CHULA VISTA – She lies dead, her face dirty and bruised. She's half-naked. She's bloodied. Her legs are bent at odd angles.
NELVIN C. CEPEDA / Union-Tribune
Bob Conrad's first murder case as a Chula Vista police detective remained unsolved for 31 years before DNA evidence unraveled the mystery.
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The crime scene photograph of the young woman was taken 31 years ago, but it never lost its hold on Bob Conrad, a new Chula Vista police detective at the time.
Anita Marie Carrier was Conrad's first homicide case, and it hit home. He knew her. When he was a patrol officer, he'd see her on the streets, hanging with friends.
Conrad had even ID'd her body. She was a Jane Doe because her purse had been stolen. He recognized her when her photograph was passed around the police station.
For decades the case remained cold, unsolved, but Conrad was finally able to close it last month thanks to luck, science and determination.
Anita Marie Carrier was 20 years old when she was slain in August 1976 in Chula Vista. DNA evidence solved the murder case recently.
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Police announced Jan. 23 that they had linked DNA evidence from the victim's fingernails to the longtime suspect, Charles Manley, who died in a Nevada prison in 2001 while awaiting execution for another murder.
Before, police only had circumstantial evidence that Manley had been with Carrier that August 1976 night. Now they knew the two were together – and that Carrier had put up a struggle.
“She was a feisty little girl,” Conrad said. “I knew she'd fight him.”
Conrad is 67 now. He has thinning white hair. On a recent day, he sat at a department cubicle cluttered with thick files. He brought up images on his computer from the Carrier case, including the crime scene photograph.
Her body is sprawled under bushes near an apartment stairway. Her blouse is pushed up. A sandal is off. She is young, only 20.
Conrad pointed to a cluster of stab wounds and said, “There were 30 or so.”
All of the cases get to you, he said, but this one . .
“I kept going back and looking at it,” Conrad said.
Conrad retired from the department in 1995 only to come back six years later to join a newly created cold case unit. More than 40 cases needed review, including the Carrier killing.
“This one had a personal connection.”
An easy victim
In 1976, all signs pointed to Manley as the killer.
Carrier was a troubled woman with little family, an easy victim. At the time of her death, she was a resident of a mental health center. She was a drug user, a counselor told a newspaper at the time.
A bartender at a bar where Carrier had been the night of the murder said she met a man there and left with him. Manley, a drifter from the East Coast with a record of robberies, matched the bartender's description.
During their investigation, police determined Manley was a car thief and had parked stolen cars near his apartment. The walkway he took to get home was where Carrier's body was found.
The murder weapon was believed to be a steak knife. A person living with Manley at the time said he was missing a steak knife.
But the murder weapon was never found. And no blood was found on Manley or his clothing, said Conrad, who worked on the case with homicide Detective Merlin Wilson, who has since retired. They got Manley for stealing cars and robbing a hair salon, but not homicide.
Wilson noted his frustration to a newspaper four months after the crime. “A homicide case is never closed until it's solved,” he said.
Conrad and Wilson weren't the only Chula Vista police detectives figuring Manley had gotten away with murder. Detective Mark Croshier, who had gone after Manley for home invasions several years after Carrier's death, also had his suspicions.
“That one always bothered me,” he said. “He was the last one seen with her. But how do you prove he did it?”
In 1997, Croshier got a call from Nevada law enforcement with news about Manley. Two years prior, Manley had shot and killed a woman he was living with – an elementary school teacher. He had fled and had been profiled on “America's Most Wanted” before getting caught in New Jersey.
Now Manley faced the death penalty.
According to a story in The Las Vegas Review-Journal, a number of witnesses took the stand during Manley's trial, speaking of the horrors he'd done.
One couple he robbed said they remained terrified years later. The woman said Manley had used the tip of his gun to sexually assault her.
“He really was a piece of work,” Christopher Laurent, the Clark County chief deputy district attorney who helped prosecute him, said last week.
Manley taught his daughter how to free-base cocaine, Laurent said. He liked to gamble, drink, carry guns. He was called “Charley Harley” because he looked like a biker guy, he said.
Manley got the death penalty after that trial.
When Croshier learned that, he thought he might be able to convince Manley to come clean on the Carrier killing. “I'm an old investigator. I never give up.”
He wrote to him in prison twice but never heard back. Later, he thought of trying again, but it was too late.
Manley had hepatitis C and the condition had worsened. Croshier learned Manley died in 2001, bleeding out in his cell. He was 53.
'Now it's over'
After landing the cold case job in late 2001, Conrad reopened the case. It didn't matter that Manley was dead. He wanted the case closed. He felt certain they were right all along, but he wanted to prove it, put an end to it.
The case had long been shelved, the evidence stored, the memories of it fading. But evidence was not only available, it was in excellent condition for crime-lab evaluation, he said. Carrier's fingernails had been snipped during her autopsy. Hairs were collected. From Manley, police had taken clothes, hair and blood samples.
But Conrad was not well-schooled in the wonders of DNA analysis when he began the cold case job.
So when he sent evidence to be analyzed, he asked about finding any trace evidence of blood on Carrier's fingernails. Manley, when first interrogated, had scratches on his arm.
The lab work came up empty.
“It was really my error,” Conrad said. “I didn't know anywhere what I know now.”
He never gave up, though. He'd flip through the Carrier file now and again, hoping something would jump out at him. Last year, something did.
Cigarette butts had been collected from the ashtray of a stolen car kept by Manley near the murder scene. Conrad knew Carrier smoked. If her DNA was on one of the cigarette butts, that would prove she and Manley were together that night.
He sent the cigarette butts to the San Diego County Sheriff's Department crime lab, hoping to land a match. Again, no luck.
But Cathy Jakovich, the criminologist, asked him if anything else could be examined. He mentioned the fingernails, but said they'd been analyzed six years earlier.
For blood, he said.
“What about skin?” she asked.
Skin is even more likely, she said, if Carrier had tried to claw at Manley. He sent the fingernails again.
This time, the results showed that the mixture of DNA found under her nails was 11 billion times more likely to have come from Manley than anyone else.
Finally.
Conrad was thrilled, but the many years that had passed made the findings bittersweet. Conrad learned Carrier's mother is still alive, but she's 86 and frail. She didn't want to be contacted, a family friend said. Carrier had no other known relatives.
“Some of these cases bother you more than others,” Conrad said. “The innocent victims. She walked out of the bar never thinking this was going to happen.
“But it did. And at least now it's over.”
Michael Stetz: (619) 293-1720; michael.stetz@uniontrib.com
