Va. high court denies serial killer's death penalty appeal

RICHMOND

The Virginia Supreme Court on Friday denied the death penalty appeal of a serial killer for the slayings of two George Washington University students in 1988.

The unanimous decision clears the way for Alfredo R. Prieto to be executed in Virginia for the deaths of college sweethearts Rachael Raver and Warren Fulton III.

Prieto appealed his conviction and his two death sentences based on dozens of claims of trial and sentencing errors concerning evidence, testimony and jury instructions.

Justices said they found no reason to overturn the conviction or return the case to Circuit Court.

"Furthermore," Justice Leroy F. Millette Jr. wrote, "we find no reason to commute or set aside the sentences of death."

Prieto was already awaiting execution in California for raping and murdering a 15-year-old girl when a DNA sample connected him to the rape and murder of Raver and the slaying of Fulton in Reston. The victims, both 22, were found shot to death in a wooded area a few days after being seen at a Washington, D.C., nightspot.

The crime was unsolved until 2005 when California entered a sample of Prieto's DNA into a national database that matched samples from the Virginia crime scene.

In November 2010, homicide detectives in California said they had linked Prieto to a 1990 double murder in Riverside County. The bodies of Tony Gianuzzi and Stacey Siegrist were dumped after they were shot to death.

This was the second time the Virginia Supreme Court had taken up Prieto's case.

In September 2009, justices ruled that Prieto was entitled to a new sentencing because the jurors who convicted him of the 1988 slayings were given unconstitutional verdict forms. The court, however, upheld Prieto's two capital murder convictions.

In December 2010, a judge in Fairfax County once again imposed two death sentences on Prieto.

Prieto's first trial, in 2007, ended in a mistrial. A second jury convicted Prieto and sentenced him to death.

During Prieto's trial, jurors heard defense testimony that Prieto was exposed to a traumatic upbringing during a civil war in El Salvador and gang violence as a teenager in California.