Former Riverside County prosecutor: Early DNA tests in exonerated murder case brought no results

The prosecutor in the three trials of a man whose murder conviction was dismissed Monday based on DNA evidence said efforts to test a watch found at the scene of his girlfriend’s slaying and material from under her fingernails in the late 1990s brought no results.

Horace Roberts, 60, was freed from prison several days ago and on Monday was found factually innocent in the April 1998 slaying of his lover, Terry Cheek, 32. The married mother of two lived in Glen Avon, now part of Jurupa Valley.

Fishermen had found Cheek’s body near Lee Lake, south of Corona, after she was missing for several days. She had been strangled. The black Nissan pick-up truck she was last seen driving was found a short distance away on the 15 Freeway near Indian Truck Trail. Co-workers said the truck belonged to Roberts.

Roberts and Cheek were co-workers at Quest Diagnostics in San Juan Capistrano, and carpooled there from the Country Village Park and Ride in Riverside County, said Mark McDonald, Roberts’ attorney for all three of his trials. Two of them ended in hung juries.

Now Cheek’s husband, Googie Rene Harris Sr., 62, of Jurupa Valley, and her nephew, Joaquin Lateee Leal, 52, of Compton, are charged with her slaying. The same DNA results that exonerated Roberts helped lead to their arrests, Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin said Monday.

Their arraignment, scheduled for Tuesday, was delayed to Nov. 1. Both remain in custody against posting bond for $1 million bail, each.

“That’s one of those cases that haunted me, and I’m sure other people, for the last two decades,” McDonald said in a phone interview Tuesday. “Sadly, it was our theory in all three trials that Googie Harris was the killer. He was outside the courtroom every day at trial, with his chest puffed out, and wanting justice.”

Michael Semanchik, the managing attorney for the California Innocence Project, said Tuesday a DNA test of a watch recovered from the scene where Cheek’s body was found and linked to Roberts during the trial showed the genetic material was from the son of Harris . He has not been fully identified nor charged in the case.

Roberts had initially told investigators the watch was his, and could not later shake that statement,  said defense attorney McDonald, adding that Roberts’ credibility was harmed at his trials because of the lies he told to cover up his affair with Cheek.

But the watch results, yielded a few years ago, were still not enough to win a bid for release by Roberts. And the testing that revealed the watch DNA did not bring results for material taken from beneath Cheek’s fingernails, Semanchik said.

After a lengthy wait on tests of additional material sent to the lab in 2017, results in early 2018 linked DNA material from under the fingernails of Cheek’s left hand to Leal, Semanchik said.

Leal is Cheek’s nephew by marriage.

The results this year from the state Department of Justice’s Forensic Crime Laboratories in Riverside came from advances in DNA testing not available 20 years ago, when tests were first run on the watch and fingernails, said Brian Sussman, Roberts’ prosecutor at all three trials

He said technicians were asked to test the materials at the time of Roberts’ 1999 trials.

“I actually asked DOJ to check the watch battery, to see if there was DNA on it from when it was changed,” Sussman, now retired, said in a telephone interview.

“They told me, ‘We can’t get anything from this.’ They tried, and they could not get it,” he said of tests on both the watch and the fingernail scrapings.

“Sussman tried really hard to get DNA off that watchband,” McDonald said Tuesday.

“The science is getting better,” said Sussman, who said he had used DNA to get convictions in murder cases. “I trusted that technology when I used it to convict people. I have to trust it when it exonerates them,” he said.

Hestrin declined Monday to discuss the new case, and Semanchik said Tuesday he did not know all aspects of the investigation. Sussman, who said he has been kept informed of developments, declined to outline what led to the arrest and charging of Harris.

Of the watch DNA, Semanchik said there was “quite a bit of habitual wearer DNA,  and for (Roberts) to be excluded is pretty powerful.”

Leal was linked to the DNA found under Cheek’s fingernails from the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS.  His DNA was in the system because of a conviction for a June 1998 sexual assault that took place about two months after Cheek’s slaying, Semanchik said.

McDonald on Tuesday recalled Roberts’ sentencing in 1999 to 15 years to life in prison.

“He looked the judge, and all he said was, ‘But I didn’t do it.’ “

“I’ve never seen that,” McDonald said.