Seventy-one-year-old **female** victim **Lula Mae Farley** was killed on the evening of **June 2 1990** in Ontario, California. She and her 65-year-old husband, **Herbert Farley** were collecting aluminum cans for recycling behind a neighborhood supermarket when they were confronted and shot. Lula Mae Farley was left mortally wounded in the alley; her husband was forced into the couple’s pickup truck and driven roughly 15 miles west to the community of Rubidoux in Riverside County, where
his body was found a short time later.
Within days, investigators focused on a 19-year-old local man, **Steven Valdez**, after a witness tentatively placed him at the Ontario scene. Valdez was booked for investigation of the double murder but released when the key eyewitness recanted critical portions of the identification. Facing the absence of physical evidence tying Valdez to the shooting, detectives had to release him and the case grew cold for more than a decade.
Breakthroughs came only after advances in ballistics and DNA technology linked the Farley homicides to a wider pattern of violence attributed to **Alfredo Rolando Prieto**, a 24-year-old **Salvadoran-American** male already on California’s death row for the rape-murder of 15-year-old Yvette Woodruff. Prieto’s semi-automatic pistol matched bullet fragments taken from the Farley crime scenes, and investigators recognized that his June 1990 movements placed him in Ontario and Rubidoux on the night the 71-year-old female victim was slain.
Prieto had originally been arrested on **September 6 1990**—just three months after the Farley murders—in the Woodruff case; yet his connection to Lula Mae Farley’s death surfaced only in **2005**, when California’s expanded offender DNA database and renewed ballistics analysis linked a series of unsolved 1988-1990 killings in California and Virginia. Riverside County authorities subsequently named Prieto as the prime suspect in the shooting of the 71-year-old female victim and her husband, although prosecutors ultimately pursued capital charges in other jurisdictions first.
Prieto was extradited to Virginia, convicted in multiple killings there, and—after California waived its priority—was **executed by lethal injection on October 1 2015** at age 49. No further arrests have ever been made in the killings of Lula Mae Farley and Herbert Farley, and Steven Valdez remains cleared. Investigators consider the Farley case functionally solved with Prieto’s identification, but California never tried him for the Ontario-Rubidoux shootings before his execution, leaving the formal homicide counts technically open in local records.
