‘No-Body’ Trial Tests Acumen of Prosecutor

The courtroom scene seemed to be lifted straight from an old Perry Mason script:

During the trial of L. Ewing Scott for the murder of his wealthy wife, Evelyn, who had disappeared from their Bel-Air home, his lawyer argued that no body had been found and that the victim “might walk through this courtroom door at any minute.”

“A-ha,” he said as the jurors looked expectantly toward the open doorway. “That shows you are not convinced ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ that she is dead.”

Then it was the prosecutor’s turn. “Every head in this courtroom turned toward that door just now,” he noted, looking slowly from juror to juror. “Except one--that of the defendant. And he didn’t bother to look because he knows she’s not going to walk through that door--he killed her.”

J. Miller Leavy, the Los Angeles County prosecutor who became a legend after winning that case 30 years ago--the first murder conviction in the United States based entirely on circumstantial evidence--chuckled over the story from his Burbank home last week.

“It didn’t happen that way at all,” the 81-year-old Leavy recalled, dismissing several variations of the widely told story as “folklore.”

“What we did was prove ‘the suddenly interrupted life pattern’ of Evelyn Scott (the missing woman),” he said. Prosecutors showed that while she had no reason to run away, her husband did have a reason to do away with her--her money.

The jury deliberated for several days before finding Scott guilty. After sifting through the cumulative evidence Leavy had introduced piece by piece, “I was just as convinced as if they’d brought her body into the courtroom,” Leavy said one juror later told him.

Since the precedent-setting Scott case, there have been at least 20 “no-body” murder cases around the country, most of them ending in convictions despite the Herculean task of having to prove that a death occurred, that it was murder, and that the defendant did it.

The corpus delicti of murder is not the actual body of the victim, detective stories notwithstanding. It refers to the body of the crime itself, which in murder cases means proof of the death of a human being and proof that that death was caused by criminal means. Both elements may be proven through circumstantial evidence.

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office has won six of the seven no-body cases it has prosecuted.

Now, in an eighth case in which the alleged victim’s body has not been found, prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against defendant Joe Hunt, leader of the so-called Billionaire Boys Club. The 27-year-old Hunt is charged with the murder of Beverly Hills con man Ron Levin, who disappeared in June of 1984.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Fred Wapner spent the first weeks of the trial, which began last month, calling Levin’s friends and relatives to establish that his life style was regular, if unorthodox.

The defense has suggested that Levin may have fled to elude creditors and criminal theft charges, but prosecutors have focused on his compulsive telephone and mail habits, his devotion to his mother, and the fact that he left $24,000 behind in bank deposits.

The Scott case was clearer-cut: Evelyn Scott was unarguably an outgoing, well-adjusted, happy, financially secure, meticulous woman with no imaginable motive for running away. But, in the past, convictions have been won without bodies, even in cases involving transients or teen-age runaways as victims. Among Los Angeles County “bodyless” cases, for example:

- Manson “family” member Bruce Davis was convicted for the 1969 murder of ranch hand Shorty Shea at the Spahn Movie Ranch in Chatsworth after prosecutor Stephen Kay showed that although Shea was a transient without close friends, he did three things with regularity: phone his mother at Christmas, send her candy for Mother’s Day, and, every six months, hit up a producer friend for a job as a movie stunt man. Not only did that pattern cease, but Kay was also able to convince jurors that if Shea were alive, he would never have given up his prized pair of pearl-handled Colt .45s, which Davis had pawned. Shea’s body was found a decade later.

- Lawrence Bittaker of Burbank and Roy Norris of Redondo Beach were convicted of the 1979 rape-torture murders of two teen-age girls whose bodies were never found--Lucinda Schaefer and Andrea Hall. Prosecutor Kay showed that the girls’ contacts with family and friends suddenly ceased; one girl’s little brother failed to receive a present on his birthday a week after she disappeared, for example. And he showed that their special possessions--a guitar, jewelry, a fur coat--had been left behind.

Said Kay: “Ties are very strong. It’s powerful evidence when you can show the victim was so close to his mother” that the voluntary breaking of that tie would be unthinkable.

- Thomas Devins of Encino, now of South San Francisco, was convicted of slaying a West Los Angeles woman in 1968 and spreading her hacked-up remains over the Swiss Alps, after bilking her out of $1 million. District attorney’s investigator Bill Burnett and prosecutor Stephen Trott (now the No. 3 man in the U.S. Justice Department) pursued Devins’ trail through Europe to gather evidence. A jawbone determined to be that of the victim, Norma Carty Wilson, was found by a hiker six years after her disappearance. Devins’ conviction was later overturned on grounds that California had no jurisdiction over a crime committed in Switzerland.

Prosecuting each of these cases was made easier by Leavy’s landmark verdict, which had been upheld by a California appeals court in 1960. There had been earlier murder convictions in cases where the victim’s body had not been found, but in each, either the killer had confessed to someone or acknowledged that the victim was dead, or there was corroboration by an eyewitness or the discovery of some part of the victim.

But nothing of Evelyn Scott, 63 years old at the time of her disappearance, was ever found, other than her eyeglasses and dentures buried under leaves and ashes on property adjacent to her Bel-Air mansion.

Federal Appeals Judge Art Alarcon, who as a young prosecutor assisted Leavy on the Scott case, recalled last week that “We called a large number of witnesses to ‘recreate’ Mrs. Scott, to bring to the jury’s mind a living, breathing, happy woman with regular habits, like having her hair done every Tuesday, calling an invalid friend each morning, and regularly visiting her bank, her dentist and her optician. . . . That was the key thing.”

Only after convincing jurors that she was dead and that her death could only have been of unnatural causes did the prosecutors turn the jury’s attention to her husband’s apparent motives and incriminating actions, such as forging her name, raiding her safety deposit box, and telling conflicting stories to concerned friends who asked her whereabouts.

While the burden of proof is on the prosecution to persuade jurors “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the crime occurred and that the defendant committed it, a carefully presented case “can shift the psychological burden to the defense, “ said Dino Fulgoni, who heads the district attorney’s special crimes division. “The jury may say it’s up to him (the defendant) to explain” his apparent motives and actions.

In the Billionaire Boys Club case, for example, defendant Hunt bragged to friends that he had “knocked off” Levin and attempted to cash a check for $1.5 million that the victim had made out to one of Hunt’s companies, testimony showed. And Hunt’s handwritten list, “At Levin’s TO DO”--including such suspicious-sounding notations as “tape mouth,” “handcuff,” and “put gloves on”--was found in Levin’s home.

But defense attorney Arthur Barens, who calls his client “brilliant, a genius,” said Hunt “must testify” and will explain.

Until recently, some states--most notably New York, until five years ago--had laws requiring “direct” proof that the alleged victim was dead, laws prompted by fears that the victim might turn up alive, but too late.

For example, in the 19th Century one unfortunate John Miles had been hanged for the murder of his friend William Ridley, whose body was discovered only after the execution. Ridley had not been murdered after all but had fallen into a deep privy while drunk--where no one had thought to look.

And in England, there was the case of the uncle hanged for the murder of his missing niece--a runaway who later returned to claim her inheritance, and the case of a kidnap victim sold into slavery in Turkey who found on his return that three people had been hanged for his murder.

In modern legal history, only two no-body convictions solely on circumstantial evidence are recorded before Scott, both in the early 1950s. One, in England, involved a Polish farmer who killed his partner in a money dispute and told conflicting stories to explain his disappearance. The other, in New Zealand, involved a bride who never returned from her honeymoon and whose new husband claimed she had been drowned when the ship on which they were sailing, Empress of India, was torpedoed. The bridegroom’s case was not helped when it turned out no such ship existed; he was found guilty of her murder.

Although no-body murder prosecutions are tough, most of the handful here since Scott have been successful, with only one acquittal in the memory of oldtimers in the district attorney’s office.

That may be, says prosecutor Kay, because “we don’t prosecute no-body cases at the drop of a hat. We know how hard they are. We have to be convinced even more than the jury before we’ll go ahead.”

None of the “victims” has subsequently surfaced alive, and in fact, in most cases either the body was later found or the killer confessed.

L. Ewing Scott, for example, maintained his innocence for nearly three decades before finally admitting in an interview with an author at age 89 that he had killed his wife and buried her body in the desert near Las Vegas.

Prosecutor Leavy--induced to come out of retirement a decade ago by what appeared to be a no-body case--persuaded a Maui grand jury to indict a man for the 1977 murder of UCLA student Ann Craddock, although her body had not been found. Just before the start of the trial, however, Leavy got a little help from a jailhouse informant who directed authorities to a shallow grave where Craddock had been buried. Craddock’s former boyfriend, Randall Krause, was found guilty of first-degree murder.

Prosecutors who have won no-body cases seem to relish the inherent challenge. Alarcon, who worked on the Scott case with Leavy three decades ago, sounded a bit disappointed last week as he described a case recently before the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals here.

It involved murder on the high seas--Mac and Muff Graham had sailed their yacht Sea Wind into the harbor at Palmyra, near Hawaii, in the summer of 1974 and mysteriously disappeared shortly thereafter. Another sailboat skipper, Buck Duane Walker, was arrested and subsequently convicted of stealing their boat, but was not prosecuted for the couple’s murder until after parts of Muff Graham’s body were found on a coral reef seven years later.

“The Hawaiian authorities,” Alarcon said, with a trace of disdain in his voice and the Scott case fresh as yesterday in his memory, “did not proceed against Walker until the body was found.”