The Perfect Murder or the Perfect Frame Job? : Crime: The prosecution says David Scott Harrison is the obvious murderer of his ex-wife, but the defense argues that the police haven’t bothered to investigate anyone else.

The way Anne Jenkins was killed--a thin cord or ligature gripped tautly around her neck, then a deep slash made to her throat--came right out of Chapter 3 of the underground paperback “The Perfect Crime and How to Commit It.”

There was no physical evidence left at the woman’s San Marcos home. Ibid, Chapter 7, “Watch Out for the Labs.”

The suspect had an alibi. Just like the book discusses.

The book warns against bragging and gossiping. Criminals can be their own worst enemies, it says toward the end.

Alas, that is where David Scott Harrison strayed from the text, says prosecutor Larry Burns.

And on Monday, Harrison’s trial for murder is scheduled to begin with jury selection in the Vista courtroom of Superior Court Judge David B. Moon Jr.

“This is probably the most interesting and challenging undertaking I’ve ever had as a prosecutor,” said Burns, 35, who has spent 11 years in the offices of the district attorney and the U.S. attorney, prosecuting more than 200 murderers, rapists and others charged with violent crime.

“There’s professional satisfaction to a case like this--but also a great deal of anxiety,” he said. Burns is an assistant U.S. attorney, but is prosecuting the case in Superior Court on behalf of the district attorney’s office because of his familiarity with the case. “You’ve heard of the thin blue line? I feel like the thin gray line between his committing the crime and getting away with it.”

Nothing physically links Harrison to the scene of the crime. No hair, no blood, no fingerprints, no eyewitnesses who can positively identify him. A murder weapon has not been recovered.

The killing of Jenkins, Burns says, is as close to a perfect murder as he has ever encountered.

But Harrison’s defense attorney, Alan May, says the only thing perfect about this crime is the frame job that has accompanied it. He argued during the preliminary hearing that not only is there no evidence that puts his client at the scene of the killing, but also that all of the available evidence and circumstances suggest that the killer was anyone but David Scott Harrison, and was probably someone who, unlike Harrison, had the victim’s confidence.

“Everyone has theories why it should have been him and why it could have been him, but there’s absolutely no evidence that it was him,” May said. “The prosecution is trying to offer the bad character of David Harrison because this is who they want the suspect to be, and they’ll use whatever circumstantial evidence that works to try to convict him.

“But they investigated no one else and have only developed the evidence they can find to try to convict him,” he said. Some of that evidence is contrary, May said, and actually serves to point the finger at other, more likely suspects.

Burns ridicules May’s attempt to point the finger at others.

“The defense theory is that the killer is anyone but Harrison, and, depending on what day it is, May names a different suspect,” he said. “I don’t know who he’ll say the suspect will be when the trial starts. He could name anybody.”

Burns argues that Harrison had the opportunity and the motive to kill his ex-wife and that he premeditated and planned the killing--including studying several books on how to commit “the perfect crime.”

Harrison had a long track record of vengeance against his former wife, Burns said.

He said that after the couple’s contentious divorce in January, 1982--ending five years of marriage--Harrison played out a bizarre campaign of harassment against his former wife; her new husband, Gary Jenkins, and her father, Harry Wanket. Harrison himself admitted to the acts, either during federal court proceedings in San Diego or when he testified on his own behalf during his preliminary hearing in Vista two months ago on the murder charge.

* Yes, in March, 1985, Harrison subscribed to numerous magazines in the Jenkinses’ names and, a month later, submitted change-of-address cards in Anne Jenkins’ and Wanket’s names. In May, 1985, he called the telephone company and, representing himself as Gary Jenkins, changed the Jenkinses’ telephone number.

* Yes, he bought an ad in a sex magazine in October, 1986, under the name of Wanket, soliciting gay lovers. More than 300 men called Wanket, and he was deluged with mail from others.

* Yes, during the better part of 1987 he mailed “Neighborhood Alert” and “Incest Warning” flyers to Wanket’s neighbors, relatives and employers, alleging that Wanket was a child molester.

* And yes, in June, 1987, he bombed the van owned by Pamela Jenkins--the former wife of Gary Jenkins. The van was parked in front of her home in Vista, and the bombing sent metal fragments into the woman’s home, spreading shards of glass across her bed.

Harrison said he did these things because he hated his ex-wife, her father and her new husband. The car bombing, for instance, was intended to get Gary Jenkins in trouble with the law.

Motive? Harrison and Anne Jenkins were locked in a prolonged, bitter custody battle over their two school-age children, Burns notes. The legal fight had bled Jenkins financially, and Harrison may have felt that he was on the brink of financially beating her down. Still, he was bitter that he had spent so much of his own money, which he earned by serving as a property manager for his mother’s real estate investments in San Diego County.

“It would have been cheaper to kill (her) than divorce her,” Harrison was quoted as telling Todd Neumann, a friend, back in 1984, according to court documents.

During 1984 and 1985, Harrison lived in a homosexual relationship with a man named David Johnson and talked constantly of wanting to see his former wife dead, according to testimony during the preliminary hearing. Yet Harrison wrote in court papers in January, 1986, of his ongoing attempts to reconcile with Anne, despite her alleged affair with another man.

“I was suspicious of her for wanting to reconcile, as she had been having an affair during our marriage and walked out on me at least five times,” he wrote. “Four times I welcomed her back and tried with every fiber in my heart to understand while she carried on her affair. . . . She told me she loved him and they had a future together. When that affair fell apart, I again welcomed her home.”

But 1986 was as stormy as the previous years; Harrison was found in contempt of court for failing to make child support payments, and the couple traded charges back and forth over foiled visitation attempts.

In December, 1986, according to testimony during the preliminary hearing by Johnson, Harrison remarked, “I’d like to cut her throat . . . then stand there and watch her bleed.”

The child custody battle continued into 1987. And whatever hopes Harrison had of sapping Jenkins financially evaporated on Jan. 13, 1988, Burns contends, when she and her husband won $727,000 in the California Lottery--their share as one of three winners in that week’s 6/49 Lotto game.

The Jenkinses and their three children--two from Anne’s marriage to Harrison marriage and a third from their own--had sat around a table where 49 numbered pieces of paper were laid out; Gary picked two numbers and the others picked one each.

They struck pay dirt, and clearly Jenkins would no longer have difficult financing her ongoing custody battle.

While defense attorney May suggests that Jenkins and Harrison had come to some resolution on child visitation rights several months before she was killed, Burns notes that Jenkins was actively pursuing a civil lawsuit against Harrison, claiming he tried to hide assets from her so they couldn’t be tapped in the divorce proceedings. On Tuesday, Feb. 16, a ruling was issued in Vista court siding with Jenkins.

Jenkins--who had just days before quit her job working for her father--was home midday on Wednesday, Feb. 17, 1988, washing her car in the driveway of the couple’s Leslie Court home.

According to 20-year-old Thomas Matthews, who was doing work in a yard several houses away but who didn’t step forward until a year later, Jenkins was arguing in the driveway with a man who was standing between the cab of his pickup and the open driver’s door, pointing his finger at the woman through the door’s open window.

Matthews said the two were arguing about children--but his own testimony conflicts about what they said. According to May, Matthews testified to the county grand jury that indicted Harrison for murder that Jenkins told the man, “We don’t need your money any more.” That was a reference, May contends, to Jenkins’ father, Wanket, who had provided financial support to Jenkins in her custody battle.

But at the preliminary hearing, Matthews testified that he heard Jenkins tell the man: “We have money now. We can fight you.”

That remark, Burns contends, clearly implicates Harrison.

It is unclear what happened next, except that the car remained only half-washed; soap had dried on it, and the hose was left running that afternoon.

Burns theorizes that Jenkins, fearing for her safety, ran inside, locked the front door behind her, and ran toward the bedroom where her baby was sleeping. Harrison, Burns says, ran through the open garage door--closing it after him--and entered the house from an interior garage door that was unlocked because Jenkins had been doing laundry while washing the car.

The two met inside the house, and Harrison, a karate expert and Ninja instructor, quickly took Jenkins to the floor in a single maneuver, strangled her and slashed her before she could so much as instinctively react, Burns contends.

Gary Jenkins, a construction worker, was paged later in the afternoon by his construction office and told that the two older children had not been picked up from school that day and that no one had been able to reach his wife.

Gary Jenkins went home and discovered his wife dead, lying fully clothed and face-up on the floor near a bathroom. His voice shaking, he called 911. The operator asked if there was anyone else in the house and Jenkins blurted out, “Oh my God, the baby!” A few moments later he returned to the phone, said he had the baby and said he believed he knew who had killed his wife--Harrison.

Homicide detectives found nothing amiss at the scene. No jewelry, money or other valuables had been taken; there were no signs of a forced entry and no indication of even a struggle. A follow-up forensics report by the coroner’s office showed no skin or hairs under Anne Jenkins’ fingernails to suggest she had struggled in hand-to-hand combat with her assailant. Defense attorney May argues that that’s because she was killed by someone she trusted.

The next day, investigators questioned Harrison at his condominium in Del Mar Heights. He said he had been home virtually all day that Wednesday, except to visit his mother briefly that morning.

Indeed, the only apparent hole in Harrison’s claim of being home all day was from 10:50 a.m. to 12:08 p.m., when there were no records of telephone activity at his home.

Would 78 minutes have been long enough for Harrison to drive from his home to San Marcos, kill his former wife and return? Burns says the round trip can be made in as quickly as 52 minutes, leaving up to a 26-minute period for the killing.

On Friday, two days after the killing, an acquaintance of Harrison, Randy Fox, heard of the murder on the radio and called detectives. That previous Sunday, he said, he saw Harrison leave three duffel bags at the Escondido home of Fox’s roommate, Bruce Freebury, also a friend of Harrison. The duffels contained, among other things, pipe bombs, books and gunpowder.

Moreover, Fox said, he overheard Harrison telling Freebury to “watch the news” because “something big was going to happen on Wednesday or Thursday.” And when Harrison saw Fox face-to-face that previous Sunday, Harrison said he was extremely distressed that his former wife had won the lottery prize, Fox said.

The detectives got a search warrant, took the duffel bags and arrested Freebury. The duffel bags contained four fused pipe bombs, applications for false identifications and three books: “The Perfect Crime and How to Commit It,” “The Joy of Cold Revenge” and “The Revenge Book.”

One book details, among other things, how to murder by strangulation or throat slashing and how to leave a murder scene clean of evidence. The other books suggest various ways of getting revenge, and list the harassment campaigns that Harrison admitted to conducting against Wanket and the Jenkinses.

Those who encountered Harrison in the days after the murder said he was anxious and appeared “drained.”

The following Tuesday, he was arrested for possession of the pipe bombs, a federal offense, and was put in custody at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown San Diego. While there, he “repeatedly bragged (to his cellmate) that the murder had been committed ‘flawlessly’ and that it was ‘the perfect crime,’ ” Burns said.

He demonstrated to his cellmate, Alan Scott Pace, the “proper” method of slitting a person’s throat so deeply that the head is nearly decapitated.

“ ‘Oh, I promise you, she suffered. It wasn’t pleasant for her,’ ” Pace quoted Harrison during the preliminary hearing as telling him.

Harrison also complained to Pace that he would be unable to fashion a precise alibi until he knew the time of Jenkins’ death--but that the death report had been sealed and he was stymied in covering his tracks, Burns said.

On Nov. 4, 1988--four days before his federal trial on the bombing charge was to start--Harrison pleaded guilty to bombing Pamela Jenkins’ van. For that and two other felony convictions--arson, for setting an estranged friend’s boat afire, and for scamming $20,000 from an insurance company on a false claim that his Corvette had been stolen--Harrison was sentenced to 20 years at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kan.

Last June 26, Harrison was indicted by a county grand jury for the murder of Jenkins.

May argues that no witnesses saw Harrison’s motorcycle on the street the day of the killing--only several pickup trucks, like the ones driven by Gary Jenkins and Wanket. Burns points out that, when Harrison bombed Pamela Jenkins’ van, he parked his motorcycle several blocks away from her residence. He followed the same scenario in this case, Burns alleges.

May said there was no way for Harrison to have known his ex-wife would have been home that Tuesday. Burns points out that Harrison had custody of the children that previous weekend, and they easily could have told him that their mother quit her job and was now staying home.

May said Jenkins never would have allowed someone as threatening and as menacing as Harrison into her home. Of course not, Burns agrees; Harrison ran in through the open garage door and surprised her in an inside hallway.

May said other suspects should have been more closely scrutinized; Burns says there are no other suspects.

“There’s absolutely no one else in the world who would have argued (with), and have killed, Anne Jenkins that day than the man who said he hated her and wanted her dead, David Scott Harrison,” Burns said.