They continue to ask why
Twenty-five years after Denise Huber was slain, her family says killer may never face the death penalty.
The family of a Newport Beach woman slain in 1991 wonder whether her killer will ever be executed.
Shortly after 2 a.m. June 3, 1991, Denise Huber was driving home from a Morrissey concert in Inglewood when her car blew a tire on the 73 toll road.
The 23-year-old was just minutes from the Newport Beach house she shared with her parents.
Even while wearing the heels she’d donned for the concert, it should have been a relatively quick walk to a call box or a nearby gas station where she could have asked for help.
But her parents, Dennis and Ione Huber, never heard from Denise that night. In the morning, they began calling her friends.
That night, about 10 o’clock, one of those friends found Denise’s Honda still on the side of the freeway, unlocked, its battery drained from the emergency blinkers that had been left running. Denise was gone.
It would take three years before police would discover her body.
During that time, her family put up a 6-by-30-foot banner on the roof of an apartment building overlooking the area where her car was found. It read “Have You Seen?” and included Huber’s likeness, a physical description and the phone number for the Costa Mesa Police Department.
Her parents went on television to share their story as they worried and waited for any shred of information.
Dennis threw himself into the pursuit.
“My car was like a rolling billboard with signs all over it,” he said. “Every time I saw some girl with long brown hair, I’d want to see her face.”
Authorities eventually came to believe that John Famalaro, a 34-year-old painter, had pulled up as Denise walked along the side of the freeway.
Famalaro sexually assaulted Denise and killed her by slamming a nail remover into her skull more than 30 times in a Laguna Hills warehouse where he lived and ran his painting business.
Instead of disposing of the body, Famalaro kept it in a large freezer, even taking it with him when he moved to Arizona.
Famalaro, now 59, was sentenced to death for the murder in 1997. The California Supreme Court upheld his sentence in 2011, but another appeal is pending, and it could take years to resolve.
“He’ll die of old age in the prison, I believe, before he gets the death penalty,” Dennis said.
“And we’ll probably die before he does,” Ione added.
The couple have been married 52 years. Dennis is 77 and Ione is 73.
Last month marked the 25th anniversary of Denise’s death. Dennis and Ione say they’ve made peace with the fact that their daughter’s killer may never serve out his sentence as prescribed.
“It’s done, I feel,” Dennis said.
Speaking from their home on the banks of the Missouri River in South Dakota, the couple sound almost casual relaying details of the crime, except for the occasional twinge of pain in their voices.
“The wound never heals,” Dennis said. “You just learn how to deal with it, and it doesn’t hurt quite as much as it did at first.”
Time helps, Ione said, but only to an extent.
“I can’t tell you how much I still miss Denise,” she said. “I think of her every single day.”
The couple agree that any pain they feel now pales in comparison to the arduous years in the early 1990s when they couldn’t answer the heart-wrenching question: Was their daughter still alive?
Denise’s disappearance became one of the most famous mysteries in Orange County.
From the outset, police had little to work with, said Jack Archer, a now-retired Costa Mesa police detective who, with his partner, was assigned to lead the search for Denise.
Archer remembers the bare-bones crime scene on the side of the freeway — essentially an empty car. So the first step was to speak with Ione and Dennis, who’d reported Denise missing.
What they told Archer made him believe Denise hadn’t simply absconded. Almost immediately he suspected she was the victim of a serious crime.
“She was a young girl that wasn’t in trouble, wasn’t into drugs, didn’t appear to be rebellious,” Archer said. “She wasn’t someone that would just take off for days at a time.”
Archer and his partner then conducted multiple interviews with friends, co-workers, acquaintances — anyone who might have an idea where Denise had gone, but they came up dry.
Grasping for a break, police staked out the freeway where Denise disappeared, identifying drivers by taking pictures of license plates and then sending them letters asking if they’d seen anything suspicious the night of June 2.
But the trail was cold. Even psychics called in by police couldn’t point in a useful direction.
“All the leads that we had were exhausted,” Archer said.
Then on July 13, 1994 — more than three years after Denise disappeared — authorities got a break.
On that day, sheriff ’s deputies in Yavapai County, Ariz., searched a large rental truck in the driveway of Famalaro’s home. A woman who bought paint from Famalaro had seen the truck and thought it suspicious enough to alert police.
“She saw the truck and she told us that she felt a spirit pulling her to that truck,” Dennis said. “She felt so compelled she wrote down the license plate number.”
When Yavapai County deputies ran the plate number, they discovered that the vehicle had been reported stolen in Orange County six months earlier.
Court documents say sheriff ’s deputies thought they’d uncovered a mobile drug lab when they found a power cord running to a padlocked freezer sealed with masking tape in the back of the truck.
When a locksmith opened the freezer, deputies were met with a foul smell.
Inside, wrapped in black trash bags, was Denise’s naked body.
The next day, deputies served a search warrant on Famalaro’s home, where they found paperwork for a warehouse Famalaro had rented in Laguna Hills. Authorities believe he lived in and ran a painting business at the warehouse until he moved to Arizona in the summer of 1992.
In California, Archer was called back into the investigation to check on the Laguna Hills facility.
According to Archer, a witness there told police that the warehouse had to be cleaned after Famalaro moved out. One spot in particular was covered in what they thought was red paint.
The substance had been washed away by the time police entered the picture, but Archer decided to have a crew cut into the wall near where the stain had been.
“As soon as they flipped over the two-by-four on the bottom of the wall, there was dried blood,” Archer said.
Police soon theorized that Famalaro took Denise to the warehouse after kidnapping her from the side of the freeway. There, he raped and killed her.
But he couldn’t leave the body behind, Archer said.
In Famalaro’s Arizona house, investigators found boxes and boxes of trash, Archer said.
The suspect had saved everything from hundreds of almost-empty paint cans to soda receipts from Jack in the Box, the former detective said.
“He just could not throw anything away, and that’s what led to him getting caught .... He’s a hoarder,” Archer said.
“If he would’ve gotten rid of the body in the middle of the desert on the way to Arizona, we might’ve never solved the case.”
Dennis said he rarely thinks of Famalaro these days, but Ione said she does occasionally. She still has a question for the man convicted of killing her daughter: Why? The Hubers know Famalaro heard their pleas for answers. In his Arizona home, police found newspaper articles about his crime and a tape recording of one of their appearances on TV asking for help finding Denise.
“To be so cruel and so cold that he let us suffer like that,” Ione said, her voice trailing off.
Even 25 years later, she doesn’t expect she’ll get an answer.