Marine’s Slain Wife Played Role in Navy Drug Investigations

The slain wife of a Marine accused of her murder had worked as an undercover operative in drug cases for a Navy police agency, the government disclosed Wednesday.

The disclosure that Melinda Thomas, whose body was found in her burnt car along a mountain road last December, had once worked for the the Naval Investigative Service, the same agency that investigated her mysterious death, came during a preliminary hearing under way at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station.

The hearing--known in military terms as an Article 32 proceeding--is being held to determine if the government has enough evidence to court-martial the woman’s husband, Sgt. Joseph L. Thomas, 28, for her murder.

Under questioning by defense attorney Edward W. Hall of Santa Ana, Naval Investigative Service Agent Jose S. Ambriz said Wednesday that his boss informed him last December, a day after Melinda Thomas’ body was discovered, that she had worked as an undercover agent in NIS drug investigations on Marine air stations at El Toro and Tustin.

Ambriz did not give details on what role Melinda Thomas played in the investigations, but sources told The Times that she may have been involved in as many as eight drug investigations involving Marines and Marine bases.

Melinda Thomas’ apparent role as an undercover operative for the government is just another odd chapter in a case that took its first strange turn when the civilian coroner in Riverside County--where her body was found along the Ortega Highway--changed his ruling on the cause of death. After first ruling that her death was a suicide, the coroner months later declared the death a homicide. The change came after another Marine told authorities that he had watched Thomas beat his 24-year-old wife to death with a tire iron in the couple’s Tustin apartment.

The witness, Lance Cpl. Mitchael Nelson, 24, was given immunity by the NIS to testify against his former friend Thomas. Nelson admitted that he helped transport Melinda Thomas’ body from the couple’s apartment on the Tustin Marine base to a remote spot along the Ortega Highway in Riverside County, half a mile east of the Orange County line. There, Nelson testified, her body was strapped with the seat belt into the couple’s 1987 Suzuki Samurai, which was drenched with gasoline. The vehicle then was pushed over a 60-foot embankment, said Nelson, who has since left the Marines.

Traces of Cocaine Found

Melinda Thomas, who was four months pregnant at the time of her death, had traces of cocaine in her blood, the Riverside County coroner’s office said. Other testimony during the Article 32 hearing has indicated that Melinda Thomas was a cocaine user.

NIS Agent Ambriz, under questioning by defense attorney Hall, said Wednesday that although Melinda Thomas’ death was at first considered an “obvious suicide,” he was later told by a friend of hers that she used drugs and sometimes “got into trouble” with drug dealers because she did not pay her bills.

Ambriz said “one of the factors” in the NIS’s continued interest in Melinda Thomas’ death was her role as a “cooperative witness” in drug cases handled by the NIS. Ambriz did not say how Melinda Thomas became involved with the NIS.

“Sometimes in the drug trade they get a little violent, wouldn’t you say?” Hall asked Ambriz, inferring that she might have been killed by a drug dealer.

During his testimony, Ambriz, whose investigative work resulted in a murder charge against Thomas, said that on Feb. 25--more than two months after Melinda Thomas’ death--he began to consider Joseph Thomas a suspect in his wife’s death.

The agent, whose investigation seemed stalled, began backtracking and reinterviewing friends and neighbors of the couple. A next-door neighbor mentioned that Thomas tried to get her to change her story about when she last saw the couple’s Suzuki in the driveway of their apartment. Thomas had told Ambriz that his wife had taken the vehicle on the night of Dec. 9, but the neighbor claimed that she had seen the vehicle in the driveway at 1 a.m. Dec. 10, the day Melinda Thomas’ body was found in the canyon.

Arrest Made on April 5

But the key to the case proved to be Nelson, who had been interviewed by the NIS in January but never mentioned the murder.

On April 5, just days before Nelson was scheduled to be discharged from the Marines, Ambriz and two other NIS agents and two Santa Ana policemen entered his apartment with their guns drawn. Nelson was arrested and taken to the NIS office on the El Toro base where they began questioning him.

Nelson was offered immunity in the case, and he made a new statement. On the night of Dec. 9, he testified earlier in the hearing, he and Thomas had been at a friend’s house next door and returned to Thomas’ house after midnight. Thomas asked him to go inside with him for a few minutes, he said, and he then sat in the dining room while Thomas went into the bedroom where his wife was allegedly sleeping.

Nelson said he heard screams coming from the bedroom. He recalled that he went down the hallway where he saw Thomas clubbing his wife to death with a tire iron. He said he made a weak attempt to stop the beating but found himself unable to prevent the attack.

All this took place while Thomas’ 4-year-old daughter from a previous marriage slept elsewhere in the apartment.

Later, Nelson testified, he helped Thomas clean up the blood-spattered bedroom and the two of them wrapped the body in a blanket and put it in the trunk of a rental car that Nelson drove up the Ortega Highway.

After Wednesday’s session, the hearing was recessed until July 8 to give Thomas’ defense lawyers more time to study a file about Melinda Thomas’ activities as a “cooperative witness.”