Death Plot Trial Opens for 2 Ex-Police Officers

Two former Los Angeles police officers accused of attempting to murder an exotic dancer were instead the unwitting victims of a set-up arranged by a disgruntled business partner, a defense attorney told a jury Monday.

In opening statements in the much-delayed Los Angeles Superior Court trial of Richard H. Ford and Robert A. Von Villas, defense attorneys proclaimed their clients’ innocence, saying they never intended to kill Joan Loguercio, as the prosecution alleges.

The trial is expected to take four months. The prosecution will have to rely on transcripts of testimony Loguercio gave at the former officers’ preliminary hearing; she died of cancer in March of 1986.

Outlining defense strategy for the first time, Von Villas’ attorney, Jack R. Stone, said he would show that Bruce Adams, a mechanic who owned an auto repair business with the officers, hatched a phony murder plot in order to incriminate the two officers, and they in turn pretended to go along with it to “see just how far Adams is going to go with this thing.”

Ford, 47, and Von Villas, 42, are accused of twice conspiring to murder Loguercio, 37, in 1983 in order to share in a $100,000 insurance policy on her life that Von Villas had bought, ostensibly to cover a loan he was making to her.

“I’m going to prove to you beyond reasonable doubt that Mr. Von Villas had no motive to kill Joan Loguercio, and you hold me to that,” Stone said.

Richard P. Lasting, Ford’s attorney, said: “This is a trial of an innocent man.”

‘Brutal Crime’ Cited

Earlier, Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert P. O’Neill described the prosecution’s case against Ford and Von Villas, telling jurors that the two men first tried to have Loguercio killed in a Hollywood motel in June, 1983.

When the woman managed to break away, the prosecutor said, the defendants planned a “brutal crime” in which they would abduct her from the adult bookstore where she worked and rape, torture and strangle her, while making it appear that she had been killed by a “sex maniac.”

The murder plan was thwarted, however, when Loguercio confided to Adams that she feared for her life and asked him to help her, O’Neill said.

The officers were arrested in July, 1983, allegedly minutes before the plot was to be carried out.

Adams had reason to frame the defendants, Stone said, because they had told him they were dissatisfied with his performance and had caught him stealing from their company.

Lasting described Adams as a “braggart, liar and cheater.”

During his statement, the prosecutor read extensively from transcripts of conversations Adams had with the two defendants, in which they allegedly discussed the murder plots. Ford at one point told Adams that killing Loguercio would be “like taking candy from a baby,” O’Neill said.

‘Piece of Cake’

Defense attorneys said the tapes show only that Adams tried to encourage their clients to carry out the scheme. At one point, for example, Adams assured Ford, “This is going to be a piece of cake,” Lasting said.

Neither defense attorney would elaborate on their theories outside the courtroom.

Ford and Von Villas are also being tried for the November, 1982, robbery of Schaffer & Sons jewelry store in Northridge, in which three store employees were tied up at gunpoint and $180,000 worth of diamonds and rings were taken.

They are to be tried separately in Van Nuys for the alleged murder-for-hire of Thomas Weed, 52, co-owner of a San Fernando Valley allergy-testing laboratory.