Ex-Hughes Aide Jailed; Trial Is Delayed : Bail Arrangement Falls Through in Beverly Hills Murder Case

Former Howard Hughes aide John Herbert Meier was jailed Monday as the start of his trial in a decade-old slaying in Beverly Hills was postponed for at least a week because no courtroom was available in which it could be heard.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Douglas McKee ordered Meier to Los Angeles County Jail when an Orange insurance agent who had posted property as part the security for Meier’s $200,000 bail asked to be relieved of the responsibility.

The insurance agent, Peter George, said in an interview that he posted his combination house and office last fall at the request of a friend who was then in County Jail with Meier.

But George said that he recently became worried that Meier, whom he said he does not know personally, might not show up in court. George said he read an article in a news magazine last month noting that Meier had once forfeited $100,000 bail in a tax evasion case.

Meier, who came from Canada for the scheduled start of the trial for the murder of a business associate, protested the jailing.

“I’m appalled being here on a trumped-up charge of murder,” he told McKee. “There is no way I can defend myself properly from a jail cell.”

Before he was led away by a bailiff, Meier filed with the court a series of motions he said he had prepared himself. They seek to dismiss his privately retained attorney, Earl Durham, have a new lawyer appointed at public expense and disqualify the prosecutor, Dep uty Dist. Atty. Michael Brenner, from pressing the case.

The last-minute motions prompted McKee to say he was “appalled.”

McKee said that Meier had “come in and in effect (tried) to avoid going to trial. I want this matter to go to a speedy trial. I don’t want the system to bog down with the defendant coming in and doing various things to prevent it from going to trial.”

The judge said he would hear arguments on the motions next Monday. A long delay probably would ensue if McKee granted Meier’s motion for a new attorney, who then would have to familiarize himself with a complex case.

In his motions, Meier said that Durham had told him recently that he was “unwilling, unable and unprepared to proceed with the defense” and was going bankrupt because Meier had not paid him.

However, Durham told McKee that he was ready to go to trial.

Meier said he was indigent and therefore entitled to counsel at public expense.

The defendant sought to disqualify the prosecutor, claiming that Brenner’s parents were shareholders in a Canadian mining company, along with Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers involved in the case. Meier added that the key witness against him also had been involved with the firm.

Brenner said in an interview that he and his parents bought stock in the venture on a tip from a Canadian police officer but that to his knowledge the key witness was not involved.

Meier is charged with arranging the 1974 murder of Alfred Wayne Netter at the Beverly Hilton. Netter, of Vancouver, was stabbed to death.

Netter was an officer of a struggling company trying to market the then-new technology of videotapes by selling franchises for small videotape theaters in Canada and the United States.

Prosecutors charge that Meier arranged a loan to Netter and then had him killed to collect on a $400,000 insurance policy taken out as a condition of the loan.

Meier, also of Vancouver, was indicted on the charge by the Los Angeles County Grand Jury in 1981, after a former associate implicated him. He fought extradition for 2 1/2 years.

Meier, a “scientific adviser” to the Hughes organization in the late 1960s, claims that he is being prosecuted for political reasons, stemming from his one-time business relationship with former President Richard M. Nixon’s brother, Donald.