Jail Conversation : D.A. Says Tape Links Murder to Ex-Officer

Jurors in the trial of a former Los Angeles police officer accused of a contract killing listened Wednesday to a secretly recorded jailhouse conversation in which the former officer told his wife “There’s no way to tie me to it” and “What worries me is the shotgun and shells.”

In the tape recording, introduced as evidence by Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert P. O’Neill, Richard Herman Ford tells his wife, Lillian:

“How’re you going to prove it? There’s no body.”

“No way to tie me to it. . . . We didn’t put a thing in the bank. There’s no connection to me there,” Ford says in what prosecutors contend is a reference to the murder victim.

Ford, 47, and another former Los Angeles police officer, Robert Von Villas, 44, are being tried by separate juries in Van Nuys Superior Court for the murder of Thomas Weed, 52, who disappeared from his Northridge apartment Feb. 23, 1983.

Weed’s body has never been found, but authorities believe the two officers murdered him and buried him in the desert for $20,000 from Weed’s ex-wife.

The tape, which was played only for the jury hearing the case against Ford, was secretly made by Los Angeles police investigators who had secured a search warrant to record the prisoner as he talked with his wife over visiting room telephones at the County Jail on Dec. 20, 1983.

The two officers had not then been charged with Weed’s death. They were in jail awaiting trial for the 1983 attempted murder of nude dancer Joan Loguercio and for a 1982 jewelry store robbery. They were later convicted of both crimes.

Los Angeles police had just served a search warrant on the Ford home in Northridge seeking evidence linking the two officers to Weed’s disappearance, prosecutors said.

Because a jail deputy turned off an amplifier in the visiting room phone system, Lillian Ford’s part of the conversation was barely intelligible to listeners in the courtroom. However, the jury was given a transcript of the conversation, made by the prosecution, which they followed as they listened.

Prosecutors contend that Lillian Ford was telling her husband about financial records and other evidence officers had seized during a search of the couple’s Northridge home.

“What I’m worried about is the shotgun and shells,” Ford replied.

But Richard P. Lasting, one of Ford’s two attorneys, said outside of court that the tape “doesn’t prove anything.”

Lasting said the 25-minute tape has eight minutes of gaps and there are places even in the written transcript where Lillian Ford’s statements were unintelligible to the transcribers. The recording and transcript thus offer a one-sided version of the conversation, he said.

Prosecutors would not show reporters the transcript.

The former officers face the death penalty if convicted.