Police Department That Refused to Solve Murder Case

ANDin February—two months later Atlantic reported on a murder case in Hawaii that sent an innocent man to prison for 23 years — Barry Scheck, legendary attorney and co-founder of the Innocence Project in New York, contacted former FBI attorney Stephen Kramer to ask for his help in solving the murder.

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On paper, things finally seemed to be going well enough for Innocence Project client Ian Schweitzer and his brother Shawn, who were both convicted in the 1991 death of Dana Ireland. After more than two decades behind bars, Ian was released from federal prison in January 2023 and officially exonerated; Shawn served more than a year in the 1990s, and his conviction was also overturned last fall. But prosecutors and police in Hilo — where Ireland, 23, was attacked, raped and left for dead while on vacation with her family — continued to argue, or at least suggest, that the brothers were not in the clear. After Ian was released, Lincoln Ashida, the prosecutor in Ian’s criminal case, said in a statement that “a new trial, indictment and conviction are possible.” When Shawn was acquitted, Ashida again said, “We stand by every fact that’s already in the record.” (Ashida did not respond to a request for comment.)

For the Schweitzers, this was about more than clearing their names. It was about getting the authorities to acknowledge the avalanche of mistakes that had led them to prosecute the brothers. (It also involved, not insignificantly, a pending civil rights claim against the state, as well as the possibility of a civil rights lawsuit; Hawaiian law does not allow anyone to receive compensation for a wrongful conviction unless a court finds them innocent.) But Hawaii police and prosecutors would not budge. The Innocence Project’s lawyers were left with only one thing: finding the real killer.

Stephen Kramer is best known for solving the Golden State Killer case in California in 63 days. He and his partner used genetic genealogy to match DNA evidence from crime scenes with publicly available genetic information collected by companies like 23&Me. By matching that information with other facts, including ages, ethnicities and family trees gleaned from obituaries, social media and even high school yearbooks, investigators have solved hundreds of cases, finding suspects who had eluded the police for decades. After retiring from the FBI, Kramer co-founded Indago, a company that develops AI-powered software to speed up genetic and genealogical investigations. “If someone can look at an obituary or a census tract, why can’t you just teach the software to recognize that?” Kramer told me. He envisions a day when police will be able to use genetic genealogy to find potential suspects in every violent crime that leaves behind DNA, with just a few keystrokes.

Through a cooperative agreement with the state of Hawaii, the Innocence Project gained access to DNA evidence in Ireland’s case—semen from Ireland’s remains, as well as DNA from a T-shirt found at the crime scene that was also soaked in the victim’s blood. Both samples were matched to a suspect labeled “Unknown Male #1.” It took Kramer just two weeks, using his new tools, to find a possible match—someone who had lived less than two miles from the crime scene since 1991.

ANDAlbert Lauro Jr. he has a fairly modest social media profile—lots of photos of him fishing and spending time with smiling family members. He has the barest of criminal records—a shoplifting conviction a long time ago. Hilo is a small town, but the Schweitzers said they don’t know him and there’s nothing public that connects him to them. His ancestry is mostly Filipino. As is the DNA of Unknown Man No. 1.

Kramer’s program was looking for residents of the Big Island of Hawaii who were of Filipino descent and shared relatives with Unknown Man No. 1. “If this was a typical Hawaiian who had a lot of Maori and other island DNA, it probably would have been a lot harder,” Kramer told me. Once Lauro appeared in the database, Kramer’s team did more manual searches of records to confirm that he was of a reasonable age—he would have been about 25 when Dana Ireland was attacked—and that he lived nearby. They even learned that he owned a van, the kind you’d need to drive through the thick underbrush to where Ireland was abandoned.

Ken Lawson, co-director of the Hawaii-based Innocence Project, told me that his team was pleased Lauro had been found but outraged that it had taken so long. “We have 110 boxes of bank records” in the case, he said—thousands of pages, all scanned and digitized, of police notes and interviews, transcribed statements and case notes. The police were so focused on the Schweitzer brothers that they never looked anywhere else. “You put (Lauro’s) name into a search engine,” Lawson said, “it never comes up.”

ANDafter Kramer shared Through his findings with the Innocence Project, he provided information to the FBI, which said it would work with Hawaii police to obtain a discarded DNA sample from Lauro — something he could have abandoned in a public place that police could discreetly collect and test.

But the Innocence Project’s lawyers were nervous: How could they know that the police would take this new suspect seriously, since they still seemed determined and clung to their old suspicions about the Schweitzers? “We were certainly worried,” Scheck told me, “that when they finally arrested (Lauro) and questioned him, they would try, through leading questions or something like that, to get them to implicate our clients.” The lawyers wanted to closely monitor the police investigation, but the prosecutor’s office abruptly announced that it would no longer honor the cooperation agreement and stopped sharing information about its progress.

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One spring, the police followed Lauro. When he threw a fork into a closed food container, they caught him and took him to the lab. Sure enough, Lauro’s DNA was a perfect match for Unknown Man #1.

The Schweitzer team didn’t learn of this until days later. They then requested that any interviews with Lauro or searches of his home be videotaped. They wanted police to immediately isolate Lauro to prevent him from fleeing, destroying evidence or committing suicide. U.S. Attorney Mike Kagami responded by saying he thought the suggestions were “good ideas.” But the only way to get police to do anything was to go to the U.S. Attorney’s Office or the Attorney General’s Office, which denied the Schweitzer team’s requests to intervene. The motion cites an email from Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez, who said she had conveyed the attorneys’ “concerns and proposals” but was “assured that the Hawaii County Police Department is capable of handling the investigation of Unknown Male #1 and that they are committed to doing so in a thorough and impartial manner.” Project Innocence has officially closed.

On July 19, Hawaii police contacted Lauro and asked him to come to the local police station to answer some questions about Ireland’s case. In a conversation that was videotaped but not released, Lauro allegedly admitted to having sex with Dana Ireland the day she died but denied killing her (even though a DNA test showed that it was his T-shirt that was soaked in her blood). The Schweitzers’ attorneys believe he may have planned it in advance because the statute of limitations for rape—unlike murder—had long since expired.

The police asked Lauro if they could get a sample of his DNA by taking a cheek swab. He said yes. The police took the sample and — despite it already being a match, and despite his admission that he was with Ireland in her final moments — they let him go home.

The Schweitzer team didn’t know Lauro had been questioned until July 24, when the lab came back with another positive result. They were furious. “They should have arrested him for murder,” Scheck told me. Even if Lauro had simply left Ireland after being injured, wouldn’t that have been enough to justify second-degree murder?

The police report showed Lauro was not in custody and his home had not been searched. Prosecutors declined to tell Lawson and Scheck where Lauro was because the investigation was ongoing. But several days passed, and Lawson knew that if Lauro was not in jail, he might be somewhere else.

On July 26, Lawson called the Honolulu Medical Examiner’s Office. He bluffed: “Can you tell me when Albert Lauro’s body will be released for burial?”

The officer who answered the call told Lawson to wait. Then he came back and asked for his name again. Lawson spelled it out. “Do you have a pen?” the officer asked. He gave Lawson the name of the detective and the number of the police report on the “accidental death.”

ANDAlbert Lauro Jr. died of an apparent suicide on July 23, the day before the Schweitzers’ lawyers learned he had been questioned. Lawson could easily understand what would drive a man to do such a thing: “How can you live with this, with a family?” he told me. “How can you tell your grandchildren, ‘Yeah, I did it, Dan’?”

In court, police and prosecutors continued to resist the judge and the Schweitzers’ lawyers, citing the ongoing investigation. “There are many other avenues of inquiry, techniques, search warrants that we have been working on and plan to continue to pursue,” Hawaii Police Chief Benjamin Moszkowicz said at a July 29 news conference.

The Schweitzer brothers have been asked not to comment on the case for now. Their attorneys are petitioning the court to immediately declare both brothers innocent and for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to investigate the police for allowing their first real lead in the decades-old murder to slip through their fingers.

The Hawaii Police Department did not respond to a request for comment, but in a statement this week, it said that “based on what investigators knew at the time, there was insufficient information to establish probable cause to arrest Lauro Jr. for murder.” Lawson noted, however, that Shawn — who was never charged with injuring or assaulting Ireland — was charged with second-degree murder for “leaving her in harm’s way without seeking help.” If that was enough for Shawn, why wouldn’t it be enough for Lauro?

The police chief told CBS News that any suggestion that his department sabotaged the case was “completely false, 100 percent false.” But both Scheck and Lawson can’t shake the feeling that, until the very end, the police were determined not to admit they were wrong in the Schweitzer case. They told me that of all the terrible things that happened in this case—the years the Schweitzer brothers spent in prison, the decades of stigma they endured, when everyone they knew believed they were murderers—this final chapter is among the most outrageous. After convicting innocent men whose DNA was nowhere near the case, they said, the police were now allowing a man whose DNA was on the victim to avoid trial.

The police “wanted (Lauro) to escape or die so they wouldn’t be embarrassed,” Scheck told me. “We told them” not to let Lauro escape “over and over again. And we told the U.S. attorney’s office and we told the attorney general and we told them right in front of a judge, and (the police) went ahead and did it anyway. So what does that tell you? It’s one of the ugliest, ugliest stories you can imagine.”