Defendant waives opening in '68 murder case.

William Speer, acting as his own attorney in a rape and murder trial in California's oldest "cold case" prosecution, surprisingly waived his opening statement Tuesday.

Speer, 63, did not explain his reason, but simply told San Francisco County Superior Court Judge Jerome Benson in front of the jury of six men and six women that he wanted the trial to commence. People v. Speer, 2144768 (2004).

Assistant District Attorney Linda Allen spent but 10 minutes telling jurors in her opening statement that she would prove to them through DNA evidence and witness testimony that Speer raped and killed Linda Harmon, 14, in March 1968.

"He left evidence of himself," Allen said. "He left his semen in Linda Harmon's body."

Allen warned jurors that key evidence will also be "graphic" photos of the crime, where the teenager was found on the floor propped up against a couch covered in blood and multiple stab wounds.

"These photos will help me prove to you what happened to that tittle girl," the prosecutor said.

She said the killer moved the body around the room of the Sunnydale District apartment, where Harmon had been babysitting a neighbor's children.

"He is the rapist and he is the murderer," Allen said as she pointed to Speer, wearing blue jeans and a gray polo shirt, while sitting with his head down writing on a legal tablet.

Prosecutors also seek to enter as evidence a statement that Speer made to a polygrapher when Speer was enrolled in a special program in Arizona for sexual offenders. Speer hopes to suppress the statement under the doctor-patient privilege.

Sources from the prosecution and defense confirmed that Speer admitted committing a murder on a 14-year-old girl with a rusty fork in 1968 while talking to the polygraph operator.

Harmon lived with her widowed mother and sister at the public housing unit. Police said the mother, who is deceased, knocked on the neighbor's door about 9:30 p.m. The child was alive and safe behind a chain-locked door.

In the morning, she was found dead by another neighbor and her mother. Police found shards of a broken vase that they believed knocked her down before the killer raped and stabbed her with a 13-inch carving fork. Speer was an acquaintance of the mother.

The case went unsolved for 35 years, until the Police Department's homicide detail began looking at cold cases--those where leads dried up or led to nowhere. They discovered some old evidence in the Coroners Office, among it was an old slide.

"They found a slide with DNA evidence and sent it to the police DNA laboratory, which created a DNA profile of the apparent killer," said homicide inspector Kervin Silas in a December 2004 interview.

That profile was entered into the national DNA database and got a hit that identified Speer, who was then incarcerated in Arizona. Police said in their reports that he was serving a civil commitment as a repeat sexual offender with convictions in California, Colorado and Arizona. He was extradited to San Francisco to stand trial on rape and murder charges.

But as with many old cases, there are problems for the prosecution, not the least of which is that everyone who worked in the Coroner's Office or performed the autopsy and secured the DNA sample is dead.

In March 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court in Crawford v. Washington, 540 U.S. 807, overruled, a 1980 precedent, Ohio v. Roberts, 448 U.S. 56, which had allowed admission of statements from witnesses who were unavailable if they fell within a "firmly rooted hearsay exception" or bore "particularized guarantees of trustworthiness."

Writing for the court, Justice Antonin Scalia argued Roberts gave too much discretion to trim judges to rule on evidentiary statements.

He wrote that the Sixth Amendment "demands ... a prior opportunity for cross-examination."

In a 2004 phone interview, Speer said, "Crawford is all over this case, because all the coroners are dead."

Defense attorneys agree with Speeds contention that to do a chain of custody of the evidence, such as the autopsy findings and DNA collection, the person who took the samples must testify about how they were taken and where they were taken from and then be cross-examined by defense counsel.

"We don't know how many people were actually in the chain," said attorney Daniel Raynak of Phoenix in a 2004 interview. "We don't know what they did or how they did things."

It will be up to Speer to argue and keep out the damaging evidence, or at least educate the jury on Crawford. It's no small task for an untrained person acting as his own attorney.