Trial Ordered for Accountant in Costa Mesa Slaying

An Orange County Municipal Court judge Monday ordered San Francisco accountant Richard Dale Wilson to stand trial in the 1983 murder of a man who had been charged with beating to death Wilson’s fiancee.

Harbor Municipal Judge Brian Carter, addressing the defense’s attack on the prosecution’s two main witnesses, observed dryly that Wilson’s brother and brother-in-law were “not models of stability.” But he said there was sufficient evidence to warrant a trial.

Carter added that inconsistencies and contradictions during three days of testimony in the preliminary hearing did not obscure the “traces that would appear to be inviolable” in the witnesses’ stories.

At one time or another, both witnesses--Wilson’s brother, Okel Aaron Wilson of Modesto, and his brother-in-law, Robert Clinton Hale of Wilmington--testified in the Newport Beach courtroom that they heard Richard Dale Wilson say he had ambushed Jeffrey Molloy Parker as Parker walked to his mother’s porch in Costa Mesa just before midnight on Aug. 2, 1983.

Hale recanted much of his previous testimony before the Orange County Grand Jury in March and denied prosecution allegations that he did so because he feared Richard Wilson.

Both Hale and Okel Wilson testified to having psychiatric and drinking problems, bouts of memory loss and suicidal intentions.

But Carter observed that despite the witnesses’ impaired memories of details, they were not likely to forget “events that could have been very traumatic--admission of a capital crime by a member of the family.”

He said there was sufficient admissible evidence to warrant a trial, where questions of “compassion, motivation and mitigation” could be considered.

Richard Wilson’s fiancee, San Francisco socialite Joan McShane Mills, then 33, was found nude and battered in her Beverly Hills hotel room in April, 1983.

Parker was standing over her and told police that he had been trying to resuscitate her after she collapsed during a night of drinking, drugs and sex.

Parker was charged with murder but was shot twice in the chest and head the day before his preliminary hearing.