On the morning of May 21 1990, the 38-year-old White female victim Elissa Naomi Keller failed to arrive for her 9 a.m. shift. That evening, her 18-year-old daughter returned to their East San Diego apartment and found the 38-year-old White woman lying on the bedroom floor, a blanket pulled over her torso; the front door’s chain was off and the usually–locked deadbolt was unlatched.
The medical examiner placed death at six-to-twelve hours earlier, bracketing the attack in broad daylight of May 21 1990.
Scene examination showed the 38-year-old White female victim was clad only in a tank-top, her bloody underwear turned inside-out nearby. Nine deep, tightly-clustered stab wounds pierced her chest; defensive cuts, facial bruising and petechiae suggested she had been punched and choked before the fatal assault. Entry appeared to be through a partially-open window: Nike Air-Jordan shoeprints on the sill matched tracks at another Clairemont murder, and bloody Honeycomb-patterned smears matched work-gloves later recovered from a suspect’s car and girlfriend’s closet.
Investigators noted that a distinctive gold-nugget ring was missing from the 38-year-old White woman. Within weeks, neighbors saw 23-year-old African-American male Cleophus Prince Jr. wearing that ring. Prince had moved into the adjacent Top-of-the-Hill complex on May 1 1990, less than three weeks before the slaying, and bragged to acquaintances about jewelry “off the girls he had slept with—they wouldn’t be needing it any more.” Keller’s mother and daughter never suspected him; the ring was later traced to Prince after it was stolen from him during a separate incident.
Prince became the prime—and ultimately sole—suspect in the killing of the 38-year-old White female victim as detectives linked shoe-print, glove-trace and jewelry evidence to a broader string of six daylight knife murders of White women in San Diego during 1990. He was arrested on March 3 1991 in Birmingham, Alabama, on the San Diego murder warrants, extradited, and tried jointly for all six homicides. A jury convicted him on July 13 1993; he was sentenced to death on November 5 1993 and remains on death row. No one else has been arrested or charged in connection with Keller’s homicide.
Detectives have publicly stated that the modus operandi in the 38-year-old White woman’s stabbing—daylight entry through an accessible window, overkill chest wounds inflicted with a kitchen knife, rapid departure with trophy jewelry—mirrored patterns in the other Clairemont serial murders. The corroborating physical evidence, eyewitness accounts of Prince wearing Keller’s ring, and his own incriminating statements left investigators confident that no additional suspects remain at large in the death of Elissa Naomi Keller.
