Double murderer paroled to downtown San Diego

SAN DIEGO  — A career criminal convicted of two murders, including a 1977 bludgeoning death in Escondido, and one attempted murder has been paroled to a downtown San Diego halfway house, authorities said Thursday.

Michael Keith Moon, 63, was released from Richard J. Donovan prison on Jan. 12, and his downtown housing was arranged by the state parole system, an Escondido homicide investigator said.

Calling Moon a “sadistic thrill-killer” who likely has committed more crimes than authorities know about, investigator Chuck Gaylor said members of the public should be informed of his presence downtown.

“It is appropriate for the public to be aware of the fact there are people like Michael Moon out there, and these people pose a risk to society,” Gaylor said.

A spokesman for the state parole system said the agency does not disclose where parolees are living.

Gary Smith, president of the San Diego Downtown Residents Group, said that although his organization opposes such placements, they have found there is no way to stop them.

Instead, Smith said, his group has taken a very active role in monitoring downtown halfway houses and substance abuse recovery housing to make sure the facilities comply with codes and regulations.

Smith said a state parole supervisor told him that for what it costs the state to put one parolee in a halfway house in La Jolla, about nine can be housed downtown, so “they dump them in downtown.”

“We don’t have a choice,” Smith said. “We keep a very close eye on these halfway houses” and have a good relationship with city employees involved in code enforcement.

Five halfway houses are downtown, he said. It is a “lucrative business” for the people that run them, so they are usually eager to comply with regulations to avoid being shut down, Smith said.

Gaylor said Moon was raised in San Diego and had a number of crime convictions before the April 30, 1977, brutal beating death of a 24-year-old migrant worker, Liborio Lindin.

A retired Escondido police detective sergeant, Gaylor was rehired by the department as a paid reserve officer in 2007 to run its cold-case homicide team with retired FBI agent Norm Wight.

Gaylor was a rookie barely out of the academy when police were called to investigate Lindin’s death. Lindin’s body, stripped from the waist down, was found in the blood-smeared garage of a home under construction on Falconer Drive in Escondido.

The case went unsolved for 30 years. Over those years, rats in the Escondido Police Department’s property room ate or badly fouled most of the evidence. All that remained were photos of the crime scene and a bloody, partial fingerprint.

Wight, who spent 28 years with the FBI, and Gaylor began running the fingerprint through state databases and conducted 100 interviews across the country. When an analyst connected the print to Moon, the two investigators tracked him down in Reno and arrested him on Dec. 12, 2007.

Moon had met Lindin in an Escondido bar, lost money to him playing pool, and offered to drive him and two other men home, Gaylor said. Moon dropped off the two other men, and Lindin wasn’t seen again alive.

“This was the oldest unsolved case in Escondido,” Gaylor said. “It was pretty exciting to be working the night of the murder and 30 years later to be on the team that solved it.”

In between those events, Moon was convicted of plunging a knife into the chest of Rhonda Salazar in Reno on Nov. 4, 1978. He likely met her in a bar, Gaylor said. Moon pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison with parole. He got out of prison in 1990, moved to Ohio and took a job with a fiber optic company that had him traveling around the eastern U.S., Gaylor said.

In 1991, Moon moved to Woodstock, Ill., and attacked an elderly man he’d met in a bar. A passing bicyclist interrupted the assault. Gaylor said Moon was sent to prison for attempted murder, got out in 2000 and was paroled to Nevada, where his parole was revoked and he was imprisoned until 2005.

After his 2007 arrest for the Lindin murder, Moon was sentenced to eight years in prison and served half that, Gaylor said.

He said there is no information he has violated the terms of parole since Jan. 12.

“Our concern is that all that time he was out of prison before, he was traveling, he could be going to bars, picking up people and killing them,” Gaylor said. “I think it’s very likely he’s committed other crimes, up to and including murder, that he’s gotten away with. He’s a real, ongoing danger to the community.”