Lake County Sheriff Rogelio "Roy" Dominguez on Wednesday named Lake County criminal court official Gilbert Gutierrez as a person of interest in a 15-year-old murder-for-hire investigation.
Although Gutierrez was out of town on Oct. 16, 1992, when Guadalupe Castaneda was murdered, the brutal killing happened three days before a scheduled court hearing to determine whether Gutierrez was the father of Castaneda's unborn child, search warrants say.
In 1993, former East Chicagoan Fidel Novoa bragged to Gutierrez's son and a mutual friend that Gutierrez "owed him big time" because Novoa had beaten to death a woman who Gutierrez had gotten pregnant, the warrants say.
"Novoa appeared to be relaxed, was halfway in a joking manner, and appearing to brag about the incident," the mutual friend, Jesus Quiroga, told police in an October 2007 interview, the warrants say.
Shortly after Lake County investigators confronted Novoa this week at his Florida home to get a DNA sample to compare with samples from the crime scene, Novoa attempted to commit suicide by slashing his wrists and stabbing himself in the chest, Dominguez said.
Novoa is on suicide watch near his home in Margate, Fla.
Gutierrez declined to comment on the investigation Wednesday.
Gutierrez is employed as a $60,000-a-year probation investigator in Lake Superior Court Judge Julie Cantrell's court, which is down a long hallway from the room where Dominguez announced Wednesday that Gutierrez is a person of interest in the case.
Dominguez released to the media copies of a search warrant for Novoa's DNA, along with an affidavit filed to support the search warrant filed in Broward County Circuit Court.
Dominguez would not say exactly what caused investigators to reopen the dormant murder investigation, but he did confirm that modern DNA analysis is being performed on strands of hair that were recovered from Castaneda's hands and on the ground near her body.
The weapon was believed to be a tire iron, although Quiroga told police that Novoa had used a baseball bat to "beat some (expletive) to death," the affidavit says.
Asked about rumors that have been swirling in political circles for weeks casting doubt on Dominguez's motives for reopening the investigation, Dominguez said his only concern is bringing any potential murderers to justice.
"It's always a good time to solve an unsolved murder," Dominguez said. "Someone's political status and affiliation or nonaffiliation has nothing to do with this investigation."
