More than three decades after Laurie Houts was strangled in her car on Crittenden Lane in Mountain View, the man charged with her killing is neither free nor on trial. John Kevin Woodward, now facing a third murder prosecution over the September 1992 death, remains under monitored home detention in Modesto while a federal judge decides a question that could end the case for good: whether a 1996 dismissal of charges against him legally amounted to an acquittal.
Houts, a UC Davis-educated computer engineer who worked at Adobe Systems, was found dead in her vehicle on September 5, 1992, killed by strangulation. Her case sat cold for decades until investigators say new forensic evidence linked Woodward to her killing, according to The Mercury News. That evidence included Woodward’s DNA found on a piece of rope preserved from the original crime scene. The California Statewide Law Enforcement Association has reported that the case also relied on the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Identification Unit re-examining more than 80 latent fingerprints collected from Houts’ car back in 1992.
At the original crime scene, a three-foot nylon rope had been tightened with a square knot around Houts’ neck, and footprints were left on the interior of her windshield, indicating a struggle, according to the Los Angeles Times. Her pocketbook was left undisturbed, a detail that steered detectives away from robbery as a motive and toward the idea that Houts had been targeted.
Two Hung Juries and a Judge’s Dismissal
Woodward was charged twice in the 1990s in connection with Houts’ death, and both trials ended with hung juries. In the 1995 trial, 8 of 12 jurors favored acquittal; in the 1996 trial, 7 of 12 did, according to the Supremecourt.gov. Prosecutors in the first trial had posited that Woodward was jealous of Houts’ relationship with his roommate, Brent Fulmer — a jealousy-based motive theory that was later criticized as homophobic and was barred from the second trial…