Suspect in Woman’s Slaying Described as ‘Gentle Giant’

Cameron Charles Seaholm, suspected of killing a 21-year-old Garden Grove woman and dumping her body in the hills near Corona, was a drifter with an unhappy family background but was not a violent man, his relatives said Friday.

“It’s such a contradiction--I can’t believe what I’ve seen on TV and in the papers,” Seaholm’s mother, Joanne Sandor of Santa Ana, said shortly before leaving for Riverside County Jail to see her son. “I know my son is innocent. It’s a setup, and that’s what I have to find out.”

Seaholm, 22, was arrested Thursday at his stepfather’s house in Lake Elsinore on suspicion of murdering Denise Marie Duerr, whose body was found the night before on a slope near the Riverside Freeway in Riverside County.

Duerr had been missing since Monday, the same day that Seaholm showed up at the Lake Elsinore home driving the young woman’s black Pontiac Fiero with personalized license plates.

Seaholm and Duerr’s live-in boyfriend, Clyde Spontak, had been friends since both attended Lake High School, and Seaholm sometimes stayed with the couple when he had nowhere else to go.

Last week, Spontak said, he asked Seaholm to leave because he had no job and showed no signs of getting one.

Brad Jones, a friend of Spontak who also knew Seaholm, described the murder suspect as a “gentle giant”--he is 6-foot-5 and weighs 230 pounds--who tagged along behind Spontak and his friends but for the most part kept to himself.

“He was always quiet. . . . He just stayed detached,” Jones said. “If we played cards, he’d watch. . . . It didn’t seem like he was interested in anything.”

Once, Jones said, Seaholm allegedly ran up about $300 on Spontak’s phone bill by dialing 976 numbers and then left without paying for them.

“I didn’t like Cameron, just because of the numbers thing,” Jones said.

Jones said Seaholm “idolized” Spontak, a sound technician, and was jealous of Denise Duerr, Spontak’s girlfriend since high school.

“He didn’t like it when he (Spontak) paid attention to Denise and bought her a Christmas gift,” Jones said.

Seaholm’s mother said that her son had had a difficult few years since graduating from high school but that he was not capable of the crime he is suspected of committing.

“He’s not a violent person,” Sandor said. “He’s very loyal to people.”

Sandor said the death of Seaholm’s grandmother early this month greatly upset him.

“He lived with her for a time,” Sandor said. Seaholm reacted to the death of his grandmother by leaving home, which he had done off and on over the past few years. “I was very disappointed in his behavior. He wasn’t able to show up for the funeral.”

Sandor said she last spoke with her son when he called her about 2 weeks ago.

“He sounded up and good,” she said. “He wasn’t doing too much. He was evasive.”

After graduating from high school, Seaholm served a brief stint in the Army but was discharged because of a motorcycle injury. He was also in the Navy for a short time but was discharged when he failed to provide complete information at the time of his enlistment, said his grandfather, Howard McKisson.

“I had my doubts about him,” said McKisson, who let Seaholm live in his Orange apartment about 3 years ago. He asked him to leave after Seaholm lost jobs at two fast-food restaurants.

“He had a hard time getting through high school,” McKisson said. “He didn’t have any goals. . . . All the traffic laws and everything, they were made for someone else, not him. That was his attitude.”

Seaholm’s father, Charles Seaholm, left the family shortly after his son and a daughter were born, McKisson said.

Cameron Seaholm has a 1-year-old son, but court records show that he was $910 in arrears on child-support payments last October. An Orange County Superior Court commissioner ordered part of his wages garnished to make monthly $130 payments and to begin paying off his debt, but Seaholm did not hold a job long with either employer listed in the court documents.

“He was training to be a driver,” said Ron Taylor, manager of John’s Towing in Santa Ana. “We had him in here for about a week . . . last year.”

Before that, Seaholm worked for Orange Engine and Auto Parts in Orange. “He was a pretty good employee at the beginning,” said Seaholm’s former supervisor, who requested anonymity. “Then he started missing days, too much time. We had to let him go. That was basically it. We were shocked when we heard.”

Sandor said that her son is still married to the mother of his child but that he has been estranged from his wife for more than a year. “There’s no love lost there,” she said.