Santa Ana Mystery Case Haunts Man Decades Later in Canada

In a midnight gun battle nearly 24 years ago, William Wayne Wagner, a one-time quick-draw artist, boxer and alleged undercover police agent, shot and killed two men in a Santa Ana motel room.

With a cast of characters including the mob, the FBI and a chief of police, the case is remembered by Deputy Dist. Atty. James Enright as “one of the most bizarre things” he has ever come across. Wagner, who was never tried for the shootings, walked away a free man--leaving only a trail of mystery and intrigue in his wake.

Now, Wagner and the strange shooting deaths of May 23, 1966, are once again the subject of a police investigation--this time by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canada Immigration Center in Moose Jaw, Canada.

Police and immigration officials, working on an anonymous tip that Wagner was in Canada illegally, picked him up last month and asked him questions about his past. Investigators were shocked by his candid account of the two killings, which he nonchalantly said were not isolated incidents.

“Basically, he told us that he was a hit man” for a government agency, Canadian immigration officer Ron Smith said recently. “There were the two (killings) in Santa Ana, a deputy in Louisiana and a couple of kidnapings.

“Some of the things he talks about seem to be out of a TV movie, but they seem to check out. . . . I really don’t know what to think about him,” Smith said.

Many of those who knew or met Wagner in the mid-1960s have the same feeling. “Nothing you could tell me about him would surprise me,” said Enright, who brought the Santa Ana shootings before the Orange County Grand Jury more than 23 years ago. “It was a totally bizarre case.”

According to newspaper clippings and interviews with officials involved, Wagner was working as an undercover agent with Santa Ana police on the night he killed Morris M. Lipsius, a suspected Mafia hit man, and Donald B. MacMillan, an innocent bystander, at the Wagon Wheel Motel on East First Street.

Wagner, a credit manager for an auto dealership who apparently knew some shady characters from his days as an aspiring boxer, approached the Police Department with information about some alleged criminal activity on the part of some acquaintances.

For at least several months, Wagner worked with undercover police and helped them infiltrate criminal organizations. Bruce Briggs, an undercover officer in Santa Ana in 1966 and now a private investigator in the area, said he and Wagner worked together on several occasions.

“We went undercover and protected some warehouses in Watts during the riots and we once worked with the Secret Service to crack a counterfeiting ring in Pittsburgh. . . . Wagner knew some unsavory people,” Briggs said.

One person Wagner knew was Lipsius.

Santa Ana police and apparently the FBI wanted to arrest Lipsius on several charges of murder, Enright said. So it was decided that Wagner would set him up for arrest.

Wagner had scheduled a late-night meeting with Lipsius at the motel so that police and the FBI could tape an incriminating conversation about a proposed murder, Enright said. But two hitches in the plan developed.

The first problem occurred when Wagner’s partner ran out of gas on the way to the meeting, leaving him to meet Lipsius alone. The other arose when Lipsius invited MacMillan, a stranger he had met at a bar, to join him and Wagner for a drink at the motel.

At the motel Lipsius apparently pulled out a gun with the intention of robbing and killing MacMillan. Wagner, in an attempt to thwart the crime, drew his pistol. Unfortunately, as Wagner later told the grand jury, he misfired and shot MacMillan in the head before firing seven bullets into Lipsius.

“He was a quick-draw, supposedly the fastest gun in the West, but his aim was terrible,” Enright recalled.

The shooting caused a stir within the city and when reporters started asking questions, the chief of police denied that Wagner was working with the department in any official capacity.

Enright said that at the grand jury hearing “all the higher-ups in the department denied any knowledge of Wagner’s activities, but when it came to the working cops on the street they all backed up his story.”

One police officer told the jurors that he was in another room with the FBI, taping the incident, but that the recorder malfunctioned, Enright said. The grand jury refused to indict Wagner.

In a recent telephone interview from Moose Jaw, Wagner confirmed the account in this article. He declined to reveal much about his past other than to say he has been involved in “many Santa Anas.” He said he has worked undercover with government agencies throughout the United States, at times in situations where he had to kidnap or kill people.

“The things I did weren’t always legal,” he said. “I did some people’s dirty work now and then.”

Currently, Wagner is living in Moose Jaw with his third wife and works as a general manager of a car dealership in nearby Regina, Saskatchewan.

Authorities with Canadian immigration said they have confirmed that Wagner is a legal resident, so that agency’s investigation is basically closed. But the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are still looking into Wagner’s past.

“We want to find out what this guy is all about,” said RCMP Sgt. Bill McLellan. “There’s something not right about him.”

McLellan said investigators have found that Wagner gave a wrong Social Insurance number--the equivalent of a U.S. Social Security number--on a work application.

Wagner is scheduled to go to court in April for that violation and will most likely face a fine if convicted, McLellan said. He also said police have confiscated a motor home that Wagner allegedly brought into the country and never claimed, because he owes more than $5,000 in duties and fees.

For his part, Wagner said he is thinking about leaving Canada. “It appears some people are afraid of my past and want me out of here. . . . Maybe it’s time to move on.”