DNA tests point to rapist in 1993 slayings of 2 boys
San Diego police say a new method ties the killings to a man in custody.
March 22, 2001
By MICHELLE MORGANTE
The Associated Press
SAN DIEGO - New developments in DNA analysis have linked a convicted rapist to the 1993 slayings of two San Diego boys who disappeared during an afternoon bicycle ride, police announced Tuesday.
Scott Erskine, who is serving a 70-year term in Wasco State Prison, will be charged with murder and other counts in the slayings of Charles Keever, 13, and Jonathan Sellers, 9, police said. One boy was sexually assaulted.
The discovery of the boys' bodies in a marshy area near their homes in southern San Diego caused outrage in the community and led to an exhaustive search for the killer.
Police reviewed some 500 suspects and questioned about 1,500 people, Chief David Bejarano said.
But it was a new DNA analysis technique, adopted by San Diego police in the past year, that led to the suspect. The tests, known as Short Tandem Repeats, are more than a million times more specific than previous tests.
"Years ago, criminalists decided ... to take swabs from the deceased to preserve as evidence in the event that someday technology allowed those swabs to identify the killer," District Attorney Paul Pfingst said.
Investigators used the technique to compare DNA traces recovered from one boy with several suspects, but failed to find a match. Then, a random search of the state database of DNA samples from approximately 80,000 violent and sexual felons led to Erskine.
"The probability of another person matching the DNA profile recovered from this crime scene is approximately 1 in 600 billion," said Bejarano, who was a police captain in the South Bay district at the time of the slayings.
Erskine, 38, has been in custody since late 1993. He was sentenced to prison for the 1993 sexual assault of a woman in San Diego. Erskine's criminal record stretches back 24 years, Bejarano said.
Pfingst said he would consider seeking the death penalty.
Erskine was living in San Diego at the time of the slayings of Keever and Sellers.
The boys, best friends, often rode their bicycles together in the San Ysidro neighborhood near the U.S.-Mexico border. They disappeared on a Saturday afternoon, shortly after stopping for hamburgers at a fast-food restaurant. A man riding his mountain bike along a trail discovered the bodies two days later.