Ex-Nevada Deputy Attorney General who fatally stabbed Nancy Anderson, 17, over 60 times arrested after five decades
RENO, NEVADA: A suspect in a 1972 homicide in Hawaii has been detained in Reno after 50 years. He was an ex-deputy Nevada attorney general who later ran for the state Supreme Court and was connected to the notorious Mustang Ranch brothel. Tudor Chirila Jr, 77, has been arrested without bail on a charge of fleeing from another state on Thursday, September 15 in the Washoe County Jail.
According to a criminal complaint charging Chirila with second-degree murder, DNA evidence connected him to the brutal stabbing of Nancy Anderson, 19, in Honolulu. Chirila was detained on Wednesday, five decades after police claim he stabbed the adolescent more than 60 times and left her body in her Waikiki apartment on January 7, 1972, according to The Honolulu Star-Advertiser. The publication reported that Anderson, who had moved to Hawaii in October 1971 after completing high school in Bay City, Michigan the year before, was employed at a McDonald's restaurant.
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Police had reopened the cold case numerous times since the killing, according to the criminal complaint submitted this week in district court in Hawaii, and they had received a tip that Chirila might be a suspect in December 2021.
On September 6, Reno police executed a search warrant at Tudor Chirila's apartment in order to obtain a DNA sample. He attempted suicide two days later, and on Wednesday he was arrested and taken to the county jail in Reno, according to a Thursday article in the Reno Gazette-Journal.
The Honolulu Police Department collaborated with Parabon NanoLabs, a Reston, Virginia-based company, in the summer of 2020 to create a sketch of the suspect's possible appearance based on DNA collected from the crime scene. The police wrote, "Using DNA evidence from this investigation, Parabon produced trait predictions for a person of interest (POI) in this case. Individual predictions were made for the subject’s ancestry, eye color, hair color, skin color, freckling, and face shape. By combining these attributes of appearance, a Snapshot composite was produced depicting what the POI may have looked like at 25 years old and with an average body-mass index (BMI) of 22. These default values were used because age and BMI cannot be determined from DNA."
According to the newspaper, police in Hawaii have looked into a number of suspects over the years, including door-to-door knife sellers who had attempted to sell knives hours earlier. However, the salespeople offered their fingerprints and passed polygraph tests. Anderson's previous boyfriends and the manager of the building where she resided were two additional potential suspects that were questioned over time.
Longtime resident of the Reno, Carson City, and Lake Tahoe regions and an attorney, Chirila served as Nevada's deputy attorney general in the late 1970s and unsuccessfully ran for the state's supreme court in 1994. There is no information in the jail records about the date of his first court appearance.