If he’d flee to Mexico to avoid being convicted of rape...
Source: Murder weapon was crowbar
FBI says Laurean may be in Mexico
BY LINDELL KAY
January 16, 2008 - 11:05PM
DAILY NEWS STAFF
A Marine charged with killing a fellow Marine who he had been accused of raping may have made it to Mexico, and authorities have recovered what could be the murder weapon.
Cpl. Cesar Laurean, a naturalized American citizen who was born in Mexico, fled Onslow County early Friday morning after authorities said he left a note telling his wife he buried the body of Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach. Lauterbach was pregnant and had accused him of rape in May.
In a week, Laurean has moved in the minds of law enforcement from “not a flight risk” to “possibly taking a flight out of the country.”
And as the manhunt for Laurean goes international, local law enforcement has concentrated on going over his recovered truck with a fine-tooth forensic comb, said Capt. Rick Sutherland of the Onslow County Sheriff’s Department.
“We found physical evidence in the truck and are processing it,” Sutherland said.
The truck was discovered Tuesday at a hotel in Morrisville just off Interstate 40, near both Raleigh-Durham International Airport and an unmanned bus station. It was then towed to Onslow County.
Investigators have not said how Laurean might have fled the area.
Sources close to the investigation also told The Daily News on Wednesday that the weapon used to kill Lauterbach was a crowbar, and a crowbar has been sent to the SBI lab in Raleigh for examination. They declined to say where the crowbar was found.
The fate of a bus ticket to El Paso, Texas, purchased by Lauterbach but not used by her, still has not been explained, and investigators on Wednesday would not rule out the possibility it was used by someone else.
The FBI filed court documents this week stating Laurean told members of his Marine Corps unit he would flee to Mexico if it appeared he would be found guilty of raping Lauterbach.
Laurean's wife, Christina Laurean, also told authorities she believed her husband would head to Mexico if he was in legal trouble.
Laurean is reported to have mailed letters back to his wife in North Carolina, according to two law enforcement officials who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. The letters had a Houston postmark, the AP reported.
"We strongly suspect, but have not confirmed, that Laurean may be in Mexico," said FBI spokesman Richard Kolko in Washington. "We have a strong working relationship with law enforcement partners in Mexico, and we're working with them to locate and apprehend him."
In addition to the original charges of first-degree murder, bank card theft and obtaining property by false pretense, Laurean has been charged by the FBI with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution,
"Every effort is being made to capture him," Sutherland said.
Catching him and seeing him returned to Onslow County are two different things, said Joseph Gutheinz, a criminal defense attorney who teaches criminal law at a college in Alvin, Texas.
"There is an incredible advantage to anyone who makes it to Mexico," Gutheinz said. "Mexico is well-known for refusing extradition back to the U.S. for any person facing the death penalty in the States."
And in 2001, the Mexican Supreme Court ruled life in prison to be cruel and unusual punishment, meaning the government is unlikely to extradite anyone facing serious murder charges, Gutheinz said.
"As a defense attorney, if I represented Corporal Laurean I would consider such a condition an absolute win," Gutheinz said.
"Here we have a man on the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted list who would return to North Carolina knowing that the worst possible sentence he faced was 40 years in prison. The prosecution would have to offer something better than that to secure a plea bargain, and absent a plea bargain they risk the possibility of acquittal."
In 1999, Texas Rangers made a deal with the sister of Angel Maturino Resendez-Ramirez, the confessed railroad-riding serial killer, for him to surrender on a bridge spanning the Rio Grande in El Paso, Texas.
Authorities said at the time that making the deal for Resendiz-Ramirez to surrender was worth the risk of him walking away, because they knew once Mexican officials had him, he would never be extradited. Resendiz-Ramirez was executed by the state of Texas in 2006.
The search for Lauterbach turned into a search for Laurean as events unfolded over the last month.
Lauterbach disappeared Dec. 14. Authorities think she was killed by Laurean shortly thereafter. Detectives found her remains, and those of her child, in Laurean's backyard Jan. 11.
Lauterbach died of "traumatic head injury due to blunt force trauma," said Onslow County Medical Examiner Charles Garrett, who signed her death certificate. The cause of death is listed as homicide. In his note, Laurean claimed she committed suicide.
When Camp Lejeune officials at a press conference Tuesday addressed Lauterbach's disappearance and death, they said she had not felt threatened by him even after accusing Laurean of the rape in May.
Base officials provided a timeline of the military's response to her disappearance that appeared inconsistent with some of the statements earlier made by investigators, including Sheriff Ed Brown.
Brown has backed away from media involvement, and Sutherland on Wednesday stressed that the department's focus was on finding Laurean and investigating the alleged murder, not on "finger pointing between the base and the Sheriff's Office" over any discrepancies.
In a statement e-mailed to The Daily News and posted in full online at www.jdnews.com, Sutherland said, "Sometime in the future, we will sit down with NCIS, the base and Sheriff's Office command staff, and we will review everything that took place and when it happened. If we find any area of this whole process that can be improved upon, we will work together to make sure that we make those improvements."
What's ahead?
Investigators have been noticeably more tight-lipped about this case since a whirlwind day of media activity. They spent Wednesday searching Laurean's truck for evidence, and there could be forthcoming information on whether their efforts yielded information about what happened to Lauterbach or about Laurean's whereabouts .
Meanwhile, the search for Laurean is in the hands of the FBI, and it will be interesting to see if the federal agency's contacts in Mexico will prove useful in tracking down the murder suspect.
Key questions
- There are many questions surrounding the death of Maria Lauterbach and the whereabouts of Cesar Laurean. Here are few that lingered prominently on Wednesday:
- Where is Cesar Laurean, and what has been his mode of transportation?
- If Laurean is captured in Mexico, what impact will extradition proceedings have on the case?
- While Laurean's wife apparently is providing valuable information in the search for her husband and the Sheriff's Department continues to describe her as a cooperating witness, what role do investigators believe she has played in this series of events?