Ex-Nevada Deputy Attorney General Arrested in Reno Over the Death of a Teen in Waikiki

Author: Nevada Globe Staff

NEVADA – On Thursday, 77-year-old Tudor Chirila Jr. was being held in the Washoe County Jail without bail because he was wanted in another state.

In a criminal complaint, Honolulu police accused Chirila of second-degree murder. They said that DNA evidence linked him to the 1972 stabbing death of Nancy Anderson, who was 19 years old.

The Honolulu Star-Advertiser was the first to report that Chirila was arrested on Wednesday, more than 50 years after police say he stabbed the teen more than 60 times and left her body in her apartment on Jan. 7, 1972.

Anderson worked in Honolulu at a McDonald’s. The newspaper said that she had moved to Hawaii the fall before after graduating from high school in Bay City, Michigan.

It wasn’t clear right away if Chirila had a lawyer or would be given one. The jail records don’t say when he’s supposed to go to court for the first time.

The criminal complaint filed this week in a district court in Hawaii said that police had looked into the killing several times since it happened, and in December they got a tip that Chirila might be a suspect.

The criminal complaint says that in March, police got a DNA sample from Chirila’s son, John Chirila of Newport Beach, California. This sample proved that John was the biological child of the man whose DNA was found at the crime scene.

On September 6, Reno police searched Tudor Chirila’s apartment and took a DNA sample from him. The Reno Gazette Journal said Thursday that two days later, he tried to kill himself. On Wednesday, he was booked into the county jail in Reno.

Chirila was a lawyer for a long time in Reno, Carson City, and the Lake Tahoe area. In the late 1970s, he was a deputy attorney general, and in 1994, he ran for the Nevada Supreme Court but lost.

In a 1998 federal indictment, U.S. prosecutors in Reno said that he was the former president of A.G.E. Corp., which was a front for Mustang Ranch brothel owner Joe Conforte.

The indictment said that Conforte and others were part of a complex plan to cheat the government out of money when the IRS seized the Mustang Ranch east of Reno, sold it for back taxes in 1990, and then Conforte and his friends bought it back illegally.

The Associated Press reported at the time that the government said Conforte hid his assets during the bankruptcy process to trick the government and buy back the legal brothel under a secret owner.

As a government witness, Chirila admitted that he knew that Conforte owned and ran the company. Then, in 1998, Chirila sued Conforte for $14 million in damages, saying that Conforte fired him for no reason because he helped federal prosecutors.

When the case went to court in 1999, Conforte had vanished and was thought to be on the run in South America. He is thought to have died in 2019 in Brazil.

Credits: Mecury News