The murder of Priscilla Strole

The evidence that identified Priscilla Strole's killer had been sitting in the Fairfield Police Department's file since the night she died. Investigators in 1983 lifted latent fingerprints from the house, and they collected semen from the scene. On September 27, 1983 the prints were run through the automated fingerprint identification system of the day. There was no hit, because the person who left them had never been arrested. That changed in December 1986, when Robert Hathaway was booked for burglary and his prints went into the database, but nobody went back to the Strole file to look. He was never an investigative lead or a person of interest, Sgt. Troy Oviatt said, until 2012, when the department's cold-case detectives began reworking the case from the beginning. Working on the assumption that the 1983 search had simply come too early, they resubmitted the scene prints to the Solano County Latent Prints Bureau on January 20, 2014. On January 28 the bureau reported a match to Hathaway, by then 48 and living on Fourth Street in Fairfield. He had been a 17-year-old friend of Strole's son at the time of the killing, a boy who had been to the house before. A Solano County Superior Court judge, Donna Stashyn, issued a warrant for a confirmatory DNA sample. On February 11 Detectives Dave Hoen and Mel Ferro went to his home with it. Oviatt said Hathaway was visibly nervous and sweating heavily; he gave the sample and denied having anything to do with the murder. Four days later, on February 15, he hanged himself. His note to his wife said he had taken the coward's way out. The state Department of Justice laboratory then matched his DNA to the semen collected in 1983, and on February 20, 2014 the department closed the case, announcing it publicly on March 4. There were no other prints or DNA at the scene, Oviatt said, and police concluded that Hathaway committed the crime and acted alone. The fingerprint found him; the DNA only confirmed what the print had already shown.