MURDERER FACES LIFE IN PRISON AFTER PLEA CONVICTED RAPIST AVOIDS EXECUTION.

Byline: Karen Maeshiro Staff Writer

LANCASTER - A street gang member already imprisoned for 368 years to life for the 1996 gang rapes of four women faces life in prison without the possibility of parole after admitting to two murders.

To avoid a possible death sentence, Richard Nieto, 35, pleaded no contest to fatally stabbing 20-year-old Daniel Pineda of Palmdale in Mission Hills in September 1994 and to murdering 19-year-old Ruth Barneond of Palmdale, who was kidnapped and sexually assaulted in February 1995.

``He's going to get life without parole,'' Deputy District Attorney Kelly Cromer said Friday. ``His attorney had offered for him to plead to what he pled to if we didn't seek the death penalty.''

Cromer had recommended seeking the death penalty, but a District Attorney's Office committee decided that the defendant should get life without parole if convicted.

Along with entering a plea to the two murder counts, Nieto admitted a kidnapping special circumstance allegation, which made him eligible either for a death sentence or life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Nieto also was charged with breaking into a woman's Long Beach home and raping her in July 1994. Prosecutors agreed to dismiss that charge in exchange for his plea.

Nieto was not linked to the Long Beach case until 2001, when authorities matched up DNA from that case with the DNA taken from the 1996 Lancaster rapes for which he was imprisoned, officials said.

The home-invasion rape and the two murders occurred before Nieto was convicted and sent to prison on the other charges.

Convicted of murder at age 17 while a South Bay area gang member, Nieto is believed to have murdered Barneond while trying to force her to disclose where her boyfriend was. Nieto was hunting Barneond's boyfriend for shooting him.

Pineda, who Nieto believed had raped Nieto's girlfriend, was stabbed to death in September 1994 during an early morning fight on Columbus Avenue in Mission Hills.

Nieto was convicted at age 17 for a gang-related killing of a young man in Carson, and was released from the California Youth Authority in 1992, when he turned 25.

Four years later, he and another man were arrested for a brutal home-invasion robbery in which two armed men systematically raped four women and held four men hostage for more than two hours in a Lancaster apartment.

The intruders had followed one of the men and two women home from a Lancaster nightclub.

Nieto was sentenced in 1998 to 368 years to life in prison for those crimes. Four months later, homicide detectives disclosed that Nieto also was a suspect in the slaying of Barneond, whose body was found in March 1995 in the desert near 220th Street West and Avenue D, 17 miles outside Lancaster.

Barneond, a 1994 Highland High School graduate who had a 2-year-old son, had been sexually assaulted and stabbed numerous times. Barneond was kidnapped in February 1995 from the Palmdale apartment where she lived with her mother and younger brother.

Karen Maeshiro, [phone]

karen.maeshiro(at)dailynews.com