Superior Court sign. (File photo by Chris Stone/Times of San Diego)
A man who snuck into a Linda Vista home and sexually assaulted a 5-year-old girl was sentenced Wednesday to 40 years and eight months in state prison.
Alejandro Jose Confesor, 24, had pleaded guilty to charges of lewd acts on a child and possession of child pornography stemming from the April 18, 2024 assault, which took place inside a Wellington Street home.
Deputy District Attorney Eric Bodnar called the defendant “a predator” and said, “This case truly is a parent’s worst nightmare.”
Along with prison, Confesor will be required to register as a sex offender.
According to testimony from a preliminary hearing held last year, he entered the home in the early morning hours and abused the child in her bedroom. He returned to the same home three days later around 3:30 a.m. and took items from the home’s garage.
Prosecutors say Confesor has no relationship to the home’s residents.
He was arrested the night of April 21 on Linda Vista Road, less than two miles from the home on Wellington.
During Confesor’s sentencing hearing, the girl’s mother said her daughter has suffered from nightmares and cannot sleep alone anymore.
For a time, she slept with shoes on to allow herself a better chance to kick intruders, her mother said.
The family home has since been outfitted with new locks, alarms and cameras. The girl’s mother said she has gone as far as setting up cans and bottles near doorways to trip up a potential trespasser and alert her to the danger.
When Marie Jones left the sentencing hearing for the man who’d viciously beaten, sexually assaulted and strangled her sister to death in a Virginia Beach motel room, she felt a huge sense of relief.
“That’s what I thought was going to happen,” Jones said during an interview. “I was sure he was going to die in prison.”
But now — less than seven months after that sentencing hearing — King is getting a chance at parole. That’s because Virginia law allows “geriatric” prisoners to petition the parole board for conditional release once they’ve met certain conditions.
King, now 72, has been incarcerated since he turned himself in to police in September 2020 for the death of his on-and-off-again girlfriend Lexie Walters. He spent more than four years in the Virginia Beach city jail waiting for his case to be tried, and was sentenced in February.
Virginia law allows prisoners 65 and older who’ve been incarcerated for at least five years in their current case to petition the parole board for a hearing. Those 60 and older who’ve served at least 10 years also can request a hearing.
King told investigators he and Walters had been drinking heavily together at a bar before heading to his room at a local motel. When he woke up the next morning, he found the 53-year-old woman dead, but said he had no memory of what had happened.
King also told detectives he’d done “the same thing” to another woman years before and that he “flips out” sometimes.
The first slaying happened in 1986 in Lucas County, Ohio. The victim was the mother of the bride at a wedding King attended. Just as in the murder of Walters, the woman in the 1986 case was savagely beaten, sexually assaulted and strangled.
King also turned himself in to police in that case. He was convicted of murder in 1990, was sentenced to 15 years to life, and released after 20. He moved to Virginia Beach after his release.
In 2019, he was charged with raping, sodomizing and strangling another woman he’d been dating. The jury in that case, however, chose only to convict him of assault. He was released immediately because he’d already spent more time in jail waiting for trial than he could get for the misdemeanor conviction.
Jones said she was stunned when she got an email last month informing her that King had a parole interview scheduled for Sept. 2. If his request is denied, he can apply again annually unless the board orders a longer interval.
“I thought it was a mistake,” she said. “I didn’t think that was possible, especially after the judge had said he would never see the light of day again.”
Jones and her mother were informed that they could offer input on the case and have a Zoom meeting scheduled with the board later this week, during which they will urge the board to keep King incarcerated. The Virginia Beach Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office and the Attorney General’s Office also have expressed to the board their objections to his release.
Jones believes the law needs to be changed to prevent this kind of situation from happening to another victim’s family, and said she has been reaching out to local lawmakers for assistance.
“It hadn’t even been a year since his sentencing, and we get this email out of nowhere,” she said. “We were just trying to heal and now it’s as if it’s starting all over again.”
Miracle Williams detailed to a federal judge the dire situation that led to her partner’s suicide. She talked about the woman she holds responsible for his death.
Robert Tascon had been embroiled in a legal dispute since 2021, Williams said through tears, over a house he owned in a beautiful, exclusive area in Encino. That September, investigators say, a woman named Caroline Herrling fraudulently sold his house out from under him for $1.5 million.
Herrling, 44, pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and was sentenced Friday by Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong to 20 years in federal prison.
“He was trying to sell the house so we could start our lives over,” Williams told the judge during Herrling’s sentencing hearing, her voice cracking with emotion. “The situation made him feel helpless.”
Tascon came from a wealthy family that set up two trusts for him in California, according to a U.S. Postal Inspection Service report. They provided enough money for him to spend freely, Travis Hartgraves, a lawyer and case manager for Tascon, told investigators last year.
But Tascon developed an alcohol problem, Hartgraves told investigators. Williams persuaded him to move with her to Abilene, Texas, in 2018 to get away from negative influences.
Tascon’s Encino home was his last asset, although he still had monthly payments from the trusts, Hartgraves told Lyndon Versoza, a postal inspector working the fraud case.
Tascon wanted to sell the home, according to the postal inspectors’ report, which was filed as part of the case against Herrling. But he couldn’t because it had become occupied by squatters. It is still unclear how Herrling found the property.
She sold Tascon’s home by using a co-conspirator with fake identity documents to pose as the homeowner, according to the U.S. Justice Department. Herrling had represented herself to the buyer as a licensed California attorney representing property owners in distressed situations needing to sell, according to an affidavit from Mark O’Donnell, a homicide detective supervisor with the LAPD.
In a plea agreement, Herrling admitted to setting up bank and E-Trade accounts to receive the proceeds of the sale, which Tascon did not authorize and which was accomplished through identity theft.
Hartgraves told Versoza that the house was sold for half its value.
Herrling used money from the sale to help pay for a home in West Hills, according to the affidavit.
After the house was sold out from under him, Tascon filed a lawsuit in an attempt to get it back.
“I am never going to get my house back,” Hartgraves recalled Tascon telling him.
“The fraudulent sale just about crashed him,” Hartgraves told Versoza.
The fraudulent sale was the final straw; it consumed Tascon, Hartgraves said, according to court filings.
Tascon killed himself on Sept. 11, 2022. He was 53. The police report noted that he had a history of mental illness and was involved in fraud litigation.
Robert Tascon in an undated photo.
(Los Angeles Police Department)
When investigators interviewed Herrling in January 2023, she denied having anything to do with the sale of Tascon’s property. She claimed her only involvement was driving Tascon to a notary to facilitate the sale of the house — and that she was only paid around $150 to do so.
When Versoza asked Herrling to describe Tascon, she couldn’t, saying that he had worn a hat and a mask. Later, when confronted, Herrling didn’t deny profiting off the sale, saying instead that she did not leave Tascon destitute, according to the affidavit.
During sentencing, Herrling’s attorney, Alex Kessel, said he didn’t think there was “any evidence to suggest that my client directly caused the death” of Tascon.
“He had a mental illness that developed long before the house in California was fraudulently sold,” Kessel said, citing a previous suicide attempt by Tascon in 2021. “We never know why somebody kills themselves … I haven’t been given in evidence any suicide note where he laid out his state of mind and mental state at the time.”
Asst. U.S. Atty. Andrew Brown stressed that Tascon “had one property and he lost it.”
Frimpong agreed with the prosecutor. During the sentencing hearing, she said there was evidence “enough to find the death was a suicide and it was caused in part by the loss of [Tascon’s] property.”
Tascon bequeathed his assets to Williams, his common-law wife, investigators said. However, with the fraudulent sale of the Encino home, he had nothing left to give her.
When Williams spoke in court, she acknowledged that Tascon was “mentally fragile,” but she said the sale of his home had only worsened matters.
Williams held a framed photo of Tascon when she first spoke. She described him as her “best friend.” After his death, Williams told the judge, she’d also tried to kill herself.
“This lady is a big manipulator and a con artist and she’s gotten away with using the dead,” Williams told the judge, referring to Herrling. “Hold her accountable and don’t let her do this to anyone else. Because this has ruined my life.”
