John Arthur Getreu (Santa Clara DA’s Office)
A 79-year-old convicted serial killer in California has been sentenced to life in prison for the second time after being convicted of killing a young librarian at Stanford Law School more than 50 years ago.
Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Hanley Chew on Thursday sentenced John Arthur Getreu to life in prison with the possibility for parole in seven years for the 1973 slaying of 21-year-old Leslie Perlov, authorities announced. Getreu in January pleaded guilty to one count of murder in Perlov’s death.
“The long nightmare of John Getreu is over,” Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a statement. “I hope this brings some measure of peace to the loved ones of the people he preyed upon. And I hope that I never have to say his name again.”
The sentence means that Getreu will not be eligible for parole until 2031 at the earliest, the DA’s office said in a press release.
In a case evocative of how authorities captured the Golden State Killer, investigators submitted DNA recovered from under Perlov’s fingernail to Parabon NanoLabs, a Virginia-based company that specializes in providing phenotyping services to law enforcement agencies, to start working up a genetic genealogy. The lab’s analysis resulted in a positive match for Getreu, who was then identified as a suspect in her murder.
Investigators then surreptitiously obtained a sample of Getreu’s DNA from a piece of discarded trash and compared it against the sample found under Perlov’s fingernail. The two came up a match, authorities said.
Prosecutors said that Perlov’s body was discovered on Feb. 16, 1973, discarded in the hills that overlook the Stanford University campus. She was found with a floral scarf wrapped and “tightly knotted” around her neck. The garment had been used as a ligature to strangle her to death, authorities said. Prosecutors previously said that her killer had been attempting to rape her.
Perlov was a Stanford University alumna who aspired to attend law school prior to her death, according to a report from The Mercury News.
Leslie Perlov (Santa Clara DA’s Office)
Getreu was arrested and charged with her murder in November 2018, with prosecutors crediting Perlov for fighting back hard enough to retain some of her killer’s DNA.
Prosecutors say they believe Getreu committed a “string of sexual assaults and at least three slayings” that were part of what became commonly known in the 1970s as “The Stanford murders.”
Getreu, who was employed and lived near Stanford in the 1970s, was previously convicted in the high-profile 1974 murder of 21-year-old Janet Ann Taylor, who was the daughter of the school’s football coach and athletic director, Chuck Taylor.
Taylor’s corpse was discovered by a truck driver in a ditch on land belonging to Stanford University on March 24, 1974. Aside from being strangled, her clothes were severely ripped and torn – her raincoat split at a shoulder seam and her shirt opened all the way. Her face had also been beaten. Evidence showed that she fought back. Authorities were never clear on whether the victim was raped, but they suspected that was the killer’s plan.
Getreu was convicted on the strength of DNA evidence culled from a disposable coffee cup he used and then threw away in 2018. That sample was matched with DNA swabbed from the inside and outside of Taylor’s pants – after her cold case murder was reopened in 2017. Getreu’s DNA from that coffee cup was also used to link him to Perlov’s murder.
Taylor will serve his latest sentence consecutive to the seven years to life sentence he received for Taylor’s murder.
Additionally, German authorities in 1964 convicted Getreu in the brutal rape and strangulation murder of 15-year-old Margaret Williams.
According to a report from The Almanac, Getreu served nearly six years out of a 10-year sentence for rape with fatal consequences. He was released after officials determined he was likely to lead a “righteous life.”
Prosecutors said that Getreu’s DNA is now in the California state database and will regularly be compared to DNA from unsolved rapes and murders in hopes of solving more cold cases.
Alberto Luperon and Colin Kalmbacher contributed to this report.
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John Arthur Getreu sentenced for killing Leslie Perlov