Paul Perez pleads not guilty during Yolo County arraignment in decades-old infant murders
Paul Allen Perez was arraigned Tuesday in Yolo Superior Court in Woodland on five counts of murder – one for each of the infant sons and daughters Yolo County prosecutors say he killed, one after the other, more than two decades ago.
The Tuesday court hearing came a day after Yolo County, state and federal officials stunned with their details of a 13-year-old cold case cracked just last October that led authorities to an accused serial killer of his own children.
The victims: Kato Allen Perez, born in 1992, who was previously known to be deceased; Nikko Lee Perez, who was born in 1996; Mika Alena Perez, who was born in 1995; a second Nikko Lee Perez, who was born in 1997; and Kato Krow Perez, born in 2001. The remains of the three children born since 1995 have yet to be found.
None of Perez’s children lived to see 6 months. Allegations that Perez inflicted torture on the newborns in the commission of the killings added to the shock for law enforcement.
“This case revealed unspeakable evil and ignited a resolve in all of us involved in the arrest,” Yolo County Sheriff Tom Lopez told reporters Monday at a Yolo County Jail news conference announcing Perez’s arrest. Perez, a 57-year-old Delano man serving time at Kern Valley State Prison for assault with intent to commit rape, was days away from his release when he was arrested in connection with the killings.
“The fact that he was not allowed to walk out of that prison a free man cannot be overlooked,” Lopez said.
Perez, his face marked at each temple with heavy inked tattoos, stood silently behind Plexiglas in the first-floor courtroom’s holding cell Tuesday. He conferred briefly with Yolo County Public Defender Tracie Olson before pleading not guilty to the charges and allegations of torture in the children’s deaths. Perez called for a speedy hearing and will face a scheduled preliminary hearing in two weeks’ time on Feb. 10 to present the case that would send Perez to trial.
The case began in March 2007 when a fisherman pulled a steel container out of a Yolo County slough. Inside, a grisly discovery: the badly decomposed remains of an infant and the beginning of a case that would haunt Yolo County Sheriff’s investigators for years.
“There were many doubts the case would ever be solved,” Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig said at the Monday news conference at Yolo County Jail that announced Perez’s arrest.
It wouldn’t be until 2018, on the heels of high-profile DNA-aided arrests of accused Golden State Killer/East Area Rapist Joseph DeAngelo and NorCal Rapist Roy Charles Waller, when Reisig’s office formed its DNA cold case division that investigators gained ground on the dormant case.
Yolo investigators working with state Department of Justice forensics experts loaded DNA information into a special indexing system checking weekly for direct matches. They then looked for matches based on kinship drawing investigators ever closer to a break in the case.
“”They were able to paint a list of potential siblings or parents of victims - and a father,” Barry Miller, the state Department of Justice’s director of forensic services.
In October 2019, after 13 years, investigators at last had a name: Nikko Lee Perez, a boy, born in Fresno in 1996, the third of Perez’s five children. Then, more heartbreak: “We learned that Nikko was not an only child,” Sheriff Lopez told reporters Monday. “We tragically learned that four of his siblings suffered the same fate. All are believed to have been murdered as infants.”
But many question remain. Investigators have no motive even as Lopez vowed Monday that “this investigation is not over.”
Chief among them for investigators and Perez’s attorney, the whereabouts of the children’s mother.
“There’s so much unknown about the case. The question I have – like everyone else has – where’s the mom? Any why isn’t she here?” Yolo County Public Defender Olson said outside court following the hearing. “There are a lot of unanswered questions. I didn’t hear anything that convinces me my client is guilty of anything.”
This story was originally published January 28, 2020 at 4:45 PM with the headline "Paul Perez pleads not guilty during Yolo County arraignment in decades-old infant murders."
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