Police arrested a former Nevada deputy attorney general for the gruesome 1972 murder of a teenage girl in Hawaii.
The New York Post reports that DNA evidence was used to link Tudor Chirila Jr., 77, to the stabbing death of 19-year-old Nancy Anderson in 1972. Chirila was arrested in Reno, Nevada, and charged with second-degree murder.
According to police, Anderson was stabbed more than 60 times in her Waikiki apartment on Jan. 7, 1972. She had recently moved to the Hawaii after graduating from high school in Bay City, Michigan, according to the Reno Gazette Journal.
Local police never gave up hope of finding her killer, reopening the cold case multiple times over the past 50 years and investigating several suspects.
Former boyfriends, the property manager of her apartment building, and the door-to-door knife salesmen who knocked on Anderson's door hours before her murder were questioned during the investigation, according to the Post.
The salesmen were ruled out after their volunteered fingerprints were not matches to the killer's and they passed polygraph tests. The other suspects were also ruled out.
Investigators finally had something to go on after they received a tip in December that Chirila could be a suspect, according to the criminal complaint.
In March, police obtained a DNA sample from Chirila's son, John Chirila, of Newport Beach, California, which identified the younger Chirila as the biological child of the person whose DNA was found in Anderson's apartment.
According to the Post, Reno police executed a search warrant last week and collected a DNA sample from Chirila at his home.
On Sept. 8, Chirila tried to kill himself and on Wednesday he was arrested and booked into the county jail where he is being held without bail.
Chirila, a longtime attorney in Reno, Carson City, and the Lake Tahoe area, served as deputy attorney general in the late 1970s and ran unsuccessfully for the Nevada Supreme Court in 1994, according to the Post.
According to the Journal, Chirila was arrested and spent eight days in jail during his campaign for failing to pay child support. He owed $33,000 for failing to pay $995 a month for his three children.
In 1995, charges were dropped against the then-50-year-old lawyer, after accusations he kidnapped a girlfriend and tied her up with the intention of raping her, according to the Journal.
In a 1998 federal indictment, U.S. prosecutors in Reno named Chirila as the former president of A.G.E. Corp., which served as a front for Mustang Ranch brothel boss Joe Conforte.
Federal prosecutors claimed Conforte hid his assets during bankruptcy proceedings to cheat the government and repurchase the legal brothel under the ownership of A.G.E. Corp.
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