Tudor Chirila Jr., 77, was arrested in Reno and charged with second-degree murder after DNA evidence linked him to the 1972 fatal stabbing of 19-year-old Nancy Anderson. Anderson — who had moved to the island state after graduating from high school in Michigan a year earlier — was stabbed more than 60 times inside her Waikiki apartment on Jan. 7, 1972, police said. The local police never gave up on finding her killer — even half a century later. Investigators have reopened the cold case several times and investigated several suspects over the years. Door-to-door knife salesmen who knocked on Anderson’s door in the hours before her murder, as well as her ex-boyfriends and the manager of her apartment building, were questioned. Nancy Anderson was stabbed more than 60 times in her apartment in January 1972. Honolulu Police Department The sellers volunteered their non-matching fingerprints and took a polygraph test. The other suspects also proved elusive. Investigators finally got a strong lead this year after receiving a tip in December that Chirila could be a suspect, according to the criminal complaint. Police were able to confirm him as the prime suspect after obtaining a DNA sample from his son, John Cirilla of Newport Beach, California, in March. The sample identified the younger Cirila as the biological child of the person whose DNA was found at the crime scene, the criminal complaint said. Last week, Reno police executed a search warrant and collected a DNA sample directly from Tudor Cirilla at his Reno apartment. Two days later, on Sept. 8, Cirilla attempted to kill himself, and on Wednesday, he was arrested and booked into the county jail in Reno, where he is being held without bond on an out-of-state fugitive charge. Chirila, a longtime attorney in Reno, Carson City and the Lake Tahoe area, served as deputy attorney general after Anderson’s murder in the late 1970s. She ran for the Nevada Supreme Court in 1994, but lost. The murder charge is not the lawyer’s first run-in with the law outside of his profession. DNA evidence at the scene and a tip in December linked Tudor Chirila Jr. to Nancy Anderson’s murder. Honolulu Police Department In a 1998 federal indictment, U.S. prosecutors in Reno identified him as the former president of a company, AGE Corp., that served as a front for Nevada brothel boss Joe Conforte. The indictment accused Conforte and others of participating in an elaborate conspiracy to defraud the government in bankruptcy proceedings when the Mustang Ranch brothel east of Reno was seized by the IRS, sold for back taxes in 1990 and illegally acquired by Conforte and his associates . The government alleged that Conforte hid his assets during the bankruptcy proceedings to defraud the government and buy out the legal brothel under the covert ownership of AGE Corp. Cirilla testified as a government witness and acknowledged that he knew the company was owned and controlled by Conforte, who disappeared — possibly to South America — when the case went to trial in 1999. With Post cables
