A convicted serial killer on California death row for murdering a dozen people in the 1980s and ’90s confessed to the 1986 murder of a 19-year-old woman in Los Angeles County, the police announced on Tuesday.

William Lester Suff, 70, confessed in May 2022 to stabbing Cathy Small to death and dumping her body on a South Pasadena, Calif., cul-de-sac, where her body was discovered by police on Feb. 22, 1986, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department announced at a news conference on Tuesday. Why the announcement came more than two years after the confession was not clear.

Ms. Small’s body was found in the morning wearing a nightgown, and she died from multiple stab wounds and strangulation, Lt. Patricia Thomas said.

Ms. Small’s body was identified three days later by a man who had read about the killing in the news and had called detectives to say he was concerned that the victim could be his roommate.

He told detectives that she had worked as a prostitute in the Lake Elsinore area and had lived at his house for a few months, Lieutenant Thomas said.

The man said that Ms. Small left their house on the night of Feb. 21, 1986 wearing a nightgown. Ms. Small, he added, told him that a man named Bill was paying her $50 to join him on a drive to Los Angeles.

Ms. Small’s roommate never saw her again, Lieutenant Thomas said.

Ms. Small’s killing went unsolved for nearly four decades despite multiple leads, Lieutenant Thomas said. However, a DNA test conducted in 2020 on previously untested evidence — including Ms. Small’s clothing and a sexual assault test kit — ultimately linked Mr. Suff and another unknown male to the killing, she added.

Mr. Suff, the authorities said, is a serial killer sitting on death row at San Quentin. Known as the “Riverside Prostitute Killer” and the “Lake Elsinore Killer,” Mr. Suff was convicted in the murders of 12 people in Riverside County, Calif., including Lake Elsinore, and sentenced to death in July 1995.

He carried out those murders over a two-year period from 1989 to 1991 and had been on the loose until January 1992, when he was arrested during a “routine traffic stop,” Lieutenant Thomas said.

Mr. Suff’s murderous rampage began at least 12 years before he killed Ms. Small. He was convicted in 1974 and sentenced to 70 years in prison for murdering his 2-month-old daughter in Tarrant County, Texas.

Mr. Suff was released on parole to California 10 years later, Lieutenant Thomas said.

It was unclear why and under what conditions he was paroled.

Over the course of two days in May 2022, detectives extracted a full confession from Mr. Suff.

He told detectives that in 1986 he was living in Riverside County and had a job at a computer repair shop. Ms. Small, he said, came into the shop one day and gave him her telephone number.

Later that day, Mr. Suff said he called and asked her to join him on a trip to “go pick up his boss” in Pasadena, Lieutenant Thomas said.

He picked her up that night and made the drive. Upon arrival, Mr. Suff said they got into an argument.

Mr. Suff told detectives that he became enraged when she knocked the glasses off his face and that he stabbed her in the chest as she sat in the front passenger seat.

Then, he told detectives, he pushed her body out of the car onto the street and drove away. He also corroborated photos of the crime scene shown to him by detectives.

Mr. Suff will not be charged for killing Ms. Small because he is already on death row, the authorities said.

The authorities on Tuesday said that the confession brought long overdue justice to Ms. Small’s family. Ms. Small left behind two small children, the authorities said.

She also had a younger sister, Deana Larson, who in a letter read aloud by officials Tuesday described Ms. Small as a “protective big sister, a loving mother and a good daughter.”

“Cathy was funny, smart and caring,” Ms. Larson wrote in the letter. “She had a big heart and would do anything for anyone.”

Ms. Larson, who was 10 at the time of the murder, said that Ms. Small had been “seeking sobriety” at the time of her death.

“But before she could take another step forward, her life was ended,” the letter said.

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According to the Riverside Police Department, 50-year-old Luis Contreras was arrested by Mexican authorities in Mexicali on July 8, and has since been extradited back to Riverside County to face charges.

Contreras, who was 32 at the time, is the primary suspect in the June 14, 2005, killing of 38-year-old Alfonso Vera. Vera was found dead from multiple gunshot wounds inside a home on the 4700 block of Doane Avenue in Riverside.

Witnesses heard the shots and saw people running and two vehicles leaving the scene, police said. Those witnesses were able to provide a license plate number of one of the vehicles.

Investigators later determined that a man was involved in an argument with his girlfriend and became physically violent with her. Vera came to the woman’s aid and intervened and was shot multiple times by another person.

Three suspects were believed involved in the case, two of which were apprehended weeks after Vera’s killing. But the gunman, who police said was Contreras, was never located, and it was believed that he fled to Mexico to avoid arrest.

In June 2024, nearly two decades since the deadly shooting, detectives reopened the cold case and renewed the search for Contreras.

Within weeks, he was located and arrested by Mexican authorities in coordination with the U.S. Marshals Service. He’s since been brought back to the U.S. and was booked into the Cois M. Byrd Detention Center near Murrieta.

Now 50 years old, Contreras is awaiting trial on second-degree murder charges and is currently being held on $1 million bail, according to jail records.

He’s expected to appear in court on Aug. 2.

Of the two other men believed to be involved in the killing of Alfonso Vera, one served a three-year prison sentence for being an accessory to murder and the other was not charged due to a lack of evidence, police said.

Anyone with information about this investigation is urged to contact the Riverside Police Department’s Homicide Cold Case Unit by email or by calling 951-320-8000.

Earlier this month, a man suspected in an Orange County homicide that happened 18 years ago was arrested in Mexico and extradited back to the U.S. to face charges.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden announced Monday that al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Kabul, an operation he said delivered justice and hopefully “one more measure of closure” to families of the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

The president said in an evening address from the White House that U.S. intelligence officials tracked al-Zawahri to a home in downtown Kabul where he was hiding out with his family. The president approved the operation last week and it was carried out Sunday.

Al-Zawahri and the better-known Osama bin Laden plotted the 9/11 attacks that brought many ordinary Americans their first knowledge of al-Qaida. Bin Laden was killed in Pakistan on May 2, 2011, in operation carried out by U.S. Navy SEALs after a nearly decade-long hunt.

As for Al-Zawahri, Biden said, “He will never again, never again, allow Afghanistan to become a terrorist safe haven because he is gone and we’re going to make sure that nothing else happens.”

“This terrorist leader is no more,” he added.

The operation is a significant counterterrorism win for the Biden administration just 11 months after American troops left the country after a two-decade war.

The strike was carried out by the CIA, according to five people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Neither Biden nor the White House detailed the CIA’s involvement in the strike.

Biden, however, paid tribute to the U.S. intelligence community in his remarks, noting that “thanks to their extraordinary persistence and skill” the operation was a success.

Al-Zawahri’s death eliminates the figure who more than anyone shaped al-Qaida, first as bin Laden’s deputy since 1998, then as his successor. Together, he and bin Laden turned the jihadi movement’s guns to target the United States, carrying out the deadliest attack ever on American soil — the Sept. 11 suicide hijackings.

The house Al-Zawahri was in when he was killed was owned by a top aide to senior Taliban leader Sirajuddin Haqqani, according to a senior intelligence official. The official also added that a CIA ground team and aerial reconnaissance conducted after the drone strike confirmed al-Zawahri’s death.

A senior administration official who briefed reporters on the operation on condition of anonymity said “zero” U.S. personnel were in Kabul.

Over the 20-year war in Afghanistan, the U.S. targeted and splintered al-Qaida, sending leaders into hiding. But America’s exit from Afghanistan last September gave the extremist group the opportunity to rebuild.

U.S. military officials, including Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have said al-Qaida was trying to reconstitute in Afghanistan, where it faced limited threats from the now-ruling Taliban. Military leaders have warned that the group still aspired to attack the U.S.

After his killing, the White House underscored that al-Zawahri had continued to be a dangerous figure. The senior administration official said al-Zawahri had continued to “provide strategic direction,” including urging attacks on the U.S., while in hiding. He had also prioritized to members of the terror network that the United States remained al-Qaida’s “primary enemy,” the official said.

The 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon made bin Laden America’s Enemy No. 1. But he likely could never have carried it out without his deputy. Bin Laden provided al-Qaida with charisma and money, but al-Zawahri brought tactics and organizational skills needed to forge militants into a network of cells in countries around the world.

U.S. intelligence officials have been aware for years of a network helping al-Zawahri dodge U.S. intelligence officials hunting for him, but didn’t have a bead on his possible location until recent months.

Earlier this year, U.S. officials learned that the terror leader’s wife, daughter and her children had relocated to a safe house in Kabul, according to the senior administration official who briefed reporters.

Officials eventually learned al-Zawahri was also at the Kabul safe house.

In early April, White House deputy national security adviser Jon Finer and Biden’s homeland security adviser Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall were briefed on this developing intelligence. Soon the intelligence was carried up to national security adviser Jake Sullivan.

Sullivan brought the information to Biden as U.S. intelligence officials built “a pattern of life through multiple independent sources of information to inform the operation,” the official said.

Senior Taliban figures were aware of al-Zawahri’s presence in Kabul, according to the official, who added the Taliban government was given no forewarning of the operation.

Inside the Biden administration, only a small group of officials at key agencies, as well as Vice President Kamala Harris, were brought into the process. Through May and June, Biden was updated several times on the growing mound of intelligence that confirmed al-Zawahri was hiding out in the home. Over the last few weeks, Biden brought together several Cabinet officials and key national security officials to scrutinize the intelligence findings.

On July 1, Biden was briefed in the Situation Room about the planned operation, a briefing in which the president closely examined a scale model of the home Zawahri was hiding out in. He gave his final approval for the operation on Thursday. Al-Zawahri was on the balcony of his hideout on Sunday when two Hellfire missiles were launched from an unmanned drone, killing him.

Al-Zawahri’s family was in another part of the house when the operation was carried out, and no one else was believed to have been killed in the operation, the official said.

“We make it clear again tonight: That no matter how long it takes, no matter where you hide, if you are a threat to our people, the United States will find you and take you out,” Biden said.

Al-Zawahri was hardly a household name like bin Laden, but he played an enormous role in the terror group’s operations.

The two terror leaders’ bond was forged in the late 1980s, when al-Zawahri reportedly treated the Saudi millionaire bin Laden in the caves of Afghanistan as Soviet bombardment shook the mountains around them.

Al-Zawahri, on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist list, had a $25 million bounty on his head for any information that could be used to kill or capture him.

Al-Zawhiri and bin Laden plotted the 9/11 attacks that brought many ordinary Americans their first knowledge of al-Qaida.

Photos from the time often showed the glasses-wearing, mild-looking Egyptian doctor sitting by the side of bin Laden. Al-Zawahiri had merged his group of Egyptian militants with bin Laden’s al-Qaida in the 1990s.

“The strong contingent of Egyptians applied organizational know-how, financial expertise, and military experience to wage a violent jihad against leaders whom the fighters considered to be un-Islamic and their patrons, especially the United States,” Steven A. Cook wrote for the Council on Foreign Relations last year.

When the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan demolished al-Qaida’s safe haven and scattered, killed and captured its members, al-Zawahri ensured al-Qaida’s survival. He rebuilt its leadership in the Afghan-Pakistan border region and installed allies as lieutenants in key positions.

He also reshaped the organization from a centralized planner of terror attacks into the head of a franchise chain. He led the assembling of a network of autonomous branches around the region, including in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, North Africa, Somalia, Yemen and Asia. Over the next decade, al-Qaida inspired or had a direct hand in attacks in all those areas as well as Europe, Pakistan and Turkey, including the 2004 train bombings in Madrid and the 2005 transit bombings in London.

More recently, the al-Qaida affiliate in Yemen proved itself capable of plotting attacks against U.S. soil with an attempted 2009 bombing of an American passenger jet and an attempted package bomb the following year.

But even before bin Laden’s death, al-Zawahri was struggling to maintain al-Qaida’s relevance in a changing Middle East.

He tried with little success to coopt the wave of uprisings that spread across the Arab world starting in 2011, urging Islamic hard-liners to take over in the nations where leaders had fallen. But while Islamists gained prominence in many places, they have stark ideological differences with al-Qaida and reject its agenda and leadership.

Nevertheless, al-Zawahri tried to pose as the Arab Spring’s leader. America “is facing an Islamic nation that is in revolt, having risen from its lethargy to a renaissance of jihad,” he said in a video eulogy to bin Laden, wearing a white robe and turban with an assault rifle leaning on a wall behind him.

Al-Zawahri was also a more divisive figure than his predecessor. Many militants described the soft-spoken bin Laden in adoring and almost spiritual terms.

In contrast, al-Zawahri was notoriously prickly and pedantic. He picked ideological fights with critics within the jihadi camp, wagging his finger scoldingly in his videos. Even some key figures in al-Qaida’s central leadership were put off, calling him overly controlling, secretive and divisive.

Some militants whose association with bin Laden predated al-Zawahri’s always saw him as an arrogant intruder.

“I have never taken orders from al-Zawahri,” Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, one of the network’s top figures in East Africa until his 2011 death, sneered in a memoir posted on line in 2009. “We don’t take orders from anyone but our historical leadership.”

There had been rumors of al-Zawahri’s death on and off for several years. But a video surfaced in April of the al-Qaida leader praising a Indian Muslim woman who had defied a ban on wearing a hijab, or headscarf. That footage was the first proof in months that he was still alive.

A statement from Afghanistan’s Taliban government confirmed the airstrike, but did not mention al-Zawahri or any other casualties.

It said the Taliban “strongly condemns this attack and calls it a clear violation of international principles and the Doha Agreement,” the 2020 U.S. pact with the Taliban that led to the withdrawal of American forces.

“Such actions are a repetition of the failed experiences of the past 20 years and are against the interests of the United States of America, Afghanistan, and the region,” the statement said.

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