Suspected serial killer is charged with a second Stanford cold case murder as DNA evidence links him to the 1974 killing of the daughter of the university's former athletics director
- John Arthur Getreu, 74, was linked to the murder of Janet Ann Taylor, 21, by DNA
- Getreu has previously been charged with the murder of 21-year-old Leslie Perlov
- He was also convicted of the sexual assault and murder of a woman in Germany
John Arthur Getreu, from Hayward in Alameda County, was charged with two murders near the Stanford campus
A retired Stanford University worker has been charged with the murder of a 21-year-old student which took place 45 years ago.
John Arthur Getreu, 74, was linked to the murder of Janet Ann Taylor, 21, after detectives investigating the cold case matched his DNA to the victim's clothes.
The San Mateo County Sheriff's Office said this is the third murder Getreu has been linked to and they are continuing to search for more victims.
Last November the former carpenter, from Hayward in Alameda County, was charged with the killing of 21-year-old Leslie Perlov in Palo Alto.
He was also convicted of the sexual assault and murder of a young woman in Germany in the 1960s, investigators said.
Investigators said both Taylor and Perlov were strangled in killings considered to be 'sexually motivated'.
'Realistically, you look at a guy who has now been connected to three sexually motivated murders, now that covers [his] ages 18 to almost 30,' said Rick Jackson, a cold case investigator with the San Mateo County Sheriff's Office.
Janet Ann Taylor, 21, disappeared on March 24, 1974 while hitchhiking from a friend's house in Palo Alto to her La Honda home
Taylor was reportedly the daughter of former Stanford football coach and athletics director Chuck Taylor (pictured left in 1954)
'Those are still prime years for someone who has such an impulse, a driven ability to commit these kind of violent crimes.'
'We're looking obviously within our county,' he said. 'We're reaching out to other agencies across the country and other areas in the world where he has spent time.'
Taylor disappeared on March 24, 1974 while hitchhiking from a friend's house in Palo Alto to her La Honda home.
Her body was later discovered by a delivery driver on the side of the highway west of Interstate 280.
She was the daughter of former Stanford football coach and athletics director Chuck Taylor.
'The suspect's [methods were] very similar, and both victims were last seen leaving the Stanford campus area,' San Mateo County Assistant Sheriff Gregory P. Rothaus said during a news conference Thursday.
Perlov, who was 21 when she died, was last seen at her place of work as a law clerk at around 3pm on February 13 1973.
The victim's orange Chevy Nova was discovered the day she died abandoned at the entrance of an old quarry near Stanford University's campus, where she had recently graduated from.
Leslie Perlov, 21, was allegedly murdered by John Getreu, after she was found strangled with a pair of tights in her mouth close to her alma mater, Stanford University
Three days later her body was discovered by officers under a tree at the side of a mountain west of Stanford.
Perlov's death was ruled a homicide following an autopsy, due to the fact she had been strangled and left with a pair of tights stuffed into her mouth.
Her death remained a mystery until cold case detectives looked into the old case and submitted DNA evidence to the county crime laboratory, reports Sf Gate.
The results showed the profile of an unidentified man, who was only found when they the investigators collaborated with Virginia-based DNA technology company, Parabon NanoLabs.
The organisation, which contracts with police when DNA profiles do not match those stored on the national database, conducted a more thorough investigation.
Parabon looked into finding the unknown suspect's relatives through DNA as a way of tracking down the unidentified person's name.
A Sheriff's office statement read: 'Parabon submitted a genetic data profile created from the unknown crime scene DNA sample to a public genetic genealogy database for comparison in hopes of finding individuals who share significant amounts of DNA with the unknown subject.'
The police released this photograph of Perlov's orange Chevy Nova, discovered the day she died abandoned at the entrance of an old quarry
Getreu was identified after genetic matches helped the agency gather a list of possible offenders before obtaining his DNA.
It was not specified how they managed to acquire his DNA, but it is standard practice for the team to use items such as a used tissue.
The suspect was previously arrested on suspicion of sexually assaulting and strangling the daughter of a U.S. Army chaplain, who was 16 at the time, AP reported at the time.
At the time he was an 18-year-old staying with his father, a sergeant major in the Army in Germany, and was considered a juvenile during the case.
Getreu was convicted of murder, but because he was tried as a juvenile, he spent only a few years in prison before he was returned to the U.S., officials said.
Then in 1975, Getreu was convicted of statutory rape in Santa Clara County and sentenced to six months in prison, Wagstaffe said.
Getreu, who is already in custody after being arrested in Perlov's death, was ordered held on $10-million bail after a brief hearing Thursday afternoon in connection with Taylor's death, San Mateo County Dist. Atty. Stephen Wagstaffe said.
John Arthur Getreu was previously employed by Stanford University in California (pictured)
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