Handyman convicted of killing actress, another woman
Crime Thread
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A jury convicted a 34-year-old handyman Thursday of
strangling two women, one of them an actress who appeared as Janet
Leigh's body double in the classic Alfred Hitchcock film "Psycho."
Kenneth Dean Hunt was found guilty of two counts of first-degree murder
in a trial that almost never happened. He could receive the death
penalty at his sentencing Monday.
Hunt avoided suspicion in the 1988 killing of actress Myra Davis for 10
years, and authorities originally thought the death of his 1998 victim,
Jean Orloff, was the result of a heart attack.
It wasn't until Orloff's grieving family was preparing to have the
60-year-old woman's body cremated that it was discovered she had been
strangled.
After that police quickly linked the killing of both Orloff and Davis to
Hunt, noting that the two had similar markings on their necks when they
died and were both older women.
Davis, 71, had appeared as Leigh's double in "Psycho" and provided the
voice of killer Norman Bates' mother for the film. Her professional name
was Myra Jones.
Like Orloff, who lived just two miles away, her house had been
burglarized and she had been raped.
At Hunt's trial, prosecutors presented DNA evidence connecting him to
both rapes, and a half dozen people testified that they had been
accosted and groped by him.
Hunt's wife and family testified that he was home at the time of
Orloff's killing and was singled out because of his criminal record. At
the time of Orloff's death, he was on parole for a voluntary
manslaughter conviction and had served time for misdemeanor sexual
offenses.