For more than 33 years, the family of Renee Cuevas had no idea who killed her or why.
Cuevas, 27, was found dead on Lambert Road near the El Toro Marine base in the early morning hours of Feb. 19, 1989. There were no witnesses to her death.
At first, evidence that investigators found led nowhere.
It took until 2003 for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department to link a male suspect at the scene of Cuevas’ murder to the suspect in the killing of another woman around the same time: Shannon Rose Lloyd, a 23-year-old strangled in a bedroom she rented in Garden Grove in 1987.
Even then, though, the trail ran cold: The FBI could not match DNA evidence from those two killings to any known person in the agency’s database. But on Monday, Garden Grove police said they’d finally found their suspect.
“We now know Reuben J. Smith was responsible for the murders of Shannon Lloyd and Renee Cuevas,” said Garden Grove Deputy Chief Emir El Farra.
Smith, a Michigan man last living in Las Vegas who had ties to Orange County, killed himself in July 1999. That was about a year after he was arrested and charged with the sexual assault and attempted murder of another woman in Las Vegas. DNA evidence analyzed in an Orange County crime lab and matched up with vast stores of DNA data from around the country finally allowed investigators to tie Smith to the two killings.
“Today is a good day,” said Yolana Lui, a cousin of Cuevas, in Santa Ana on Monday.
While Smith will never face his day in court over the death of the woman, the news still provided Cuevas’ family with some closure, Lui said.
After so much time, not all of the family was still alive to see her case closed.
“Renee was loved by our grandma Mercedes, known as ‘Ama,’” Lui said.
Cuevas also had four siblings. Louie’s mother, Emilia, loved her niece deeply as well, she said. But “all have passed,” Louie said.
While police were able to get DNA evidence from the scene of both crimes, neither the technology nor the sheer volume of DNA data existed to help investigators match the evidence to a suspect.
That has changed. Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer likened the case to the now famous example of the cracking of the Golden State Killer case in 2018.
Joseph James DeAngelo, whose DNA neither federal nor local investigators had, was found through a technique allowing DNA analysts to match suspects through their family trees reconstructed from genealogical data. Ultimately, DeAngelo was found after investigators matched him to his brother, who had been arrested and his DNA sampled.
That system was not available to the FBI, which has a huge trove of DNA data, or to California state databases built through the passage of Proposition 69 in 2003. That law — which Spitzer, Jackie Speier and Lou Correa, all representatives in the California state house at the time — allowed the state to collect DNA data from inmates.
“That’s reconstructing a family tree from a known sample — connecting that known sample back to people in the family tree whose data we do have, or have the ability to get,” Spitzer said. “Today we can build back those genetic genealogy trees — we can go back decades.”
Neither police nor the D.A.’s office on Monday said who they were able to match to Smith to finally determine him as the suspect in the killings of Lloyd and Cuevas.
Last year, the 1976 killing of 19-year-old Janet Stallcup, also in Garden Grove, was solved through the same process. Investigators determined that Taylor Dean Hawkins murdered her. Hawkings died in Orange County Jail in 1977.
Stallcup’s sister, Lee Neil, said Monday the solving of the case brought her remaining family some comfort. But the pain is still there.”
“When a person dies, it leaves a hole,” Neil said. “This is finally over, though it’s never really over. We will never have all the answers that we want: We know the who and know where, but we’ll never know why.”
Source: Orange County Register
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