Bio

Douglas Hines Jr. was born around 1948, based on his reported age of 42 at the time of his 1991 arrest. According to news reporting from 1991, he was convicted of murdering an elderly woman in Bexar County, Texas — the county seat of San Antonio — in either 1973 or 1974, with the killing described as a murder "with malice." He was sentenced to a term of 15 years to life and was paroled from a Texas prison in 1988. By 1991, he was living in Spring Valley, California, on Sweetwater Springs Boulevard, and was reportedly acquainted with a woman named Nita Nevarez, 57, who lived in the Linda Vista area of San Diego.

Murder Story

On May 1, 1991, Nita Nevarez, 57, was killed inside her home in the Linda Vista neighborhood of San Diego. According to a Deputy District Attorney's account reported in the Los Angeles Times, she was stabbed multiple times in the face, neck, and chest. The murder weapon was never recovered. Investigators determined that her television set, jewelry, and a Social Security check had been taken from her home, and the district attorney's office characterized theft as the apparent motive.

Hines, who was acquainted with Nevarez, was arrested on June 18, 1991. He was charged with her murder along with robbery and burglary in connection with her death. Prosecutors filed special-circumstance allegations against him under California law, based on three separate grounds: that he had a prior murder conviction, that the killing occurred during the course of a robbery, and that it occurred during the course of a burglary. Under California law at the time, a finding of special circumstances could expose a defendant to a sentence of death or life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Hines was held in county jail without bail pending a preliminary hearing scheduled for August 2, 1991.

Court records show that Hines's case proceeded through pretrial litigation over the following year. In 1992, disputes arose between the defense and prosecution over the scope of pretrial discovery under California's Proposition 115, particularly regarding whether prosecutors could compel the defense to disclose penalty-phase witnesses before a guilty verdict had been returned. This dispute reached the California Court of Appeal, which ruled on the discovery question in September 1992; the California Supreme Court granted review of that ruling in December 1992 before ultimately dismissing the review in January 1994.

According to a secondary reference source, Hines was ultimately convicted and sentenced to a term of life in prison in California in 1993, though this office was unable to locate an original trial report, verdict announcement, or sentencing record confirming the specific terms of that sentence, including whether it carried the possibility of parole.