In the winter of 1988, the lives of two promising George Washington University students were tragically cut short. Twenty-two-year-old Rachael A. Raver and her boyfriend, Warren H. Fulton III, also 22, vanished on December 4th after an evening with friends at a Washington D.C. bar. Two days later, their bodies were discovered in a secluded, wooded area off Hunter Mill Road in Reston, Virginia.
Both had been shot to death, and Rachael had been raped.
For nearly two decades, the brutal slayings remained a painful unsolved mystery, a source of unending grief for their families. The case grew cold, with few leads to follow. A breakthrough finally came in 2005, not from a new witness, but from the silent testimony of DNA. Advances in forensic technology allowed investigators to link DNA evidence from the crime scene to Alfredo R. Prieto, a man already sitting on death row in California for a 1990 rape and murder.
The DNA match revitalized the investigation and brought a suspect into focus for the double homicide in Reston. Prieto, a native of El Salvador, was subsequently extradited to Virginia to face charges for the murders of Raver and Fulton. His legal proceedings were complex, marked by a mistrial in 2007 due to juror misconduct. However, a retrial in 2008 resulted in his conviction on two counts of capital murder.
The path to final sentencing was also fraught with legal challenges. The initial death sentences were overturned in 2009 because of errors on the jury's verdict forms. Nevertheless, Prieto was once again sentenced to death in 2010. Prosecutors also revealed that Prieto was a serial killer, connecting him to as many as nine murders in total.
After years of appeals, which included arguments regarding his intellectual capacity, all legal avenues were exhausted. On October 1, 2015, Alfredo Prieto was executed by lethal injection at the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Virginia, bringing a final, somber end to a case that had haunted the Washington area for over a quarter of a century.
