Troiani Guilty; Now Jury to Decide on Life or Death : Panel Took Less Than 9 Hours to Convict Woman of Plotting the Murder of Marine Sergeant Spouse

A Vista Superior Court jury, deliberating less than nine hours, convicted Laura Troiani on Wednesday of first-degree murder for the ambush slaying of her Marine husband three years ago to collect on his life insurance.

The same jury found Troiani, 26, guilty of special circumstances in the murder and must now decide between one of only two sentencing options: death in the gas chamber or life in prison without the possibility of parole. The penalty phase of the trial will begin Monday.

Defendant Sobbed After Decision

Troiani, who had shown virtually no emotion during the 6 1/2-week trial, dropped her head into her hands, closed her eyes and began sobbing quietly as the court clerk, holding a stack of verdict forms, read the top sheet, which said she is “guilty of the crime of murder . . . in the first-degree.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Phil Walden, who heads the San Diego County district attorney’s office in Vista and who co-prosecuted the case, said Troiani is the first woman in San Diego County to be convicted of first-degree murder.

State Department of Corrections officials said there are 19 women serving sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole at the California Institution for Women near Chino, the state’s only maximum security prison for women.

The last woman to sit on death row was Elizabeth Ann Duncan, who was executed in 1962 for the murder in Ventura County of her daughter-in-law.

Most of the jury members entered the courtroom soberly, but two offered weak smiles to one another. None of the nine women and three men on the jury appeared to look at Troiani as the verdict was read, and jurors were admonished by Superior Court Judge Gilbert Nares not to discuss the case until they conclude the penalty phase, which is expected to last about two weeks.

Prosecution Expected Verdict

Lead prosecuting attorney Paul Pfingst said after the verdict, “We expected this verdict. We expected it three years ago.” He said he was not especially surprised by the swiftness in which the jury reached its decision. “You never know how fast or how slow a jury is going to take, and it really doesn’t matter,” he said.

Defense attorney Geraldine Russell caressed Troiani’s back as five separate guilty verdicts were read involving first-degree murder; use of a weapon in commission of a murder; lying in wait; murder for financial gain, and conspiracy. Russell spent a few minutes privately with Troiani as the courtroom was cleared, and said outside the courtroom, “We’re very disappointed, and I have no other comment.”

The prosecution said Troiani, who was unhappily married to her husband of five years, Marine Staff Sgt. Carlo Troiani, wanted to kill him instead of divorce him so she could collect $95,000 in life insurance and continue an affair with another Marine.

After approaching several Marines who later testified for the prosecution, she hired five other Marines to kill her husband.

After several bungled attempts by the Marines outside her presence to kill her husband, including an attempt to firebomb his car and another to stab him, Troiani bought a box of high-powered bullets Aug. 9, and that night lured her husband to a desolate Oceanside road near the back gate of Camp Pendleton on the pretense that she was having car trouble.

With three Marines at a nearby convenience store baby-sitting her two small children fathered by other men, she parked her car and sat behind the steering wheel while two other Marines hid in some reeds, one of them armed with a .357 Magnum pistol.

Gave Deadly Signal

When Carlo Troiani pulled up in his car and approached his wife, she tapped her brake lights as a signal for the two in hiding to emerge. Carlo, 35, was shot twice, once in the back and, as he tried to crawl for protection under his wife’s car, shot again at nearly point-blank range in the back of the head.

Shortly afterward at home, Troiani called Oceanside police to say she was worried about her husband’s whereabouts. By the time she called a second time, police had already found his body. Tire tracks at the scene matched her car’s, and by 8 that morning, Troiani was being questioned by Oceanside homicide detectives. Twelve hours later, after a rambling interrogation in which she changed her story several times, she confessed to the killing. The taped admission was used as evidence in the trial.

Within hours, the five other Marines were also arrested at Camp Pendleton, after several of them boasted to friends on the base that they had murdered a Marine.

The five co-defendants, who are being held without bail in Vista Jail, will be tried individually after Troiani is sentenced. They are Mark Schulz, the alleged triggerman; Russell Harrison, allegedly at the shooting scene; Kevin Watkins; Russell Sanders, and Jeff Mizner, Troiani’s supposed lover.

The key witness for the defense was psychiatrist Dr. Mark Mills, who interviewed Laura Troiani several months before the trial began and testified that at the time of the killing 2 1/2 years earlier, Troiani was enveloped in a fog of depression and melancholia over her soured marriage and fantasized that her husband was dead.

The five Marines, who at the time were 18 to 20, were a tightly knit group of violent thrill seekers who called themselves the Gremlins and who manifested Troiani’s fantasy for their own excitement, the defense contended.

Defense Argument Rejected

Troiani was emotionally and mentally too immature to stop the group’s murder plot once it was formed, the defense argued, and she found herself along for the ride.

The jury, which could have found Troiani guilty of second-degree murder, manslaughter or an accessory to murder, apparently rejected the defense position out of hand and accepted the prosecution’s contention that Troiani was the cold, conniving ringleader and paymaster of the murder scheme who ultimately found five men to oblige her after several others discussed but then turned down her invitations to murder.

Among the prosecution witnesses were friends and neighbors of the Troianis who characterized her as cold and manipulative, and a marriage counselor who was meeting with the couple in the weeks prior to the murder and who testified that Troiani tormented her husband.

The prosecution considered the marriage counselor as one of its most important witnesses--and someone it would not have been able to call to the stand at all, had not the defense waived Laura Troiani’s patient-doctor privilege by calling Mills as a witness.

Pfingst argued that the witnesses who knew Laura Troiani at the time of the shooting were more credible than a psychiatrist who was paid by the defense to testify to what he believed was Troiani’s state of mind three years ago.

On Tuesday, jurors asked that some of the testimony of prosecution witnesses be re-read to them. The jury deliberated for about 5 1/2 hours Tuesday and resumed at 9 a.m. Wednesday. At 11:45 a.m., jury foreman John Umphreyville sent a note to the judge saying a verdict had been reached.

Nares gave Russell the option of having the jurors brought into the courtroom immediately or waiting until after lunch. The defense attorney said her client did not want to wait; the jury was brought in at 12:08 p.m.

The reading of the verdict was completed within five minutes. When Troiani was returned to the courtroom for a brief 2 p.m. hearing to discuss the beginning of the sentencing phase, she appeared composed.

During the penalty phase of the trial, both sides will present witnesses to testify as to Troiani’s character in order for the jury to decide whether she should be executed for her husband’s murder.