2 Portraits of Slain Man May Determine Wife’s Fate in Trial

Lew Jones had all the trappings of the good life.

He kept a 50-foot yacht near his apartment in Marina del Rey, drove five cars, including a Rolls Royce, and had a young wife--his fourth--with a taste for Rolex watches and mink coats.

But when he died two years ago at the age of 54 from a bullet in the back of his head, Jones had almost nothing in the bank.

“Lew was always looking for the one big deal,” his wife, Linda, testified recently in Los Angeles Superior Court, where she is on trial for the murder of her husband. “He always thought the one deal would bail us out.”

2 Contrasting Portraits

Two sharply contrasting portraits of Lew Jones--one sketched by the prosecution, the other by the defense--have emerged during six weeks of testimony before Judge Alexander R. Early III. The case is expected to go to the jury Monday.

Jurors will have to decide for themselves who Jones really was. Was he an honest, if fun-loving, lawyer, as the government says, who made the fatal mistake of trusting his wife too much? Or was he an embezzler and con man, as the defense contends, who was killed by a shady associate after his grandiose schemes began collapsing?

What jurors conclude about Lew Jones, both sides agree, is likely to determine whether Linda Sue Jones, now 32, is convicted of murder.

According to the prosecution, Lew Jones was the unwitting dupe of his wife, who stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from him, his clients and his friends while working as a secretary in his law office. She needed the money, Deputy Dist. Atty. Charles Girot says, to support a compulsive gambling habit that she kept hidden from Jones.

Besides murder, Linda Jones, who is free on $50,000 bail, is charged with six counts of grand theft. She is accused of stealing $235,000 from various parties and about $500,000 from Aetna Insurance Co. But the prosecution believes that Linda Jones may have stolen as much as $500,000 from collection accounts her husband held in trust for Aetna, which provided about 90% of his legal work.

There is no disagreement that Linda Jones took money from the Aetna accounts, but she testified that she was just “borrowing” it on instructions from her husband.

The scheme started to unravel, the prosecution argues, when business from Aetna dropped off, Linda Jones got more deeply into debt and her gambling losses became more spectacular--she bet $350,000 at Caesars Palace alone, according to investigators. She began stealing checks from lawyers who sublet office space from her husband.

After Lew Jones learned that a check for nearly $53,000 intended for one of these lawyers had been placed in one of his Aetna accounts, the prosecutor says, he went to the police. Then Jones launched an investigation of his own.

‘Time Was Up’

At that point, Girot told the jurors Wednesday during his closing argument, Linda Jones realized that “the time was up.” She feared that, eventually, suspicion would focus on her and that her husband would leave her. She killed her husband for one reason only, Girot said, “Simply because she couldn’t face the fact that she had been stealing all these years.”

The defense, however, has tried to show that Linda Jones had “no motive to murder her husband” because the stealing was instigated by Lew Jones himself--a man who knew that his weak-willed wife, a high-school dropout whom he nicknamed “Runt,” adored him enough to take the fall for him. Although Linda Jones was slightly built and 5 feet, 2 inches to her husband’s broad-shouldered 6 feet, 3 inches, the nickname was as much a sign of his power over her as a term of endearment, her attorney, Harland Braun, told jurors. “She idolized this man,” he asserted.

Braun contends that Jones was involved in other illegal activities, including money-laundering, and that these dealings led to his death.

He said Jones only married Linda in October, 1983, after living with her for eight years, so that she wouldn’t be able to testify against him.

Money Woes Worsened

Jones’ money problems “mushroomed,” Braun said, after he won a liquor license in a lottery and opened a restaurant with $50,000 borrowed from Linda’s parents. At that point, the couple developed a “plan.”

Her gambling was merely a ruse, Linda Jones testified, to divert attention from her husband in case authorities became suspicious. “The plan was, should this be found out--and I don’t really think he believed it ever would--that I would take responsibility,” she said.

In addition, the defense has maintained that when Jones was killed, his wife, who had a history of suicide attempts, was in Las Vegas, trying once again to take her own life because she could no longer face the couple’s worsening financial and legal crises.

Photographs introduced into evidence showed her bloodied arms--there were 60 cuts on each--and a bullet wound in one arm that she said she inflicted while trying to shoot herself in the stomach.

Lew Jones’ body was found in his bed by his mother, Estelle, on Feb. 28, 1984. The murder weapon--a .38-caliber handgun--was recovered from the water beneath the couple’s yacht.

Testimony Inconclusive

According to the prosecution, Linda Jones murdered her husband, probably after an argument, some time between 8 p.m. on Feb. 26 and 11 a.m. on Feb. 27. She dropped the gun in the water, told people at the office that he wasn’t coming to work and fled to Las Vegas, where she faked a suicide attempt, prosecutors said.

Testimony from coroner’s investigators was inconclusive, Girot said, but it is clear that Jones died at least a day before his body was discovered because he failed to keep an important appointment and--uncharacteristically--he never contacted his office.

To support Linda Jones’ alibi, Braun called four witnesses who testified they heard a gunshot fired about 10 p.m. on Feb. 27--many hours after his client had arrived in Las Vegas. The prosecution contends that the witnesses either lived too far away from the Joneses to have heard the shot that killed him or were confused about the timing.

In addition, a friend of Lew Jones testified that she saw Linda’s red Fiat--bearing the license plate, “The Runt”--in Sepulveda the afternoon of Feb. 27. Only Jones himself could have been behind the wheel, the defense says. The prosecution argues simply that the woman’s memory for dates was faulty.

A key piece of evidence, in Braun’s view, is a typewritten letter purportedly written by Lew Jones to “Runt” only a few days before his death. In it he expresses fear for their safety. “If you are reading this letter we are in trouble and I can’t be with you to help,” he writes in the so-called Runt letter, which the defendant found in a hiding place behind a bureau after his death, according to her testimony.

Letter Called Phony

“The money needs to be washed,” the letter states at another point, adding, “Once you get involved with the big boys, you can never get out.”

The prosecution maintains that the Runt letter is phony. His mother testified that he didn’t know how to type and that Linda Jones had access to office stationery that was blank except for Lew’s signature.

The letter is “a figment of somebody’s imagination, right out of a Harlequin novel,” Girot declared, alluding to Linda Jones’ own testimony that she had read a hundred romance novels in the Harlequin series.

Linda Jones’ acknowledged that story-telling has formed a significant element of Girot’s case.

On the witness stand, for example, she said she and her husband told people she was being treated for cancer--but she said the lie was intended to explain why she was frequently out of town acting as a courier for her husband in some of his illegal deals.

On her return from Las Vegas after her purported suicide attempt she told police she had been kidnaped, although she later conceded that she had lied.

On Monday the jury will begin weighing whether her portrait of her husband is equally fictional--”the plot of a high school dropout,” as Girot put it.