A Sunnyvale wallpaper hanger, recently sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for strangling his mail-order bride, also killed one of his previous girlfriends -- but got away with murder by staging the scene to look like a drowning, court documents allege.
Now, law enforcement in Santa Clara County are calling on authorities in Goshen, N.Y., to open an investigation of the 1993 "drowning'' of Gary Swierski's then-girlfriend Hilda Gonzalez-Tapia Muhammad.
Swierski, they say, has a long record of viciously abusing women and should be convicted of killing Muhammad 19 years ago to make doubly sure he's never freed to prey on anyone else.
"Usually we prosecute individuals who've committed bad acts,'' Santa Clara County Deputy District Attorney Matt Braker said. "But this is one of the rare instances where we prosecuted an evil man for despicably evil acts."
Late last month, Swierski, 51, was sentenced for strangling his 28-year-old wife, Reina, in 2005 and dumping her body in the Santa Cruz Mountains with the help of his terrified teenage daughter. Jurors took just one day to convict him of first-degree murder.
But for years, Swierski had managed to evade justice by reporting his wife as missing. He successfully removed all traces of her murder from their house, where he choked her to death after learning she intended to leave him for another man.
Sunnyvale detectives suspected the burly Swierski from the very first after neighbors said he routinely abused Reina, a native of Honduras. But his wife's skull wasn't found by hikers in Castle Rock State Park until 2008.
Still, there was nothing rock-solid tying Swierski to the homicide until early last year. That's when his daughter, Eva -- wracked with guilt and under constant threats from her father to keep mum or else -- reported he'd killed Reina and then coerced her into helping him hide the body.
During the investigation into Reina's killing, detectives concluded Swierski was a serial abuser who had also killed Muhammad nearly two decades ago.
'Red flags'
The trail of abuse begins with Mansueta Casinillo, a native of the Philippines, who like Reina met Swierski through a pen-pal service. The two began writing in 1981 and were engaged in 1984. Casinillo moved to Middletown, N.Y., about 90 minutes north of New York City, married Swierski and had a child with him.
During the recent trial, Casinillo testified that Swierski spit in her food, backhanded her and forced her to have sexual relations with him against her will. The abuse reached a point where Casinillo sent a letter to her sister declaring if she ever went missing, the defendant was responsible. In 1992, Casinillo fled to California with their child Eva, whom he also abused.
In 1993, Swierski met Muhammad, a native of Chile who moved in with him in Middletown in April and died two months later -- ostensibly by drowning.
After her death, Swierski moved to California, where he met Elizabeth Armijo, a native of Bolivia who was working at a Burger King in Sunnyvale. She left him in 1996 immediately after he first lashed out by punching her and grabbing her throat, squeezing to the point where she nearly lost consciousness. To avoid prosecution, Swierski reported that Armijo was in the country illegally, and she was deported.
One of the original detectives in Reina's case, Lt. Craig Anderson of the Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety, said he suspected Muhammad's death was not accidental after conferring with police back East and reading their coroner's report.
"There were a lot of red flags," Anderson said. "One of the original officers, I learned secondhand, was highly suspicious. But Swierski complained about him, and the officer was ultimately told to drop it."
The drowning itself didn't make sense to police. Muhammad was a champion swimmer who worked out at a local college. Yet her body was found after midnight in a wetland in the Basha Kill Wildlife Management Area in Wurtsboro, N.Y., not normally used for swimming. She was fully clothed in a purple jumpsuit with her shoes still on, eight feet from shallow water.
Swierski reported she had accidentally drowned after they had dinner at a Red Lobster. And the Orange County pathologist found the cause of death to be asphyxia due to drowning.
Blunt trauma
But a top Santa Clara County coroner, who closely examined Muhammad's autopsy photographs and the pathologist's report, found several signs that she had died far more violently.
Among them: florid petechiae on the face, an indication consistent with an asphyxia death but very unusual for a drowning. There were also superficial abrasions to her face, which suggest smothering, and tongue bite marks that also lend support for strangulation. The report also noted there was blunt force trauma to the right side of her head that was never explained.
Dr. Michelle A. Jorden, Santa Clara County's assistant medical examiner, also found a hemorrhage around the cervix and uterus. That, in conjunction with torn clothing around the pelvis area, suggests forcible or rough sexual intercourse, she concluded.
Braker tried to get the judge's permission to use the information in Swierski's recent trial. But Judge Diane Northway rejected the request on the grounds that the issue would require a time-consuming mini-trial within the murder trial on whether Muhammad's death was a homicide or not. In the end, Braker, who was named the office's prosecutor of the year in 2010, didn't need the macabre story to handily win the case.
But local law enforcement officials still hope their New York counterparts will prosecute Swierski for Muhammad's death. In Orange County, Assistant District Attorney Andrew Kass, who first learned about the case Wednesday from this newspaper, was noncommittal, saying, "I'm not in a position to comment as to what we may or may not do." But he jotted down prosecutor Braker's phone number.
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