Friday there was not time to shuffle in an ugly police mugshot of the week. If there had been, Gerald Guy Byrne would have taken it. He was arrested in Everett, Washington, for the 2009 murder of 69-year-old John Charles Samo.
I've received calls and emails from people asking if there was any movement in this case. There was a forceful shove when Byrne was arrested for an unrelated offense in Washington state. He reportedly gave police a false name, but his fingerprints linked him to the strangulation death of Samo.
]
As we reported at the time, a housekeeper found Samo's body in his condominium at 2522 W. MacArthur Blvd., Santa Ana, around 11:30 p.m. on July 21, 2009,
Samo, who'd retired from the Office of the
State Fire Marshal, ran a business called Safety Consulting and Engineering from his condo.
Byrne, a drifter with a long criminal record, was later identified as a suspect in Samo's murder, even landing on the Santa Ana Police Department's 10 Most Wanted list.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.
One Reply to “Gerald Guy Byrne, Most Wanted Murder Suspect and Ugly Police Mugshot Model”