First published in the Aug. 20 print issue of the Burbank Leader.
Sentencing has been scheduled on Sept. 19 for a man described by a prosecutor as a sexually motivated serial killer convicted today of murdering two women in the 1980s, including one in Burbank.
A downtown Los Angeles jury deliberated for about three hours before convicting 67-year-old Horace Van Vaultz Jr. of first-degree murder for the July 16, 1981, strangulation of Selena Keough, a 21-year-old mother who was killed in San Bernardino County and dumped under bushes in Montclair.
The jury also convicted him in the June 9, 1986, asphyxiation of Mary Duggan, a 22-year-old Reseda resident whose body was found in the trunk of her car in an empty parking lot in Burbank.
Van Vaultz is facing life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The nine-man, three-woman panel also found true the special-circumstance allegations of multiple murders, murder during a rape involving both women and murder during sodomy involving Keough.
Vaultz testified in his own defense and denied any involvement in the killings.
The case marked the first criminal prosecution in Los Angeles County involving investigative genetic genealogy, in which detectives access commercial DNA databases, load DNA material from the crime and find a relative’s match that can point toward a suspect and collect their DNA, then-Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey said at the time.
— City News Service
