Cops: DNA Links State's Former Deputy AG to 1972 Murder

Police say Nevada resident Tudor Chirila Jr. stabbed Hawaii teen more than 60 times
By Newser Editors and Wire Services
Posted Sep 16, 2022 1:08 PM CDT
Cops: DNA Links State's Former Deputy AG to 1972 Murder
This photo provided by the Washoe County Sheriff's Office shows Tudor Chirila Jr.   (Washoe County Sheriff's Office)

A former deputy Nevada attorney general who ran for the state Supreme Court and was later affiliated with the infamous Mustang Ranch brothel has been arrested in Reno as a suspect in a 1972 homicide in Hawaii, per the AP. Tudor Chirila Jr., 77, is being held without bail on a charge of being a fugitive from another state. In a criminal complaint accusing Chirila of second-degree murder, Honolulu police said DNA evidence linked him to the fatal stabbing of 19-year-old Nancy Anderson. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser reports that Chirila was arrested Wednesday—five decades after police say he stabbed the teen more than 60 times and left her body in her Waikiki apartment on Jan. 7, 1972.

Anderson had moved to Hawaii in October 1971 and was working at a McDonald's restaurant after graduating from high school the year before in Bay City, Michigan. The criminal complaint filed this week in district court in Hawaii said police had reopened the cold case multiple times since the killing and received a tip in December that Chirila could be a suspect. In March, police obtained a DNA sample from Chirila's son, John Chirila of Newport Beach, California, that identified him as the biological child of a DNA sample found at the crime scene, according to the criminal complaint.

On Sept. 6, Reno police served a search warrant and collected a DNA sample from Tudor Chirila at his Reno apartment. Two days later he tried to kill himself and on Wednesday was booked into the county jail in Reno, the Reno Gazette Journal reports. Chirila, a longtime attorney in Reno, Carson City, and the Lake Tahoe area, served as a deputy attorney general in the late 1970s and ran unsuccessfully for the Nevada Supreme Court in 1994. In a 1998 federal indictment, US prosecutors in Reno identified him as the former president of a company, AGE Corp., that served a front for Nevada brothel boss Joe Conforte. He later sued Conforte, saying he been fired for cooperating with prosecutors.

(More cold cases stories.)

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