Dazed Parents Begin Another Trial, Ordeal : Justice: Legal system puts Gary and Collene Campbell through another emotional wringer that compounds the agony over their son’s slaying seven years ago.

Gary and Collene Campbell sat grim-faced in court this week as they listened with jurors to the sound of their voices on their son’s answering machine, the panic increasing with each day’s unanswered calls.

“It was as if it all happened 10 minutes ago,” Collene Campbell said afterward, red-eyed from a full day of tears.

But it was more than seven years ago that 27-year-old Scott Campbell disappeared. And for his parents, successful publishers from San Juan Capistrano, it has been one courtroom after another since then.

This week, they are back in Superior Court Judge Ragnar R. Engebretson’s courtroom for the retrial for Lawrence R. Cowell, the boyhood friend convicted four years ago in their son’s murder.

Engebretson is the 15th judge that the Campbells have faced as their son’s murder has gone through the justice system.

Cowell, now 40, has already admitted to undercover police agents that he and another man, Donald P. DiMascio, killed Campbell in a private plane and dumped his body from 2,000 feet a mile from Santa Catalina Island.

But two years after Cowell’s conviction, the 4th District Court of Appeal ruled that his confession had been coerced and should not have been used as evidence.

DiMascio, now 41, was convicted in Campbell’s death at a separate trial and is now serving a prison sentence of life without parole. The appellate court last month upheld his conviction.

But the Campbells received another jolt while awaiting the outcome of those appeals. Collene Campbell’s brother, racing entrepreneur Mickey Thompson, and his wife, Trudi, were shot to death in front of their home in Bradbury on March 16, 1988. Their murders are still under investigation.

The Campbells say the wait for Cowell’s new trial has been especially difficult because he has been freed from prison on $200,000 bail. “Here we go again,” said Collene Campbell Thursday morning, after Deputy Dist. Atty. Thomas M. Goethals’ opening statement to the jurors.

But whatever attitude that the Campbells had mustered for this new trial was shaken as the day went on. Collene Campbell couldn’t stop crying when she got on the witness stand. Gary Campbell, when his turn came to testify, was in such a daze that he had difficulty concentrating on Goethals’ questions.

“I think we’ve been waiting so long for this thing that we’re both just drained,” Gary Campbell said later.

The Campbells are involved in this case more than most parents of murder victims. That is because it was the Campbells who investigated their son’s disappearance when the police were reluctant to spend time on it. It was the couple’s investigation that led to Cowell and DiMascio.

The Campbells also discovered, to their dismay, that their son, who was in the computer and electronics business, was flying to North Dakota to sell a pound of cocaine.

What Scott Campbell did not know was that he would be selling it to undercover police agents, who were going to arrest him.

It was the Campbells who befriended one of those agents, Greg Fox, and persuaded him--and finally the Anaheim Police Department--to put together a plan to get Cowell to confess.

But the appellate justices said that Fox and undercover officer Mike Patterson of the Anaheim department went too far. Cowell did not confess until he felt virtually threatened by them, the justices found.

But prosecutors are convinced that it was Cowell who set up the murder and hired DiMascio to carry it out while Cowell flew the airplane. Scott Campbell had asked Cowell to fly him to North Dakota, fearful of taking a pound of cocaine on a commercial flight.

Both prosecutor Goethals and Cowell attorney Gerald J. Reopelle describe the new trial in the same words: “It’s going to be interesting.”

That’s because prosecutors have been stripped of the two most important pieces of evidence that they had at Cowell’s first trial: his confession, and testimony about a telephone conversation between Cowell and Campbell. Fox, who was listening in on the conversation, later testified that Cowell said he would pilot the plane. The testimony was struck by the appellate court because Cowell was unaware that Fox had been listening.

Reopelle believes the new trial will be fairer for his client.

“There is no question that Mr. Cowell made statements to those undercover agents that he would never have made if they hadn’t scared the hell out of him,” Reopelle said.

Prosecutors have also lost attempts to put another critical piece of evidence before the jury. Blood was found on the rear passenger seat of the airplane rented by Cowell, and on one of the curtains. But the evidence was collected without a search warrant, and Engebretson has agreed with earlier judges that it cannot be admitted.

Without Cowell’s confession, prosecutors considered the blood evidence as their biggest piece of evident. Prosecutors in mid-trial filed a writ with the 4th District Court of Appeal, hoping to force Engebretson to reverse himself and allow the blood evidence.

But with the trial already in progress, the prosecution’s best hope for conviction may lie with DiMascio, the man who has confessed that Cowell paid him to carry out the actual murder.

DiMascio’s testimony could be a critical blow to Reopelle’s defense strategy. The question, court observers say, is whether he will agree to turn on Cowell.

Testimony in the Cowell case, which is expected to conclude before Christmas, is scheduled to resume Monday afternoon.