A serial killer already on death row in California has been sentenced to death for the murder of a young couple in Reston more than two decades ago. A Fairfax County judge formally imposed two death sentences on Alfredo R. Prieto, 45, for the December 1988 slayings of Rachael A. Raver and Warren H. Fulton III in a vacant lot.
A jury recommended last month that Prieto be sentenced to death, but Circuit Court Judge Randy I. Bellows could have reduced the sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Peter Greenspun, Prieto’s attorney, said the judge’s decision was disappointing, but not unexpected.
Prieto was convicted in 2008 of the rape and capital murder of 22-year-old Raver and the capital murder of Fulton, also age 22. Prosecutors said he shot both of them, then raped Raver.
He has been on death row in California since 1992 for the rape and murder of 15-year-old Yvette Woodruff in 1990.
While in prison during the appeals process, Prieto was linked to the two Reston murders when DNA evidence from the 1988 cold case was resubmitted to a national database. It matched Prieto.
Prieto’s DNA was also linked to the May 1988 rape and murder of Veronica “Tina” Jefferson in Arlington. Prieto has not been charged in that case.
He is also suspected, but has not been charged, in a 1989 homicide in Prince William County, as well as two double homicides in California in 1990.
In total, he has been convicted of three murders and is suspected in six others, all of which took place in a two-year span.
A jury convicted Prieto in the Fairfax slayings in 2007, but a judge declared a mistrial when a juror claimed he had been pressured into convicting.
Prieto was retried in 2008, was convicted a second time and was sentenced to death. But last year, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that jury received a flawed verdict form and ordered that he be resentenced. The form did not correctly instruct the jury that life in prison was a possible sentence for Prieto, the state’s highest court said.
This fall, a third jury was empaneled to decide whether Prieto should be sentenced to death or life in prison.
Raver and Fulton were last seen at a Dupont Circle restaurant on Dec. 4, 1988. Their bodies were found in a lot near Hunter Mill Road two days later, and it’s unknown how they met Prieto.
