Dana Ireland

Case background and investigation

Dana Ireland was a 23-year-old woman visiting from Virginia who was staying with family on the Big Island of Hawaii in December 1991. On Christmas Eve, December 24, 1991, she was riding a bicycle in the rural Kapoho area of the Puna district when she was struck, abducted, sexually assaulted and brutally beaten. She was found gravely injured near a fishing trail and taken to Hilo Medical Center, where she died the following day, December 25, from her injuries and blood loss. The savage crime shocked the Big Island and launched a lengthy and ultimately deeply flawed investigation.

In the late 1990s, three local men, brothers Albert 'Ian' Schweitzer and Shawn Schweitzer, and Frank Pauline Jr., were arrested and, in 1999 and 2000, convicted in connection with Ireland's rape and murder. The prosecutions relied heavily on questionable informant testimony rather than physical evidence. Ian Schweitzer was sentenced to life and served more than 20 years in prison. Frank Pauline was later killed in a prison in New Mexico. For years the men and their advocates maintained their innocence, arguing that crucial forensic evidence, including DNA, never matched any of them.

The convictions eventually collapsed. Working with the Hawaii Innocence Project, Ian Schweitzer had his conviction vacated in January 2023 after more than two decades behind bars, and he walked free; his brother Shawn, who had earlier pleaded guilty in exchange for a lighter sentence, had his conviction vacated in October 2023. The cases had long troubled observers because DNA from the crime scene, and a bite mark and other evidence, never matched any of the three men, pointing instead to an unidentified attacker. The exonerations underscored that the real killer had never been caught, and investigators turned to modern forensic genealogy. Using DNA recovered from the crime scene, an FBI genealogist helped build family trees tracing back centuries in Hawaii, narrowing the field to a single suspect: Albert Lauro Jr., a 57-year-old man from Hawaiian Paradise Park who had lived within about two miles of where Ireland was found in 1991.

In July 2024, investigators surveilling Lauro recovered a fork he had used and discarded in public; laboratory testing matched his DNA to evidence from the 1991 attack. On July 19, 2024, officers executed a warrant and collected a confirmatory cheek swab from Lauro. Days later, before he could be arrested, Lauro was found dead at his home in what police described as a suicide. Because he died before any charges were filed, no one has ever been convicted of Dana Ireland's murder despite the DNA identification, and police noted that the presence of his DNA alone was not by itself proof he intentionally caused her death. The case thus stands in a painful limbo: two men exonerated, one dead in prison, the long-sought DNA match finally made, and the man it pointed to beyond the reach of justice.