Brentwood Execution-Style Slayings : 2 Sons Face Trial in Parents’ Killings

Two brothers were ordered Wednesday to stand trial for arranging the murder of their parents after a judge concluded that they had close ties to two of the men accused of actually carrying out the killings, as well as “long-standing and bitter animosity” toward the victims.

“Why would people with no independent motive become involved in the execution-style murder of Gerald and Vera Woodman?” Los Angeles Municipal Judge Sandy R. Kriegler said. “That to me is the crux of why the focus shifts to Neil and Stewart Woodman.”

Woodman, 67, and his 66-year-old wife were gunned down in the underground garage of their Brentwood condominium last Sept. 25.

The prosecution contends that their sons, Neil, 42, of Encino, and Stewart, 36, of Hidden Hills, who had been warring with their parents for several years over a family plastics business, wanted them killed in order to collect on a $500,000 insurance policy to save the failing company.

Kriegler also ruled that “the evidence is abundant” that Steven M. Homick, 45, of Las Vegas, “orchestrated” the murders by conspiring with his brother, Robert Thomas Homick, 35, and recruiting Anthony Joseph Majoy, 47, of Reseda, and Michael Lee Dominguez, 27, also of Las Vegas.

Dominguez, described by Majoy’s attorney, Richard B. Hershberger, as a “Las Vegas marauder . . . (whose) story is as slippery as a greased eel,” pleaded guilty last month to two counts of murder and testified against the Homicks and Majoy.

The Woodmans and the other three men, all jailed without bail, will be arraigned in Superior Court on June 19 on two counts each of murder and conspiracy to commit murder. If convicted, all could face the death penalty.

Most of the testimony focused on the Homicks and Majoy, leading defense attorneys for the Woodman brothers to argue that there was no evidence linking their clients to the killings.

Neil Woodman’s attorney, Gerald Chaleff, told the judge that the case against his client was “long in motives and short in facts.” Outside the courtroom, he said: “If this is the evidence they present at the trial, there will not be a conviction . . . . “ Similarly, Jay Jaffe, who represents Stewart Woodman, said the evidence “doesn’t even rise to the level of a suspicion.”

But Kriegler said that testimony from a business associate, Steven Strawn, that Neil Woodman called him shortly after his March 11 arrest and told him to destroy two business cards from Steven Homick indicated that the defendant had “a strong consciousness of guilt.” Testimony that Neil Woodman hired Steven Homick to provide security at his son’s July, 1984, bar mitzvah showed that there was a relationship between the two men that “goes beyond mere association,” the judge said.

In addition, Kriegler cited testimony from a sister of Vera Woodman that her nephew, Stewart, had telephoned her two days before the killings and asked whether family members were going to break the traditional Yom Kippur fast together. As a result of the family dispute, Neil and Stewart Woodman were not invited to the annual gathering, the aunt, Sybil Michelson, testified.

One minute before the aunt’s call, telephone records showed, Robert Homick had called Manchester Products, the Chatsworth plastics company, from a phone booth. Five minutes after Stewart Woodman spoke to his aunt, Homick called the office a second time, the records show. The sequence of telephone calls was “consistent with Stewart Homick’s participation in the case,” Kriegler said.