HAWAII 1972 Cold Case Solved After 50 Years — Her…
HAWAII 1972 Cold Case Solved After 50 Years — Her Killer Became a Deputy Attorney General
When Jodie Spooner pushed open her roommate’s bedroom door on the afternoon of January 7th, 1972, she thought Nancy had killed herself.
Blood was everywhere.
On the floor, the bed, the bathroom walls, soaked into towels in the hallway, and down the fire escape stairwell of the Coral Terrace Apartments in Wiki.
Nancy Anderson was 19 years old.
She’d moved to Honolulu from Michigan just 3 months earlier, looking for a fresh start in paradise.
And someone had stabbed her 63 times.
Detectives recovered blood that didn’t belong to Nancy.
The killer had cut himself during the attack and bled onto everything he touched.
They had his DNA before DNA testing even existed.
They just couldn’t do anything with it yet.
That was January 1972.
By January 1973, every lead had dried up.
The case went cold.
That blood sat in a Honolulu police evidence locker for half a century.
And when the results finally came back in 2022, they pointed to a man who had spent his entire career on the other side of the courtroom.
A man who prosecuted criminals for the state of Nevada, a deputy attorney general.
This is the story of how a 19-year-old girl’s murder went unsolved for 50 years.
How her family refused to stop fighting and how a genetic genealogologist in Virginia used a Honolulu city directory to catch a killer who had been hiding inside the justice system all along.
This case sat buried for half a century, and the full story of how it unraveled is unlike anything we’ve covered on this channel.
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Now, let’s go back to where NY’s story begins.
Not in Hawaii, in a small town in Michigan.
It was 1952, and in Bay City, Michigan, a couple named Merurl and Thelma Anderson were raising what would eventually become one of the largest families on their block.
Nancy Elaine Anderson was born on November 10th of that year.
The fourth of 10 children, 10 kids in one household.
Merl worked as a fireman at the Dao Chemical Company plant in Midland, about 20 m west of Bay City.
He was a World War II Navy veteran.
Thelma held the family together at home.
The Anderson kids grew up close, the way big families in small Michigan towns tend to.
They didn’t have much, but they had each other.
Birthdays were loud.
Dinners were crowded.
The older kids looked after the younger ones because that’s just how it worked in a house with 10 children and two parents stretched thin.
NY’s brother, Jack, later described their childhood in simple terms.
They were a tight-knit group.
Their father worked hard.
Their mother kept them fed and together.
It was the kind of childhood that sounds ordinary when you describe it.
And it was until it wasn’t.
On January 8th, 1966, everything changed.
Merl Anderson was critically burned in a boiler explosion at the Dao Chemical Plant in Midland.
He was 39 years old.
He fought for his life at the hospital for over 2 weeks.
On January 24th, 1966, he died.
Nancy was 13.
Jack was seven.
The youngest Anderson children were barely old enough to understand what had happened.
The older ones understood too well.
Thelma Anderson was suddenly a single mother with 10 children, no second income, no safety net, no road map for what comes next when you lose your husband at 30some with a house full of kids who still need school clothes and packed lunches and someone to tell them it’s going to be okay.
As Jack later recalled, he watched his mother raise her 10 kids alone from the time he was 7 years old.
That kind of loss doesn’t just shape a family, it defines one.
The Anderson kids learned early that the people you love can be taken from you without warning.
They learned that you hold on to each other because the world doesn’t owe you anything.
Those lessons would carry them through what came next, even though none of them could have imagined what that would be.
The Anderson children grew up fast.
They looked out for each other because they had to.
And Nancy, by every account from her siblings, was the one who wanted more.
She was adventurous, outgoing, trusting, maybe too trusting.
The sister who dreamed of seeing the world beyond Bay City.
In June of 1971, most of the Anderson family packed up and moved from Michigan to Arvvada, Colorado, looking for a fresh start in a new state.
Nancy went with them.
She was 18.
She worked at a doughnut shop and waited tables, saving whatever she could.
She didn’t stay in Colorado long.
By October of 1971, Nancy had done something none of her siblings expected.
She bought a plane ticket to Honolulu, packed a suitcase, and flew to Oahu alone.
She was 19 years old with waitressing savings and no real plan beyond beyond wanting to figure out what she wanted from life.
Her sister Mary Skiatoni put it best.
Nancy was trying to find herself.
She knew Hawaii was beautiful and if you’re going to go anywhere, why not Hawaii? Nancy landed in Honolulu and almost immediately found her footing.
She got a job at the McDonald’s inside the Alam Moana Center, one of the biggest shopping malls in the state.
She rented a room in apartment 704 at the Coral Terrace Apartments on Aloha Drive in Wiki, sharing the 7th floor unit with an 18-year-old roommate named Jodie Spooner.
The Coral Terrace was a residential high-rise on a quiet stretch of Aloha Drive just a few blocks inland from Waiki Beach.
NY’s apartment was on the 7th floor with views of the Honolulu skyline and the Cooa Mountains in the distance.
For a girl from Bay City, Michigan, it must have felt like living inside a postcard.
People who knew Nancy in Hawaii described her the same way her family did.
She was exceedingly friendly.
She talked to strangers at bus stops and in checkout lines.
She struck up conversations with people she met in the building and sometimes brought acquaintances home.
She dated several men during her short time on the island.
Her manager at McDonald’s said she was dependable and well-liked.
She showed up on time, did her job, and got along with everyone.
Nancy was 19 years old, 3,000 m from her family, working a fast food job in paradise, and she was happy.
Or at least she seemed to be.
For a girl who’d lost her father at 13 and grown up fast in a crowded Michigan household, Honolulu must have felt like the first place that was truly hers.
But something happened during her Christmas trip home.
In December of 1971, Nancy flew back to Arvvada to spend the holidays with her family in Colorado.
Her sister, Betty Burke, noticed something was off.
Nancy acted strange during the visit.
She seemed scared, like she sensed something bad was going to happen to her.
Betty remembered that visit for the rest of her life.
Nancy returned to Honolulu after the holidays.
She had about 2 weeks left to live.
NY’s story is one that almost stayed buried forever.
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Now, let’s go back to January 7th, 1972.
January 7th was a Friday.
Nancy wasn’t scheduled to work at McDonald’s that day, so she stayed home at the Coral Terrace Apartments.
Around noon, two men knocked on her door.
Parker Graham and his trainee Jeffrey Alward were door-to-door cutlery salesmen working for a company called Renoware Distributors.
They introduced themselves and asked if they could come back later to demonstrate their knives.
Nancy agreed.
The two salesmen returned in the early afternoon and gave their pitch inside the apartment.
Around 2:30 in the afternoon, Jodie Spooner came home and found Nancy sitting in the living room chatting with Graham and Alward.
Neither Nancy nor Jod bought anything.
The salesman left a pie cutter as a gift, gathered their samples, and walked out.
Jod went to her bedroom to take a nap around 2:45.
Nancy stayed in the apartment.
This is where the timeline narrows and the details matter.
Sometime around 4:15 in the afternoon, Jod thought she heard a scream.
She didn’t get up.
She assumed Nancy had left for work or was watching television.
It was a single sound easy to dismiss in a Wiki apartment building where noise carried through thin walls and open windows.
Around 5:00, Jod noticed something wrong.
The radio in NY’s room was still playing.
Water was running in NY’s bathroom.
The bedroom door was slightly open.
Jod pushed the door the rest of the way.
Nancy was on the floor covered in blood.
Blood on the carpet.
Blood soaked into the bed sheets.
Blood on the bathroom walls.
Jod panicked and ran to a neighbor’s apartment.
She said the words that would begin a 50-year investigation.
I think Nancy just killed herself.
Honolulu police arrived at the Coral Terrace Apartments within minutes.
What they found was not a suicide.
The medical examiner’s autopsy would later document 63 stab wounds across NY’s body.
Her neck, arms, chest, stomach, back, and sides.
Three of the wounds went clean through her body, creating exit wounds.
The cause of death was a single stab wound that pierced her heart.
There were no drugs or alcohol in her system.
She had defensive wounds on her hands, meaning she fought back.
Near the apartment entrance, officers found a blue and white towel stained with blood.
More blood was found on towels in the bedroom, in the hallway, and trailing down the fire escape stairwell.
The pattern told a story on its own.
The killer had cut himself badly during the attack, likely on the blade of whatever weapon he used.
He tried to clean himself up using NY’s towels.
He’d bled his way through the hallway and down the stairwell as he fled the building.
Think about that for a second.
He didn’t use the elevator.
He took the fire escape from the seventh floor, bleeding the entire way down, leaving a trail that ran from NY’s bathroom to the street.
in a Wiki apartment building in the middle of the afternoon.
Nobody saw him.
Nobody reported a man covered in blood walking down seven flights of stairs.
Or if they did, that report never made it into the case file.
It was a Friday afternoon in one of the most popular tourist neighborhoods in the world, and a killer walked out of a high-rise soaked in evidence and disappeared.
In 1972, that blood was evidence, valuable evidence.
Detectives could tell it came from someone other than Nancy.
They could type it, group it, preserve it in cold storage.
What they could not do was identify exactly who it belonged to.
DNA profiling wouldn’t be invented by Alec Jeff at the University of Leicester until 1984.
It wouldn’t be used in a criminal case until 1986, and it wouldn’t become standard procedure in American law enforcement for years after that.
The Honolulu Police Department had the killer’s blood.
They just had no way to read it.
That single fact would haunt this case for half a century.
The answer was sitting in a plastic evidence bag in a storage room, waiting for a technology that didn’t exist yet.
There’s a reason this story is still talked about today.
The blood on those towels would eventually speak.
It just took 50 years for anyone to hear it.
The investigation moved fast in the early days.
Jodie Spooner told detectives about the two knife salesmen who had been inside the apartment that afternoon.
Parker Graham and Jeffrey Alward immediately became the primary suspects.
Two men who sold knives for a living had been inside the victim’s apartment hours before she was stabbed to death.
The logic was obvious.
Honolulu detectives brought both men in for questioning.
Both submitted to fingerprint comparison.
Both took polygraph examinations.
Both were cleared.
Their fingerprints did not match anything found at the scene, and their polygraph results showed no deception.
Decades later, when DNA technology became available, both men were tested again and definitively excluded.
The knife salesman had nothing to do with Nancy Anderson’s murder.
With Graham and all eliminated, detectives expanded their search.
They pulled every thread they could find.
They interviewed men Nancy had dated during her brief three months in Hawaii.
They followed up on tips from acquaintances and neighbors who thought they might have seen someone near the building that afternoon.
They investigated the manager of the Coral Terrace apartment complex.
They reined Jodie Spooner multiple times, pressing for any detail she might have missed or forgotten.
Every lead went nowhere.
Every suspect was cleared.
The killer was not anyone in NY’s known circle.
At least not anyone investigators could connect to her.
He was a ghost.
A man who walked into her apartment, committed one of the most violent murders Honolulu had seen in years, bled his way out of the building, and vanished.
The fundamental problem was one of timing.
Police had latent fingerprints from the scene, but no match existed in their files.
Fingerprint databases in 1972 were manual systems organized by classification and jurisdiction.
If the killer’s prints were not already on file with Honolulu PD or shared through regional channels, they were useless.
And they were.
They had blood from the killer, plenty of it.
But the science to analyze it at the molecular level simply did not exist.
In 1972, blood evidence could tell you a general blood type.
It could narrow a suspect pool.
It could not tell you a name.
As Deputy Prosecuting attorney Scott Bell would later explain, by the end of 1972, the investigative leads had completely run dry.
There was nothing further for detectives to pursue.
The case file was shelved.
Nancy Anderson became a name in a cabinet inside the Honolulu Police Department’s records division.
Another unsolved homicide in a city that had plenty of them.
This decision seemed small at the time.
It wasn’t.
Because while NY’s file gathered dust in a police archive, the man who killed her was building a new life on the mainland.
And the career he chose would make the eventual revelation almost impossible to believe.
Tutor Cherila Jr.
was born on April 15th, 1945 in Sharon, Pennsylvania, a small steel town near the Ohio border.
He earned a bachelor’s degree from California State University in Long Beach in 1968, then moved to Hawaii for graduate school.
By 1970, he had a master’s degree from the University of Hawaii at Monoa.
In 1971 and early 1972, Cherila was a graduate assistant at the university, living in Honolulu with his wife, Merrily Roco Cherila.
Their residence was less than 3 mi from Nancy Anderson’s apartment on Aloha Drive.
He was 26 years old.
He was educated.
He was married.
And on January 7th, 1972, his blood ended up on towels inside apartment 704 of the Coral Terrace Apartments.
Nobody investigated Tutor Cherila in 1972.
His name never appeared on any suspect list.
There was no reason it would.
He had no criminal record, no connection to Nancy that investigators knew about.
No one placed him at the scene.
He was invisible.
After the murder, Cherila left Hawaii.
He enrolled at the Mc George School of Law at the University of the Pacific in Sacramento, California.
He earned his jurist doctor in 1977.
On September 25th, 1978, he was admitted to the Nevada State Bar, member number 884.
And then came the part that still doesn’t make sense to anyone who knows this case.
By 1980, Tutor Cherila was listed as Nevada’s Chief Deputy Attorney General.
The Chief Deputy, not an entry-level position, not a junior associate filing paperwork.
He was the second highest ranking lawyer in the Nevada Attorney General’s office, working directly under the state’s top law enforcement official, helping to prosecute criminals on behalf of the people of Nevada.
Stop and sit with that for a moment.
A man who stabbed a 19-year-old girl 63 times in a Wiki apartment was now wearing a suit, carrying a briefcase, and standing in courtrooms arguing for justice.
He reviewed case files.
He built prosecutions.
He sat across from defendants and made arguments about criminal accountability.
He did this for years while his own blood evidence gathered dust in a storage facility on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.
And no, I’m not making that up.
Court records from 1980 list him by name as Nevada’s chief deputy attorney general.
By 1981, he appeared in another case listed as a deputy attorney general.
His name is on the legal documents.
Cherila’s career continued through the 1980s.
He served as a senior assistant city attorney for the city of Reno.
He maintained a private law practice across several Nevada cities, including Carson City, Incline Village, and the Lake Tahoe area.
He moved through legal circles with the credibility that comes from having served in the Attorney General’s office.
He was a known quantity in Nevada legal and political networks.
In 1994, he ran for a seat on the Nevada Supreme Court.
He lost.
During that campaign, reporters discovered he had been briefly jailed for failing to pay $33,000 in child support to his ex-wife Merrily.
Not exactly Supreme Court justice material, but it barely registered as a scandal compared to what was hiding in his past.
His name surfaced again in the late 1990s in connection with one of Nevada’s most notorious scandals.
Federal prosecutors identified Cherila as the former president of a company called A Corporation.
That company turned out to be a front used by a man named Joe Conforte, a legendary Nevada brothel owner to illegally repurchase the Mustang Ranch after the IRS had seized it.
Cherila testified against ConForte in federal court in 1999 and separately sued him for $14 million.
In 1995, Cherila was accused of kidnapping his girlfriend, binding her, and threatening her with scissors.
Those charges were eventually dropped.
But the accusation itself tells you something about the kind of man who was walking free.
While Nancy Anderson’s case sat in a filing cabinet.
The reason Cherilla evaded detection for 50 years comes down to a simple, infuriating fact.
He was never convicted of a felony.
And because he was never convicted, his DNA was never entered into any law enforcement database.
The system was designed to catch repeat offenders.
Tutor Cherila committed one of the most vicious murders in Honolulu’s history and then as far as the criminal justice system knew, never broke the law again.
He didn’t beat the system.
He just never triggered it.
If Cherila had stopped there, if he’d simply lived out his years in Reno as a retired attorney, this would be a very different story.
But Nancy Anderson had nine brothers and sisters.
And they were not going to let her file stay closed.
50 years.
That’s how long Tutor Cherila walked free while NY’s family waited for answers.
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We’ll keep telling them.
For nearly three decades after the murder, the Anderson family had no recourse.
The case was cold.
Honolulu police had moved on.
Detectives who worked the original investigation in 1972 had retired or been reassigned.
The file sat untouched in a records division, one case among thousands, gathering the kind of dust that eventually makes a folder feel permanent.
29 years is a long time to wait for a phone call that never comes.
NY’s siblings grew up, moved to different states, started families of their own.
They buried their mother, Thelma, who died in 2001 at the age of 75.
Thelma had remarried in 1975 to a man named Robert Chambers and spent the second half of her life never knowing who killed her daughter.
She went to her grave without that answer.
NY’s older sister, Carol Samson, refused to accept that the case would stay closed forever.
In 2001, the same year they lost their mother, Carol did something that most cold case families never attempt.
She didn’t just write a letter or leave a voicemail.
She successfully petitioned the Honolulu police chief to formally reopen her sister’s murder investigation.
Not just review it, not just pull the file and flip through it.
Reopen it.
Assign a detective.
Work it like an active case.
That petition worked.
A detective was assigned to take a fresh look at the homicide with the tools that now existed.
Tools that hadn’t been available in 1972.
First, all latent fingerprints recovered from the original crime scene were submitted through the automated fingerprint identification system known as AFIS.
AFIS is a national database containing millions of fingerprint records.
It didn’t exist when Nancy was killed.
Now it did.
The results came back empty.
No matches.
Whoever left those prints at the Coral Terrace apartments had never been fingerprinted and entered into the system.
Then came the real test.
DNA analysis was requested on the blood evidence that had been preserved for nearly 30 years.
The towels, a bedspread, a slipper, all of it went to the lab.
The results confirmed what detectives in 1972 had suspected.
An unidentified male genetic profile was recovered from the blood on the towels.
The killer’s DNA had survived three decades in storage.
It was intact.
It was usable.
The profile was uploaded to state and national offender databases.
And once again, the case hit a wall.
No matches.
The man who killed Nancy Anderson had never been convicted of a crime that required a DNA sample.
He simply wasn’t in the system.
Carol Samson’s petition had accomplished something important.
It proved the killer’s DNA existed and could be tested.
But without a name to attach to it, the case went cold again.
The Anderson family now had confirmation of what they’d believed for decades.
The answer was sitting in an evidence locker.
The science just hadn’t figured out how to use it yet.
