defense. He described himself as a swinger, said he could not remember meeting either woman, and denied killing them. "My semen means I may have had sex with the person. It doesn't mean I killed them," he testified. His lawyer, Damon Lamont Hobdy, argued the prosecution had not proved its case. The jury of nine men and three women deliberated for about three hours.

"You think for so many years nobody cares," Keough's sister, Sabrina Plourde, told reporters after the verdict. "They do care and they won't forget."

"Using the latest in technology and forensics, we were able to secure a conviction against someone who targeted young women," District Attorney George Gascón said. Sentencing was set for September 19, and Van Vaultz faced life in prison without the possibility of parole.

What came before, and what came after. In 1988 a Ventura County jury acquitted Van Vaultz of the 1986 killing of Janna Rowe, 25, whose body had been found strangled on a pile of trash. Prosecutors said a recent re-examination of the evidence showed a DNA link to him, and the case was used as pattern evidence at this trial, but the acquittal stands and he cannot be tried for her death again. On September 19, 2022, he was sentenced to two consecutive terms of life without parole. Keough's age is given as 20 in the district attorney's announcement and the Associated Press report, and as 21 in the City News Service account of the trial.

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