Dana Ireland Case Solved With DNA

[Obie]

I don't think it has anything to do with Mitch. The police seem to do this all of the time.
Must be something in Hawaii law.

I'm curious why they say he lived 2 miles from the fishing trail where her body was found. Her body was found in WaaWaa about 5 miles from HPP. Maybe he lived 2 miles away in 1991.

Her bicycle was found in Vacationland where her older sister was living. I wonder if the murderer was living in Vacationland ?

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

I'm curious why they say he lived 2 miles from the fishing trail where her body was found

Obie,
I think he was living 2 miles from where Dana was found in 1991. Waa Waa area.
In 2024 he was living in HPP.

[ChunksterK]

"I don't think it has anything to do with Mitch. The police seem to do this all of the time.
Must be something in Hawaii law." - Obie

Well, ultimately this case does have something to do with Mitch. When presented with facts in 2015 indicating that the wrong people were convicted, he claimed that he saw nothing to justify reopening the case. Had he done so, the Schweitzer brothers and Frank Pauline could have been cleared much sooner.

And this whole mess is not a matter of Hawaii law, but rather the culture of the Big Island criminal justice system. "Catch and release" is the main operating concept partly because the judges keep telling the county that the jail is inhumanely overcrowded and partly because they are too lenient to begin with. The prosecutors are afraid to publicly call out the lenient judges, and the cops feel like their efforts to get criminals off the street are undermined.

Getting back to Mitch Roth, I once personally saw him at a meet and greet when he first ran for prosecutor. In response to a direct question, he said he didn't see his job as putting people in jail. When asked three minutes later why he was still sending people to prison for non-violent marijuana charges, he said, "I have to enforce the law" without any obvious embarrassment. And that's who we have running the county.

[Obie]

The Hawai‘i Police Department announces the identification of a suspect via DNA evidence in the 1991 murder of Dana Ireland. Age 23 at the time of her death, Ireland was kidnapped, raped, and murdered in the Kapoho area of Hawai‘i Island on December 24, 1991. She died the next day at the Hilo Medical Center.
“For 33 years, our Department has been resolute in investigating the Dana Ireland case,” said Hawai‘i Police Department Chief Benjamin Moszkowicz.
As part of the Hawai‘i Police Department’s investigation, several pieces of evidence were recovered, some of which contained DNA evidence. Specifically, DNA was recovered from a swab taken from Ireland’s body, from a sheet used to transport Ireland to the hospital, and from a t-shirt found at the scene. While it was analyzed at the time, there was no match in any DNA database, and the person whose DNA was found at the scene became known as “Unknown Male #1.”
In 2008, the DNA evidence was sent to the Forensic Analytical Crime Lab in California, where it remains today, as part of a cooperative agreement with the Innocence Project.
In the decades since Ireland was murdered, DNA technology has evolved significantly. Additional DNA evidence was collected from the t-shirt and found to match the other samples from the scene. In addition, experts are now able to take data from a DNA sample and build a family tree based on the known DNA from relatives. Earlier this year, an FBI agent from the Honolulu Field Office contacted police investigators with the names of some people who could potentially be identified as “Unknown Male #1.”
One of the names provided was that of 57-year-old Albert Lauro Jr., who lived in the Kapoho area at the time of the murder. Based on that information, police investigators surveilled Lauro Jr., attempting to gather further evidence. In early July, they collected a utensil that he had been using after he discarded it. The DNA from the utensil was analyzed and found to be a match to “Unknown Male #1.”
While the DNA at the scene and from the victim certainly established probable cause that “Unknown Male #1” had committed the offense of rape, the statute of limitations for that charge ran out several years prior. The only remaining crime still within the statute of limitations was murder. Based on what the investigators knew at the time, there was not enough information to establish probable cause to arrest Lauro Jr. for murder.
Investigators obtained a court order to obtain a buccal swab from Lauro’s cheek as confirmation that the DNA taken directly from him matched the DNA collected at the crime scene 33 years earlier. On Friday, July 19, Lauro Jr. was asked to come to the station and talk with investigators. The encounter was consensual, and he was not in police custody at the time. After speaking with investigators, Lauro Jr. asked to leave and was allowed to do so after the court-ordered buccal swab was collected. The buccal swab was sent to Forensic Analytical Crime Lab in California along with a request to rush the analysis and return the results as soon as possible. Based on that analysis, the Hawai‘i Police Department can now confirm that the DNA collected at the crime scene matched Lauro Jr., a resident of Hawaiian Paradise Park.
“The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution protects individuals from unwarranted search and seizure,” explained Chief Moszkowicz. “In order to obtain a search warrant, investigators would have to have established probable cause for the crime of murder and explained specifically what evidence it was seeking.”
“We remain focused on Dana Ireland, a young woman who was brutally murdered. There is still a lot about this case that we do not know and our investigation into this case continues to push forward. Our search for the truth is not over,” added Chief Moszkowicz.
People with information relative to this investigation should contact Hawai‘i Police Department Area I Criminal Investigation Division Captain Rio Amon-Wilkins at (808) 961-2251 or via email at Rio.Amon-Wilkins@hawaiicounty.gov.

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

I heard from a reliable source that he was employed at a school in East Hawaii as a janitor.
Unattended with students, sometimes individual students after school - nothing untoward occurred fortunately.  
How would the school know?
Had he learned his lesson?
So many unanswered questions.

(Sorry, can’t provide more information at this time, but give it a day or two, mothers talk)

[HiloJulie]

I have not been able to find any reporting that Ian Schweitzer ever filed for and claimed the wrongful conviction payment he is entitled to - which is a minimum of 50 grand a year for each year incarcerated, which would have been around 1.2 million.

Further, I don't think Frank Pauline, Jr., has been officially exonerated yet, even though he passed away while in prison, but his estate would be entitled to the same compensation as well.

https://www.innocenceproject.org/wp-cont...n-2017.pdf

I believe however, if a wrongly convicted individual gets this type of settlement, they are barred from any further civil litigation.

It will also be interesting to hear about the life that Albert Lauro Jr. lived for the last 33 years. 

I wonder if Lincoln Ashida is sleeping well these days?

[Obie]

According to the Trib, both Schweitzers have a hearing today regarding compensation.

[HiloJulie]

A well written step by step write up of the whole case from The National Registry of Exonerations:

https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoner...aseid=6540

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

The Atlantic had a story a year ago, with all of the twists and turns that led to what happened this week.  A beef between neighbors.  Jailhouse informants.  It’s a sad story that depends almost entirely on unreliable witnesses, not on evidence.  Excellent reporting, the best I’ve seen.

Lawson (from the Innocence Project) zeroed in on the VW. He saw an engineer’s report saying a VW Bug’s bumper was too wide to make the damage seen on Dana Ireland’s bike—nor could a VW’s low-sloping front end have directly caused Ireland’s injuries. “If you go through the police reports, day by day, step by step,” Lawson told me, “you’ll see there ain’t nobody talking about Volkswagens at all for three years,” until Pauline changed his story to bring up the model of the Schweitzers’ car. The police were first looking for a small blue pickup truck, and then a tan van. Lawson couldn’t understand why the VW wasn’t more of an issue at Ian’s trial. “Based on the tread box and the tire distance, Ian would have had to customize and stretch the Volkswagen out, commit the crime, and then bunch it back to its normal size when the police came and seized it,” he said. “It’s just physically impossible.”

Lawson approached the prosecuting attorney on the Big Island, Mitch Roth, and laid out the problems he’d uncovered, proposing a joint reinvestigation of the case. Roth agreed. In 2019, his office gave Lawson’s team access to more than 100 bankers boxes of files and all of the physical evidence.

https://x.com/theatlantic/status/1817902...39716?s=61

The link is through TwitterX. The Atlantic is a subscription site, but you can get a few stories free.  Every time you click it counts as a free story, so read it all.

[ChunksterK]

So Roth changed his mind about reopening the investigation between 2015 and 2019. That's interesting.