Ex-Deputy Attorney General Of Nevada Arrested For 1972 Murder Of 19-Year-Old Girl In Hawaii

In early 1972, Nancy Anderson was a 19-year-old who had been living in Hawaii for less than a year after graduating high school.

On January 7, 1972, Anderson was found dead in her Waikiki apartment. She had been stabbed more than 60 times.

Police spent 50 years trying to solve her murder, reopening the case numerous times and coming up with new suspects, the New York Post reported. Authorities spoke to a pair of door-to-door knife salesmen who had visited Anderson’s home just hours before her murder, along with former boyfriends and the apartment building’s property manager – but all leads came up empty.

The case went cold until earlier this year, when a tipster suggested 77-year-old Tudor Chirila, the former deputy attorney general of Nevada with a history of sordid affairs, may have been the one to kill Anderson back in 1972. Police obtained a DNA sample from Chirila’s son, John, and determined that the DNA they collected showed John was the biological child of whoever’s DNA was found at the crime scene 50 years earlier.

Earlier this month, police executed a search warrant and obtained DNA from Tudor Chirila directly. Two days after police obtained the sample, on September 8, Chirila tried to commit suicide, the Reno Gazette Journal reported. A week later, he was arrested and sent to the county jail in Reno, Nevada, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported. He was held without bail and charged with being a fugitive from another state and the murder of Nancy Anderson.

Chirila has been an attorney in Reno, Carson City, and the Lake Tahoe area. In the late 1970s, just years after Anderson’s murder, Chirila became Nevada’s deputy attorney general. Decades later, in 1994, he unsuccessfully ran for the Nevada Supreme Court.

Four years after his failed Supreme Court bid, Chirila was named in a federal indictment as the former president of a company that worked as a front for Joe Conforte, a Nevada brothel boss who owned the infamous Mustang Ranch. The indictment alleged that Conforte and others had conspired to defraud the government after the Mustang Ranch was seized by the IRS. Conforte was accused of hiding his assets during bankruptcy proceedings in order to buy back the brothel after it was seized, sold for back taxes, and then repurchased by Conforte. Conforte allegedly used A.G.E. Corp., where Chirila was president, to buy back the legal brothel.

Chirila testified as a government witness, saying he was aware of Conforte’s ownership of A.G.E. Corp. Conforte fled when the case went to trial in 1999, the Post reported.

In 1998, Chirila sued Conforte for $14 million, claiming he was wrongly fired because he cooperated with federal prosecutors. The lawsuit was dismissed.