On the morning of July 16, 1981, the body of Selena Keough, a 20-year-old mother, was discovered discarded under some bushes on a street in Montclair, California. The young woman had been brutally abducted, sexually assaulted, tied up, and strangled to death. In the hours before her death, Selena, a female of white ethnicity, had been walking home from a local nightclub called Club Unicorn. Witnesses later recalled seeing her with a tall man beside a shiny gold or yellow Cadillac.
One passerby noticed her crying and carrying her shoes; he stopped to ask if she needed help, but she declined, and he drove on. It was the last time she was seen alive.
For nearly four decades, Selena’s murder remained a painful, unsolved mystery for her family and investigators. Her younger sister, Sabrina Plourde, and their mother were left to grieve without answers. The loss was so profound that Plourde holds the killer responsible for her mother's death from a massive stroke just five years after Selena was killed. The case grew cold, one of many unsolved homicides filed away, but evidence from the scene, including the killer's DNA, was carefully preserved, holding the silent potential for a future breakthrough.
That breakthrough began to take shape decades later. In 2006, forensic analysis revealed that the DNA profile from Selena's case matched the DNA from another unsolved murder: the 1986 killing of 22-year-old Mary Duggan in Burbank. This confirmed that a single serial killer was responsible for both deaths, but his identity remained unknown. The crucial turning point came with the advent of investigative genetic genealogy. In a pioneering effort for Los Angeles County, investigators uploaded the suspect's DNA profile to commercial genealogy databases. By building a family tree from distant relatives who had submitted their own DNA, authorities were able to narrow their focus and ultimately identify a single suspect.
That suspect was Horace Van Vaultz Jr., a man who had been living across Southern California for years and was a peripheral figure in the L.A. hip-hop scene in the 1980s. Investigators began surveillance and collected an item from his trash, obtaining a DNA sample that definitively matched the evidence from both the Keough and Duggan crime scenes. In November 2019, Van Vaultz, then 64, was arrested during a traffic stop in Inglewood. He was a former Marine who described himself as a "swinger" and had a history of violence against women.
Horace Van Vaultz Jr., also known as "Horace the Horrible" and Randdi Stone, was charged with two counts of first-degree murder with the special circumstances of multiple murders, rape, and sodomy. Prosecutors described him as a "sexually motivated serial killer." During his trial, Van Vaultz testified in his own defense, claiming he had consensual sex with many women and, while he couldn't remember Keough or Duggan, his semen being present didn't mean he killed them. Evidence also linked him to the 1986 murder of a third woman, Janna Rowe, for which he had been tried and acquitted in 1988, long before DNA evidence was a factor in court.
On August 18, 2022, after deliberating for only three hours, a jury found Van Vaultz guilty of the murders of both Selena Keough and Mary Duggan. The verdict brought a long-awaited sense of justice to the families who had waited over three decades. "I hope that today's guilty verdict provides some comfort to the victims' families," said District Attorney George Gascón. On September 19, 2022, Van Vaultz was sentenced to two consecutive terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole. He maintains his innocence. The conviction, upheld on appeal, stands as a testament to the relentless work of law enforcement and the power of technology to reach back in time and close a case that once seemed destined to remain cold forever.
