The Police Department That Refused to Solve a Murder
9 min read
In February—two months after The Atlantic reported on a Hawaii murder case that sent an innocent man to prison for 23 years—Barry Scheck, the defense-bar legend and a co-founder of the Innocence Project in New York, contacted a former FBI lawyer named Stephen Kramer to ask him for help finally solving the murder.
On paper, things finally seemed to be going well enough for the Innocence Project’s client, Ian Schweitzer, and his brother Shawn, both of whom were 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 ’90s, and his conviction was reversed, too, last fall. But the prosecutors and the police in Hilo—where Ireland, 23 and on vacation with her family, had been attacked, raped, and left for dead—continued to argue, or at least imply, that the brothers weren’t fully in the clear. After Ian’s release, Lincoln Ashida, the prosecutor in Ian’s criminal trial, said in a statement that “another trial, prosecution, and conviction is possible.” When Shawn was exonerated, Ashida again said, “We stand by every fact that is already in the record.” (Ashida did not respond to a request for comment.)
For the Schweitzers, this was about more than just clearing their names. It was about getting the authorities to own up to the avalanche of errors that had led them to go after the brothers in the first place. (It was also, not trivially, about a pending compensation claim against the state, plus the possibility of a civil-rights lawsuit; Hawaii law does not allow anyone to receive compensation for a wrongful conviction if a court hasn’t found them innocent.) But the Hawaii police and prosecutors’ office weren’t budging. For the Innocence Project lawyers, this left just one thing to be done: find the real killer themselves.
Stephen Kramer is best known for cracking California’s Golden State Killer case in 63 days. He and a partner made use of genetic genealogy to link DNA evidence from crime scenes with publicly available genetic information collected by companies like 23&Me. By cross-referencing such information with other facts, including age, ethnic background, and family trees culled from obituaries, social media, and even high-school yearbooks, investigators have now solved hundreds of cases, finding suspects who evaded the police for decades. After retiring from the FBI, Kramer co-founded Indago, a company that is developing AI-assisted software to speed up genetic-genealogy investigations. “If a person can look at an obituary or a census record, why can’t you just teach software how to recognize that, too?” Kramer told me. He envisions a day when police, with just a few keystrokes, can use genetic genealogy to find possible suspects in any violent crime that leaves behind DNA.
Thanks to a cooperation agreement with the state of Hawaii, the Innocence Project had access to the DNA evidence in the Ireland case—semen from Ireland’s remains, as well as DNA on a T-shirt found at the scene that was also soaked with the victim’s blood. Both samples were attributed to a suspect designated as “Unknown Male No. 1.” It took Kramer just two weeks, using his new tools, to find a possible match—someone who, ever since 1991, had been living less than two miles from the scene of the crime.
Albert Lauro Jr. has a rather modest social-media profile—lots of pictures of him fishing and hanging out with smiling family members. He has the most minor of criminal records—a shoplifting violation long ago. Hilo is a small town, but the Schweitzers have said they don’t know him, and nothing public connects him to them. His ancestry is mostly Filipino. So is the DNA of Unknown Male No. 1.
Kramer’s program had gone searching for residents of Hawaii’s Big Island who had Filipino ancestry and shared relatives with Unknown Male No. 1. “If it was a typical Hawaiian person who had a lot of Māori and other islander DNA, it probably would have been a lot tougher,” Kramer told me. When Lauro turned up in the database, Kramer’s team did more manual records searches to confirm that he was a plausible age—he would have been about 25 when Dana Ireland was attacked—and that he lived nearby. They even learned that he owned a pickup truck along the lines of what would have been needed to drive through the thick brush to where Ireland had been abandoned.
Ken Lawson, a co-director of Hawaii’s Innocence Project, told me his team was relieved that Lauro had been found, but outraged that it had taken so long. “We have 110 banker boxes of documents” on the case, he said—thousands of pages, all scanned and digitized, of police notes and interviews, transcribed testimony, and investigation notes. The police were so focused on the Schweitzer brothers, they never looked elsewhere. “You put [Lauro’s] name in a search,” Lawson said, “it never comes up.”
After Kramer shared his findings with the Innocence Project, he brought the information to the FBI, which said it would work with the Hawaii police to obtain an abandoned DNA sample from Lauro—something he might discard in a public place that the police could surreptitiously grab and test.
But the Innocence Project lawyers were nervous: How could they know that the police would take this new suspect seriously, given how determined they still seemed to stand by their old suspicions of the Schweitzers? “We were certainly worried,” Scheck told me, “that when they eventually arrested [Lauro] and interrogated him, that they would try to, through leading questions or something, to get them to implicate our clients.” The lawyers wanted to closely monitor the police investigation, but the prosecutors’ office abruptly said it was no longer going to abide by the cooperation agreement, and stopped sharing information on its progress.
Sometime in the spring, the police followed Lauro. When he discarded a fork in a closed food container, they snagged it, and brought it to a lab. Sure enough, Lauro’s DNA was a perfect match for Unknown Male No. 1.
The Schweitzers’ team learned about it only days later. They then demanded that any questioning of Lauro or search of his house be videotaped. They wanted the police to isolate Lauro right away, to keep him from fleeing, destroying evidence, or committing suicide. The prosecutor, Mike Kagami, said in response that he thought the suggestions were “good ideas.” But the only way to compel the police to do anything was by going to the U.S. attorney’s office or the attorney general’s office, both of which refused requests by the Schweitzers’ team to step in. A motion in the case quotes an email from Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez saying that she’d passed the lawyers’ “concerns and proposals” on, 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.” The Innocence Project was officially locked out.
On July 19, the Hawaii police contacted Lauro and asked him to come to a local station to answer some questions about the Ireland case. During the conversation, which was videotaped but has not been made public, Lauro is said to have admitted that he had sex with Dana Ireland the day she died, but denied killing her (even though the DNA test indicated it was his T-shirt that was soaked with her blood). The Schweitzers’ lawyers believe he might have planned to say this ahead of time, because the statute of limitations for rape—unlike for murder—had long expired.
The police then asked Lauro if they could get a sample of his DNA by swabbing his cheek. He said yes. The police collected the sample and—despite his already being proved a match, and despite his admitting that he’d been with Ireland in her final moments—they let him go home.
The Schweitzers’ team didn’t know that Lauro had been interviewed until July 24, when the lab came back with another positive match. They were apoplectic. “They should have arrested him for murder,” Scheck told me. Even if Lauro had simply abandoned Ireland after she was injured, wouldn’t that be enough to justify second-degree murder?
The report from the police showed that Lauro was not in custody, and that his home hadn’t been searched. The prosecutors refused to tell Lawson and Scheck where Lauro was, on the grounds that the investigation was ongoing. But it had been several days, and Lawson knew that if Lauro wasn’t in jail, there was one other place he might be.
On July 26, Lawson called the Honolulu Medical Examiner’s office. He bluffed: “Can you tell me when the body of Albert Lauro is going to be released for burial?”
The officer who took the call put Lawson on hold. Then he came back and asked for the last name again. Lawson spelled it for him. “You got a pen?” the officer said. He gave Lawson the name of a detective and the number for a police report about “an unintended death.”
Albert Lauro Jr. died by an apparent suicide on July 23, a day before the Schweitzers’ lawyers even knew that he’d been brought in for questioning. Lawson could easily understand what would drive a person to do that: “With his family, how do you live with that?” he said to me. “How do you tell your grandkids, ‘Yes, I’m the one that did this to Dana’?”
In court, the police and prosecutors have continued to stonewall the judge and the Schweitzers’ lawyers, citing an ongoing investigation. “There are a lot of other investigative avenues, techniques, search warrants that we have been working on that we plan to continue working on,” Hawaii Police Department Chief Benjamin Moszkowicz said at a July 29 press conference.
The Schweitzer brothers have been asked not to comment for now. Their lawyers are petitioning the court for an immediate declaration of innocence for both brothers, and for the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department to investigate the police for letting their first real lead in a decades-old murder case slip through their fingers.
The Hawaii Police Department did not reply to a request for a comment, but said in a statement this week that “based on what the investigators knew at the time, there was not enough information to establish probable cause to arrest Lauro Jr. for murder.” Lawson pointed out, however, that Shawn—who was never accused of injuring or assaulting Ireland—was charged with second-degree murder for “leaving her in peril without seeking help.” If that was enough for Shawn, why not for Lauro?
The police chief told CBS News that any suggestion that his department had sabotaged the case was “abjectly false, 100 percent not true.” But both Scheck and Lawson can’t help but believe that, until the very end, the police were determined not to admit they had been wrong about the Schweitzers. They told me that of all the terrible things that have happened in this case—the years the Schweitzer brothers spent in prison, the decades of stigma they lived through, when everyone they knew believed they were murderers—this latest chapter is among the most outrageous. After condemning innocent men whose DNA was nowhere near this case, they said, the police have now let the man whose DNA was on the victim escape trial.
The police “wanted [Lauro] to flee or die so that they weren’t embarrassed,” Scheck told me. “We told them” not to let Lauro get away—“again and again and again. And we told the U.S. attorney’s office and we told the AG, and we told them directly in front of the judge, and [the police] went ahead and did it anyhow. So what does that tell you? It’s one of the ugliest, ugliest stories you can imagine.”
