Thursday, July 08, 1999
Guilt led man to kill ex-wife, he says
BY JANE PRENDERGAST
The Cincinnati Enquirer
COVINGTON — He felt so guilty about having sex with his ex-wife, the man accused of murder told police, that he straddled her as she slept afterward and strangled her.
All this happened with his 2-month-old baby girl in the apartment, police said. They said he took time to have a bite to eat afterward.
Dannie Heras, 27, hung his head, sometimes banging it on a table, as Detective Marty Epperson explained Wednesday what she and other investigators think he did to Krista Cox Heras in her Covington apartment early June 26. She was found the next afternoon in the trunk of her mother's car in a Campbell County pond.
A fisherman saw the Dodge Dynasty's front end poking up out of the water. Mr. Heras used a log or fence post to jam down the accelerator, Detective Epperson said, and put the car in reverse. Investigators found little evidence in the car to connect him to it, she said, except for a bottle of formula he said might be his baby's.
Police think he tied Ms. Heras' hands with the drawstring from his white jogging pants and with a shoestring from a tennis shoe in her closet. He then rolled her up in a bedspread, Detective Epperson testified, removed
the screen from a window and pushed her out.
It was the cheated-upon girlfriend — whom Mr. Heras said he felt so guilty about — who informed on him. She approached a police officer as he sat in the Kroger parking lot in Latonia, the detective said, and told him that Mr. Heras came to her apartment after the killing and said “he'd done something terrible.”
The girlfriend is the mother of the 2-month-old. Mr. Heras and the dead woman also had a child together, a 7-year-old son. They have been divorced for several years.
Mr. Heras is likely to remain in the Kenton County Jail for some time, given his bond — $250,000 in cash. Kenton District Judge Ann Ruttle decided after the hearing Wednesday that there was probable cause to think he committed the crime. She sent the case to the grand jury for possible indictment.
Detective Epperson said she did not know of any aggravating circumstances involved in the crime. Those, such as an accompanying burglary, would be necessary for prosecutors to seek the death penalty.
Detective Epperson was the first to interview Mr. Heras after he was arrested. She knows him well, she said, from previous run-ins with the law. He pleaded guilty in 1992 to sexually abusing a 13-year-old girl and guilty the next year to assaulting Ms. Heras.
The detective said she started their taped conversation with idle chatter.
“First, I asked him if he'd just woken up,” she testified. “Then I said, "It's been a bad couple of days, huh?”
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