THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, October 14, 1995 TAG: 9510140279
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MIKE MATHER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines
The prime suspect in the rape and strangulation slaying of 17-year-old Amber Marie Zajac was released from jail Friday because prosecutors said they no longer believe he is the killer.
DNA tests showed semen taken from the victim did not match that of Kenneth N. Pallett, 22, police and prosecutors said.
Pallett had been charged with murder for the Aug. 8 killing of the Ocean Lakes High School girl.
``DNA evidence cuts both ways,'' said Shep Wainger, the prosecutor in the case. ``It convicts some people. It frees others. As long as we were holding him, we believed he was the killer, but after receiving DNA evidence and analyzing his statement to police, we let him go.''
The charges are nolle prossed, meaning prosecutors are not pursuing them now, but could reinstate them.
Wainger said he could not comment on whether DNA results had linked another suspect to the case. After studying Pallett's 12-hour, recorded statement and reviewing physical evidence from the crime scene, Wainger said there was not enough evidence to pursue lesser charges, which required proving Pallett had helped kill and rape the girl.
Police would not say if they had another suspect, only that no one else was in custody. But a search warrant affidavit from Aug. 25 showed that, while Pallett was in jail, police also were focusing on a 17-year-old boy.
Pallett told police he served as a lookout while someone else raped Zajac. Pallett said the rapist offered him sex with the girl, but Pallett declined, records show.
Police said Pallett lied so many times they did not know if the lookout story was true. It was one of at least nine conflicting accounts Pallett told police, records show.
The accounts ranged from Pallett saying he slept through the night, to saying he found the body, to saying he served as a lookout for a rapist, records show.
Records show Pallett knew crime-scene details that only someone who was there would know.
Police in August used a search warrant to take blood and hair samples from the second suspect. The teen had admitted to Detective Alan Ball that he was with Zajac shortly before her death.
DNA tests to prove the second suspect is the rapist are more complicated and more time-consuming than are the tests that cleared Pallett, officials said.
Police spokesman Lou Thurston would only say investigators were awaiting further test results.
The second suspect told investigators he walked Zajac to the entrance of the Derby Run Trailer Park and got her phone number. He told police he then went home.
Zajac's body was found in a patch of woods not far from her Redwing area home and not far from where the second suspect told police he left her.
Zajac left a friend's home shortly after midnight and apparently walked through the woods separating the Derby Run Trailer Park from her home. The woods are used by neighborhood teens as a shortcut between subdivisions.
When she failed to return home, her father and an acquaintance went looking for her, and found her body just off the well-worn path. MEMO: Staff writer Lynn Waltz contributed to this story.
ILLUSTRATION: Kenneth N. Pallett, 22, was the prime suspect in the rape and
strangling of Amber Marie Zajac, 17, of Virginia Beach in August.
by CNB