SAN JOSE — A man already imprisoned for one 1970s-era strangling of a young woman near Stanford University has pleaded guilty to a second slaying, capping an extraordinary run of Santa Clara County cold-case investigations that closed the long-unsolved murders of three women during a dark period in the campus’ history.
John Arthur Getreu, 78, formally admitted Tuesday to killing 21-year-old Leslie Marie Perlov on Feb. 13, 1973. He entered the first-degree murder plea in Santa Clara County Superior Court via video conference; he is in state prison custody in Stockton, and his attorney said several medical conditions made it impossible to safely bring him to court.
Getreu also admitted Tuesday that his murder of Perlov was during an attempted rape. The body of Perlov, a Stanford graduate working at a local law library, was found face down underneath an oak tree, west of her car parked near a quarry off Old Page Mill Road.
Despite being on short list of suspects and a documented history of sexual assault and homicide, Getreu eluded charges until his November 2018 arrest at his Hayward home.
Authorities credited the then-rising forensic method of DNA genealogy, made famous by the solving of the Golden State Killer case that same year. On Tuesday, Getreu spoke briefly, to say “Guilty” to Judge Jessica Delgado in affirming his plea and to assure her that he understood his rights.
Diane Perlov spoke in court to describe the lasting impact her sister’s death had on her family.
“It has been 50 years this month since my older sister was taken from us. Fifty years in which this monster has been free and living his life,” Diane Perlov said. “I don’t know how many other people he has killed. Hopefully he will have to deal with that with his soul.”
She credited her sister’s struggle with Getreu for helping solve her own murder.
“It was only because she fought so desperately that she had the evidence underneath her fingernails,” Diane Perlov said. “It was an incredibly brutal murder and sexual assault.”
She added: “There is no peace for this, there is no resolution or peace or comfort. Justice is the least we can do.”
Deputy District Attorney Michel Amaral said the latest conviction was a “tribute to law enforcement’s use of science to find killers, and the family’s perseverance of seeking justice on behalf of their sister.”
“John Getreu committed these atrocious crimes nearly 50 years ago and he thought he had gotten away with it,” Amaral said. “But science caught up to him.”
Getreu was convicted in September 2021 in San Mateo County for the 1974 murder of 21-year-old Janet Ann Taylor, who was the daughter of Chuck Taylor, a former Stanford athletic director and coach. He was given a sentence of life in state prison and is being held at the California Health Care Facility, Stockton.
While his first conviction was on the Peninsula, the road to implicating Getreu in the two murders was paved in the South Bay, where the Santa Clara County sheriff’s office and district attorney’s office, which operates the county Crime Lab, revived the Perlov investigation about five years ago.
Leslie Perlov’s body was discovered Feb. 16, 1973 — three days after she is presumed to have been killed — and the crime scene showed she had been strangled with her underwear and pantyhose stuffed in her mouth and her skirt pulled up above her waist. But there was physical evidence underneath her fingernails that was preserved, with the hope that one day in the future it could be meaningfully processed.
Getreu has a sordid history that preceded and coincided with the two Stanford killings for which he was convicted. In 1964, when he was 18, Getreu was convicted of raping and killing a 16-year-old girl in Germany. Both Getreu and the girl were the children of Army officers stationed there; he was tried as a minor and returned to the United States after serving a short sentence.
He was working as a security guard in Palo Alto when Perlov and Taylor were killed, and in 1975, Getreu was convicted of raping an underage girl in the city. But DNA collection from felons was not standard practice at the time, so he was not tied to the Perlov and Taylor killings.
Fast forward to 2018, and Getreu was on a list of possible suspects identified by the new round of evidence analysis. Detectives conducted surveillance on him and surreptitiously obtained his DNA from a discarded item.
Authorities said it matched the sample that had been recovered from the original crime scene. After Getreu was arrested, he was linked to Taylor’s killing after San Mateo County sheriff’s investigators matched his DNA to samples taken from Taylor’s clothing.
Perlov and Taylor were among four young people connected to Stanford who were killed on or near the campus between 1973 and 1974. In a separate case, the same team of investigators tapped DNA genealogy to solve the murder of Arlis Perry, who was killed in 1974 at the Stanford Memorial Church. Stephen Blake Crawford, a campus security guard at the time, died by suicide in June 2018 as officers were approaching his San Jose apartment to arrest him.
The murder that remains unsolved is that of David Levine, a 19-year-old junior who was found stabbed to death outside Meyer Library in September 1973.
Getreu is scheduled for sentencing April 26 and again faces a lifetime prison sentence. Technically, he would be eligible for parole after about seven years because his crimes are subject to 1973 sentencing guidelines. But Amaral said he expects that the entirety of Getreu’s criminal history dating back to the Germany killing, and how he was free for decades after killing Perlov and Taylor, would dissuade a parole board from actually releasing him.
“What we have here is an actual serial killer,” Amaral said. “That should give the parole board enough to keep him in (prison) for the rest of his natural life.”
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