Robert F. Horan, whose 40 years as the Fairfax County commonwealth’s attorney made him Virginia’s longest-serving prosecutor when he retired in 2007, died Saturday. He was 90.
Horan’s death was first reported by The Washington Post.
The former prosecutor tried hundreds of cases since he was first elected in 1967, including that of D.C.-area sniper Lee Boyd Malvo.
Mr. Horan secured a conviction in 2003 for Malvo’s killing of FBI analyst Linda Franklin at a Home Depot in Falls Church. However, he couldn’t persuade a jury to give the then-17-year-old Malvo the death penalty.
“The morning when we began the trial of Malvo, we met in the lobby of this hotel and [Moran] said, ‘Raymond, we are about to have an adventure,’” Raymond F. Morrogh, Mr. Horan’s longtime deputy, told The Washington Times in 2007. “Truer words were never spoken.”
Mr. Horan also won a guilty verdict against James L. Breeden, who murdered four people execution style in the walk-in refrigerator of a Roy Rogers restaurant in the Landmark area of Fairfax County in March 1976. Breeden was sentenced to five life terms.
Another major win for Mr. Horan was his 1997 death penalty conviction of Mir Aimal Kasi, who fired an AK-47 into two cars outside of CIA headquarters in 1993 and killed two workers and injured three others. Kasi then fled the U.S. for a safe house run by Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan until the FBI tracked him down in 1997.
Kasi was tried for capital murder and executed in 2002.
The Post reported that many alumni of Mr. Horan’s office went on to become judges, including five on the Fairfax County bench, three in Loudoun County and one on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit. Mr. Morrogh and three other former assistants to Mr. Horan became their county’s top prosecutors as well, with James Plowman serving in Loudoun, James Fisher in Fauquier and Nate Green in James City.
