Ex-Pasco officer charged again with murder in 1986 Spokane killing
A former Pasco police officer is once again charged with the fatal strangling of a woman working as a prostitute in 1986.
The move by Spokane County prosecutors comes nearly three years after they dismissed the cold case against Richard J. Aguirre.
A spokesman for the prosecutor’s office could not be reached Monday morning to explain the reason for the re-filing.
When the case was dropped in December 2017, it was done without prejudice, meaning prosecutors could file the same charges again in the future if new evidence came to light.
At the time, Deputy Prosecutor John Driscoll said in his one-page motion that the “recent DNA results raise significant evidentiary issues.”
Court records filed Sept. 11 say the new filing was based on new DNA tests that prosecutors claim link the suspect to the case, according to a story in The Spokesman-Review.
Aguirre, 56, was sent a summons to appear Sept. 30 in Spokane County Superior Court on one count of first-degree murder. The premeditated charge includes an allegation of sexual motivation.
He remains out of custody.
Aguirre was a Pasco police officer for 27 years. He resigned in 2015 after he was charged in Franklin County in an unrelated rape case.
A Franklin County jury later acquitted Aguirre of the 2014 rape and assault.
1986 cold case
The initial Spokane case also was filed in 2015 for Ruby J. Doss, who was found beaten and strangled in January 1986.
The investigation into her death went cold for 29 years until detectives claimed Aguirre was a match for a DNA profile from a condom found near the murder scene.
Aguirre was stationed at the time at Fairchild Air Force Base.
His DNA was entered into a national database in 2014 after a Franklin County woman accused him of sexual assault.
Spokane police at the time said his DNA also was being considered in several other unsolved homicides, according to the Spokesman-Review.
Doss, 27, was the first of at least five Spokane women strangled between January 1986 and August 1987.
But some time after the condom was tested for DNA in 1986 at a Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory, and again when it was retested in 1989 at a lab in New York, it went missing, according to court documents.
Prosecutor Larry Haskell confirmed the condom was misplaced during the investigation, but said it wasn’t material to the case since the DNA evidence that linked Aguirre to the body had already been extracted, the Spokesman-Review previously reported.
“It wouldn’t have been an item that would have been paid attention to the way it would have been because of the advances in DNA,” he said.
In March 2016, Aguirre’s lawyer John Henry Browne of Seattle tried unsuccessfully to have the case dismissed, saying military records proved his client was in South Korea at the time of the murder.
The Doss killing happened at a time in Spokane and Spokane Valley when prostitutes were literally disappearing off the streets, the Spokesman-Review recently reported.
Investigators initially tried to link her murder on Jan. 30, 1986, to serial killer Robert Yates, who later pleaded guilty to 13 counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder in Spokane County from 1975 through 1998, the newspaper reported.
Former Spokane Police detective Brian Breen investigated the Doss crime scene near 3118 E. Ferry Ave.
According to court records, Breen found where it appeared Doss had sex with someone near a manure pit behind the old Playfair Race Track, the paper reported.
He also found shoe-heel impressions that indicated Doss ran some 254 feet before her attacker chased her down and struck her in the back of the head with a blunt instrument.
“The suspect then strangled the victim causing her death,” Breen wrote in court records.