Lying-in-Wait Allegation Added to Accountant’s Murder Case

Richard Dale Wilson of San Francisco could face the death penalty as the result of special allegations added to his 4-year-old murder case Friday.

The Orange County district attorney’s office now alleges that Wilson, an accountant, was lying in wait when he allegedly shot Jeffrey Molloy Parker to death in August, 1983. At the time, Parker was about to stand trial for the murder of Wilson’s fiancee, San Francisco socialite Joan McShane Mills, 33, whose battered body was found nude in a Beverly Hills hotel room in April of that year.

The allegations were filed with murder charges in Orange County Superior Court, where Wilson, 45, appeared Friday and entered a plea of innocent. Superior Court Judge Myron S. Brown set Wilson’s trial date for April 20, 1988.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Doug Woodsmall said Friday that “based on the way the evidence came out at the preliminary hearing,” the district attorney’s office decided to add the special-circumstance allegation. A conviction of murder with special circumstances results in the death penalty or a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Woodsmall said the testimony of Wilson’s brother, Okel Aaron Wilson of Modesto, indicated that Wilson had been lying in wait when he allegedly shot Parker, 37, as Parker returned to his mother’s home in Costa Mesa just before midnight on Aug. 2, 1983.

Richard Wilson, who remains free on $250,000 bail, was indicted last spring by an Orange County Grand Jury based in part on his brother’s testimony.

However, Wilson’s attorney, Joel Baruch, has attacked the credibility of Okel Wilson, who testified that he had had psychiatric and drinking problems and periods of memory loss and suicidal tendencies.