Slaying of Marine Sergeant : Troiani Murder Trial Getting Started at Last

Nearly three years after the slaying and after five postponements caused by a swarm of pretrial motions and challenges, jury selection is scheduled to begin today in the murder trial of Laura Troiani, accused of plotting with five Marines to kill her Marine sergeant husband on a deserted Oceanside road.

The prosecution wants Troiani, now 25, executed for the crime, contending she masterminded the ambush killing to cash in on his $95,000 life insurance policy--sharing $500 with each of the alleged accomplices--and to then marry one of the defendants who had been her secret lover.

The five men will be tried individually after Troiani’s trial is completed, and the district attorney’s office has said it will seek the death penalty for them also because of the alleged conspiracy.

The arduous process of selecting the first jury is expected to last at least 2 1/2 months. The first question to be put to each of the prospective jurors is whether they can devote five months to the trial; those who say they can’t will be asked to show some proof of hardship.

Those who have the time to serve will be asked individually whether they can freely apply California’s death penalty law. Those who say they oppose capital punishment will be excused from the courtroom.

Written Questionnaire

And then, in a seeming shift in the weight of the questioning, prospective jurors will be given a written questionnaire and be asked, among other things, to name their three favorite television programs, to list the last three books they read, and to describe what they do in their free time. Defense attorneys say they want to find out as much as they can about the jurors who will decide Troiani’s fate.

Opening arguments on the trial will be held about the time of the third anniversary of the killing of Carlo Troiani, a 37-year-old Marine Corps staff sergeant. A week before his death, Carlo Troiani had opened a bottle of champagne and toasted his wife on their fifth wedding anniversary.

His romantic notions were not returned, and on three occasions during the ensuing days his wife and the five Marines tried unsuccessfully to kill him before finally succeeding on the fourth attempt, prosecutors contend.

On Aug. 6, 1984, the group planned to lure Carlo Troiani out of his home on the pretense that his wife had car trouble, then jump him with a knife, according to a witness who testified during the preliminary hearing two years ago.

That witness, Kim Hartmann, said that Laura Troiani had told her she was unhappy with her marriage. “She said she wanted him killed,” Hartmann testified.

Hartmann said that while spending the evening bar hopping at Camp Pendleton with Laura Troiani and the five Marines, she heard them discussing ways to lure Carlo Troiani out of his home so he could be jumped.

Hartmann said she initially thought the group was joking, then realized they were serious. After the group split up, Laura Troiani allegedly called her husband from a pay phone in Oceanside, saying she was stuck in Carlsbad with car problems.

“I told her it wasn’t too late to call Carlo back and tell him she got the car started, and not to leave (the apartment). But she said, ‘Nope, I gotta get it over with,’ ” Hartmann testified at the preliminary hearing.

But that plan was foiled when Troiani left the couple’s Oceanside apartment accompanied by a friend.

Bomb Plot Failed

The next night, the group rigged a bomb to Carlo Troiani’s car battery, but the device malfunctioned and the Marine laughed off the incident as a practical joke played on him by some rambunctious subordinates, the prosecution contends.

Two nights later, according to other witnesses, two of the suspects allegedly walked up to Troiani’s apartment, intent on stabbing and shooting him, but they had second thoughts when they confronted him face to face at his front door.

Finally, on Aug. 10, Laura Troiani parked her car on North River Road, in a rural area of eastern Oceanside not far from Camp Pendleton’s back gate, according to the prosecution.

The prosecution contends that Lance Cpls. Jeffrey T. Mizner and Russell E. Sanders, both 20 at the time, and Pfc. Kevin W. Watkins, then 18, were at a nearby convenience store from where Sanders called Carlo Troiani to tell him his wife had car trouble and needed help.

Mizner, her supposed lover, had her two children with him at the time, prosecutors say. (The Troianis had one child together; Laura Troiani was pregnant with another man’s child when she and Carlo Troiani were married.)

Carlo Troiani drove to the scene, parked his car behind his wife’s and approached her, the prosecution says, adding that when she saw him in her rear view mirror, she tapped her brake lights and Lance Cpl. Mark J. Schulz, then 19, stepped out from some rushes along the roadway and shot Troiani once from behind with a .357 Magnum handgun. As Troiani yelled out in anguish and tried to crawl beneath his wife’s car, he was shot a second time in the back of the neck, according to the prosecution’s scenario.

Afterward, Laura Troiani returned to her apartment and called Oceanside police twice, saying she was worried about the whereabouts of her husband. By the second call, police had already happened upon the murder scene, discovering Carlo Troiani’s body and his car, its engine still running, according to evidence and testimony provided during the preliminary hearing.

‘It Was Fun’

Prosecution witnesses testified that the next morning, Mizner boasted about the killing to fellow Marines at Camp Pendleton, saying “it was fun” and he “liked it.”

“He said he could finally get some sleep now,” Joseph Hickman, another witness, testified during the preliminary hearing.

Troiani and her alleged accomplices were arrested within hours after authorities were tipped to the bragging.

Marine Cpl. Marty Gunter, a friend of the Troianis, testified that he called Laura Troiani by phone after she was arrested. He said he asked the woman whether her husband had suffered. “She said, ‘Not maybe more than two or three minutes.’ ”

The six defendants in the slaying have been held without bail since the killing; the men at County Jail in Vista and Troiani at the County Jail at Las Colinas Jail (for women) in Santee, where she is a trusty and, according to her attorney, spends time coloring books.

The five men have been discharged from the Marines since their arrest.

Schulz and Harrison have been convicted of sex-related crimes in jail, and Harrison is awaiting a retrial on charges he tried to have drugs smuggled in. His first trial resulted in a deadlocked jury.

In the two years since the preliminary hearing, the lead prosecuting attorney and two of the five primary defense attorneys have dropped out of the case. Larry Burns, the lead prosecutor, took a job in the U.S. attorney’s office in San Diego; Harrison’s attorney, Richard Wehmeyer, quit after saying he felt duped in being asked to take pants to jail that allegedly contained the hidden drugs, and Troiani dismissed her initial attorney, Jack Campbell, in favor of her current one, Geraldine Russell.

But Paul Pfingst, a former New York City prosecutor who coincidentally was hired by the San Diego County district attorney’s office on the very day Troiani was murdered and who is now the main prosecutor on the case, said the case against Troiani remains strong despite the passage of time because the hard evidence remains intact and because witnesses’ testimony can be refreshed by referring them to the transcripts of their preliminary hearing testimony two years ago.

‘People Forget Details’

“But it doesn’t help the quality of the testimony to have it stand on hold for nearly three years (since the killing). People forget details. We would have preferred the case to be tried soon after it happened,” Pfingst said.

Still, he said he does not fault the defense’s attempts and successes in delaying the start of the trial.

“I expect a defense attorney on a capital case to try to keep the case going as long as possible,” Pfingst said. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that because, at the very minimum, they’re keeping their client alive. I have no fault with the defense counsel trying to make every (pretrial) motion possible. That’s sound practice.”

There have been scores of pretrial motions and appeals to higher courts on issues ranging from change of venue to jury selection to the racial balance of North County juries to the admission or suppression of evidence and jail cell admissions.

Russell argued that the trial should be moved outside the county because of the publicity the case has attracted. She presented a survey of a sampling of North County persons who are eligible for jury duty that showed, she said, that a full two-thirds had heard of the Troiani case.

Vista Superior Court Judge Gilbert Nares, who will preside over the trial, denied the change of venue, saying those who have been swayed by newspaper coverage can be weeded out during jury selection. And the district attorney’s office contended that much of the publicity surrounded the procedural matters of the trial versus the merits of the prosecution’s case against Troiani.

Russell appealed the decision to the state 4th District Court of Appeal, which on Friday refused to overturn the Superior Court decision.

Motion Denied

Russell also argued that a fairer jury could be picked out of a courtroom in San Diego because those juries come from a population base that more fairly represents the racial makeup of San Diego County. Juries in Vista Superior Court are selected only from North County, where blacks make up a smaller portion of the population, she contended. (The defendants are all white.)

That motion, too, was denied but as recently as last week Russell was hoping the state Supreme Court would accept her appeal of the issue. But Thursday afternoon, the court declined to hear her appeal.

Russell also asked that the trial be separated into two parts--first, to determine whether her client is guilty and then, if she is convicted, a second trial to determine her sentence. Russell maintains--and brought an expert to discuss the issue before Nares--that if a jury is seated at the outset which is admittedly open to applying the death penalty law, it would be more prone toward convicting her client than a jury which included persons opposed to capital punishment.

Nares has refused to separate the trial into two stages, citing state Supreme Court decisions allowing so-called “death qualified” jurors to sit on the guilt phase of a trial.

Finally, she has asked that the trial be moved to San Diego because the larger downtown court, with a larger jury pool, could better handle the demands of the Troiani case.

Nares ruled against that motion as well, saying that the current pool of North County jurors will provide enough prospects from which 12 jurors and up to 4 alternates can ultimately be selected.

Large Enough Pool

Geraldine Stevens, the county’s assistant jury commissioner and the coordinator of jury services, said her office has not been asked by Nares to call more than the normal number of prospective jurors to the Vista courthouse beginning today.

Normally, 700 people are summoned weekly for jury duty in Vista, of which 115 to 130 respond, she said. Nares has said he believes that is a large enough pool from which to find jurors willing to serve five months and to meet the other requirements of jury duty.

In addition to excusing any number of prospective jurors “for cause”--such as, they admit they hold an open prejudice or have been swayed by pretrial publicity--each side can dismiss up to 26 prospective jurors without giving a reason. It is that part of the jury selection process that can become painstakingly slow as the attorneys try to delve into the minds of the prospective jurors to end up with 12 who might be most fair to their side.

In the meantime, the district attorney’s office has tried to keep tabs on the more than 65 witnesses it called during the preliminary hearing, and it remains confident that virtually all of them will be available for the trial, Pfingst said.

“We have some witnesses who periodically get lost and we find again,” he said. “We have a witness in Spain, another in Mexico, and one in Canada. And we’ve got military witnesses all around the United States and overseas.”

The estimated cost of the trial has not been revealed, but is assumed to be well over $1 million so far, largely on the part of the defense’s request for psychologists and experts and consultants on subjects ranging from jury selection to pretrial publicity.

Not the least of the issues being discussed last week among the attorneys and Nares was the sorts of questions prospective jurors will be asked to determine any hidden biases or prejudices they may hold either for or against Troiani.

Party Affiliation

Prospective jurors will be asked, for instance, to state whether they have a political party affiliation--but won’t be asked whether they voted last year, an issue which Russell hoped to raise because of the appearance of then-Chief Justice Rose Bird on the ballot.

Prospective jurors will be asked what sorts of magazines and books they read; a Mickey Spillane fan might try to solve the Troiani case himself without listening to the evidence, while a reader of romance novels might be living in a “fictionalized, fantasy world,” said Tom Bowden, another defense attorney.

Prospective jurors also will be asked to list their favorite television programs. “It might tip us off if they’re in a dream world, if their favorite program is Perry Mason,” Bowden said.

The defense said it wants prospective jurors to identify their three favorite movies of all time. “What possible relevence is this question?” Nares asked.

“Asking about a movie is hardly a big deal,” said Russell, asking that it be allowed to remain.

Responded Pfingst, “The accumulative effect (of all the questions being asked) will be resentment of the criminal justice system for putting them through all this.”

Nares decided to toss out the question.