Murder charges dropped after prosecutor reveals affair with criminalist

SAN FRANCISCO —  —  Santa Clara County prosecutors said Tuesday they were dropping murder charges against the husband and brother-in-law of a slain woman because the deputy district attorney in the case had an undisclosed affair with the criminalist who processed the evidence.

David Zimmer, the husband of the victim, and his brother, Robert, were arrested this year after a cold case review linked DNA on the victim’s body to the brother-in-law. Zimmer’s trial was set for next week.

Cathy Zimmer, 38, the mother of two teenagers, was found strangled to death in her car at San Jose International Airport in 1989. Prosecutors said David Zimmer was seeing another woman at the time and later collected on insurance policies and inherited his wife’s estate.

In a written statement, the district attorney’s office said it needed to review the case more thoroughly after discovering the “prosecutor originally assigned to the case had an undisclosed and improper relationship with the case’s criminalist” and had failed to turn over evidence to the defense in a “timely fashion.”

Also in the statement, Santa Clara Dist. Atty. Jeff Rosen apologized to the victim’s family.

“We simply cannot proceed without taking the time to re-examine and re-evaluate the case in order to ensure we have not violated the rights of the accused, nor compromised the integrity of the criminal justice system,” Rosen said.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Ted Kajani, who headed the district attorney’s cold case unit, told his superiors about the affair a month ago, said Assistant Dist. Atty. Marc Buller. The office took Kajani, who is married, off the case and removed him as chief of the unit.

The criminalist, who testified in the case, also was reassigned. Buller said he could not comment on whether the two might face disciplinary action because personnel matters are confidential.

Michael Cardoza, David Zimmer’s lawyer, called Tuesday’s development “bittersweet.”

Cardoza said a judge who oversaw the preliminary hearing had remarked that the evidence against his client was thin. Cardoza said he also was struck by the dearth of evidence and insisted on a speedy trial for his client, who has been free on $1-million bail.

Two weeks ago, the district attorney’s office gave him 10,000 pages of evidence and several CDs, Cardoza said. He said he also demanded to know more information about the affair.

“We were pounding on them,” he said.

The defense lawyer — a former prosecutor in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Alameda counties — said that the district attorney’s office told him it had reexamined the DNA and the evidence was solid. But Cardoza said the district attorney’s forensic laboratory could not have retested the genetic evidence because there was none left.

Buller said the district attorney’s office arranged for Robert Zimmer’s release from jail Tuesday.

“If we believe there is sufficient evidence to go forward, we will,” the assistant district attorney said. “We revealed everything. We disclosed everything. We want to make sure we got it right.”

maura.dolan@latimes.com

Twitter: @mauradolan