Judge Visits Site of Family-Police Melee and Death as His Decision on Trial Nears

Central Municipal Judge C. Robert Jameson went to a home near Tustin Friday to see for himself where Deanna Slender was killed during a June, 1984, melee involving two sheriff’s deputies and three Slender brothers.

Jameson, who is presiding over a second preliminary hearing in the case, is scheduled to decide Tuesday whether to dismiss charges against Charles George Slender, 22, Monte Slender, 21, and Steve Slender, 24, or bind them over for trial in Superior Court.

All three face charges of assault on a law enforcement officer and interfering with an officer. Charles George Slender faces an additional charge of attempted murder.

The June 27, 1984, incident began with a sheriff’s deputy writing a speeding ticket for Charles George Slender, and ended with six shots fired from a deputy’s gun, one of them killing Deanna Slender, 23, Charles George’s wife.

But there are substantial differences in reports about the events leading up to her death.

Officers’ Claims

The deputies say that Monte Slender kept interfering while they were trying to write his brother a ticket after following him to his parents’ home, and that when they arrested Monte after warning him, the other two brothers attacked them.

The brothers and two neighbors say the incident escalated after the deputies allegedly jumped on Monte and began beating him severely with their clubs.

All parties agree that one deputy, Ben Stripe, was on the ground fighting with Steve Slender when Charles George Slender picked up Stripe’s gun from the ground in the driveway.

Six shots were fired in all, four by Deputy Leon Bennigsdorf, and two by Charles George Slender. One of Slender’s shots struck a motor home in the street in front of the house. The other struck Bennigsdorf in the face.

Bennigsdorf has testified that he shot and killed Deanna Slender and that he wounded Charles George Slender. But he said he did it in self-defense because both of them had Stripe’s gun and were about to shoot him. The Slenders say that Deanna Slender was only backing away from Bennigsdorf and that the officer had no reason to shoot at her.

Previously Dismissed

The three defense attorneys in the case, Ron Brower, Marshall Schulman and Al Stokke, successfully got the case against their clients dismissed last July after Superior Court Judge Richard J. Beacom agreed they had not received a fair preliminary hearing.

The district attorney’s office had learned after the Slenders were bound over at the first preliminary hearing that Sheriff’s Department officials had failed to make available to the defense attorneys all of their notes.

The defense says that some of the missing notes were crucial. One witness, a neighbor, Katherine Dolan, was not called at the preliminary hearing.

Defense attorneys said they knew she would testify that she saw the police beating Monte Slender with their night sticks. But the lawyers did not call her, they said, because that statement was not in the police report of the Sheriff’s Department investigators’ interview with her.

The defense lawyers said they feared she could have been impeached by the prosecutor. It wasn’t until after the late arrival of the investigators’ notes that they learned she had indeed made that statement to the police, but it had been left out of the police report, they said.

Katherine Dolan did testify, however, during the hearing before Judge Jameson. Defense attorney Stokke said he believes her testimony will make the difference.

At the Slender home, Jameson walked around the driveway area for about 20 minutes to familiarize himself with the scene and even went into the motor home, which had been put back in the same place it was the night of the shooting. A car and a truck were positioned in the driveway in the same locations where two similar vehicles had been parked when the melee began.