Dwight Rhone, 74, Is Charged With Three More Murders Reaching Back to 1993
Already charged in a 2023 killing, the San Diego man now faces four murder counts and a multiple-murder special circumstance. He pleaded not guilty.
Published
For eighteen months Dwight Rhone had been charged with a single killing, the October 2023 death of a 54-year-old man named Bernardo Moreno near the Interstate 5 and State Route 905 interchange in southern San Diego. On June 10, 2026, San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan announced that the 74-year-old now faces three more murder charges, reaching back more than three decades, along with a special circumstance alleging that he committed multiple murders. He was arraigned the same day and pleaded not guilty.
Two of the new counts revive cold cases. In December 1993, Heriberto Ruiz was found dead in an alley near the 3500 block of Acacia Street; the medical examiner found that he had been strangled. In September 2002, Ronald Johnken's body was found in Chollas Creek near 3300 National Avenue, killed by blunt-force trauma to the head. The third new count is for Michael Brown, whose remains were found in December 2025 beneath a house on Newton Avenue in the Southcrest neighborhood where Rhone had once lived as a tenant, after investigators served a search warrant there.
The Brown discovery is what widened the case. At the time, the district attorney's office named Rhone only as a person of interest. He was already in custody: the California Highway Patrol had arrested him on December 5, 2024, in Moreno's death. Moreno had been found in burned debris, shot at the base of the skull. Days after that arrest, Rhone was sentenced to two years in federal prison on unrelated gun and ammunition charges. Federal prosecutors wrote at the time that he had a lengthy criminal history, with 33 offenses between 1963 and 2021.
Stephan credited years of work by the San Diego Police Department, the FBI, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and the Highway Patrol, which she said "helped uncover critical connections between this defendant and multiple victims, including victims whose cases had gone cold." She did not say what those connections were.
The investigation is not finished. Prosecutors are examining other missing-person cases and unidentified or deceased people who may be associated with Rhone, and they asked for information about two people in particular: Danice Galloway, whose body was found on May 1, 1989, in an alley at 3700 Main Street, and Antenogenes Gomez Velasquez, who was last seen in 2021 and last known to live on Newton Avenue. Rhone has not been charged in either case.
His next court date is March 24, 2027.
Rhone is charged, not convicted, and is presumed innocent; he has pleaded not guilty to all four counts. Danice Galloway and Antenogenes Gomez Velasquez are named only because prosecutors are asking the public for information about them; neither is among the charged cases. The account of the four deaths is the San Diego County District Attorney's.
Sources
- Three Additional Murder Charges Filed Against Man Linked to Southcrest Human Remains Investigation, San Diego County District Attorney's Office
- Human remains found at property linked to California homicide suspect, NBC News