Mother, Daughter Accused of Separate Plots to Kill Mates

A mother and daughter were arrested Thursday on suspicion of soliciting a hit man to kill their estranged husbands, San Diego police said.

“I’ve been in the department a year and spent 11 years before that as a reporter for Channel 8 news,” Police Department spokesman Dave Cohen said, “and I’ve never seen a solicitation with quite so many twists.”

Apparently, neither woman knew the other was contacting a hit man.

Cohen said criminal investigators had gathered information that each of the women wanted her husband dead and was interested in hiring a hit man to do the job. He refused to say how the information was obtained. An undercover agent called them each independently and set up appointments to meet them separately in public areas, Cohen said.

The agent met with the daughter first, Cohen said, at a Paradise Hills Shopping Center. There, Venise L. Morris, 27, of La Mesa, purportedly agreed to pay $5,000 to have her husband killed and gave the agent a $1,000 check as a down payment. She said she would use her husband’s life insurance to pay the balance, Cohen said.

The mother, Judith L. East, 45, of San Diego, met the agent outside the Mission Bay Hilton on Wednesday, Cohen said. She allegedly offered to pay $10,000 for the slaying of her husband, and said she would use the money she received from her husband’s life insurance to pay the agent.

Both women allegedly provided personal information to the agent about their husbands to make the men easier to find but left the how, when and where to the “hit man.”

East was arrested on the spot and Morris, an unemployed secretary, was arrested at her apartment just before that, Cohen said.

Both women are separated from their husbands, he added.

“Perhaps, over a period of time, the women developed a dissatisfaction with their husbands,” Cohen said of the possible motives. “But there is no indication that there was any combined conspiracy to do away with the husbands.”

The mother’s husband, Mark East, 31, a Navy man stationed at the 32nd Street Naval Station who is on leave, was found in the Los Angeles area and said he was not aware of his wife’s plan. The daughter’s husband, Michael Morris, 41, has not yet been found, Cohen said.

Both women were taken to the County Jail at Las Colinas and will be arraigned at 2 p.m. Monday.

The maximum penalty for soliciting to commit murder is six years in prison.