Accused of Husband’s Slaying, Widow Sues to Clear Her Name

Less than three weeks after Sun Valley businessman Gregory Sophiea was stabbed to death in his bed during what appeared to be an amateurish burglary attempt, police identified bloody fingerprints found inside the house as those of an 18-year-old drug user and drifter.

Los Angeles police officers tracked down the youth and told him they had physical evidence linking him to a murder, and Anthony Thomas Moore confessed to the killing. He said he stabbed Sophiea, 38, in a panic after breaking into the house via the bathroom window to steal a VCR and other valuables.

Moore’s story matched the physical evidence at the crime scene. The bathroom window was open and there was dirt on the toilet seat below, suggesting that someone had stepped on it. But detectives Woodrow Parks and Gary Milligan were not satisfied with the confession.

The day of the Jan. 31 murder Parks and Milligan arrested Sophiea’s widow, Mary Kellel-Sophiea, on suspicion of murdering her husband. They said she had tried to cover her tracks by making her husband’s death appear to have been the work of an intruder.

Last month, Kellel-Sophiea filed a civil lawsuit in U.S. District Court against the two detectives, charging that they tried to frame her for the murder by coercing Moore to falsely implicate her and by fabricating other evidence.

The lawsuit, which seeks compensatory and punitive damages, alleges that Parks and Milligan have continued to pursue her because they do not want to admit their mistake in arresting her, despite obvious signs that Sophiea was slain by an intruder.

Even now, after the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office has dropped the criminal case against Kellel-Sophiea for insufficient evidence and Moore has been ordered to stand trial in San Fernando Superior Court for murder committed during a burglary, the two officers still say they are investigating the former advertising executive and consider her a primary suspect.

Kellel-Sophiea’s civil attorney, David Romley, said tapes of police interviews with Moore indicate that the officers encouraged him to make up a story that she had recruited him to kill her husband.

They told Moore over and over that he was lying about trying to burglarize the house. They repeatedly asked him about his relationship with the woman referred to on the tapes as “Mary” and asked why he was protecting her. The detectives told him, falsely, that Kellel-Sophiea had confessed to the arrangement with Moore, and they urged him to help his case by telling the truth.

“If you went in there and helped her do this, and then you said, ‘Well, listen, I can make it look like a burglar came in here,’ and you faked this thing, then tell us about it. Do it now,” one of the detectives said on the tape.

“If you didn’t stab the guy, now is the time to tell me. If you went in and helped her, that’s a whole lot better than going in and driving that knife through the guy.”

Finally, after hours of such questioning, Moore recanted his original story of a simple burglary gone awry, and told the detectives a story of blood and lust that concluded with Kellel-Sophiea stabbing her husband in a fit of rage.

Kellel-Sophiea, 39, contends she has never met Moore. And Sophiea’s sister said in an interview that police told her they have no evidence to corroborate Moore’s story of having had a relationship with her brother’s wife.

But the officers said they have good reason to suspect that she was responsible for the crime. In a search warrant affidavit, they said that Kellel-Sophiea’s defense attorney told a deputy district attorney that her client had confessed her guilt.

Criminal defense attorney Leslie H. Abramson said, however, that the detectives misconstrued the comment made to Deputy Dist. Atty. Myron L. Jenkins prior to a bail hearing, before Abramson had interviewed her client.

Jenkins said, “I don’t recall her ever telling anyone that her client said she did it.”

Abramson said the detectives also twisted neighbors’ statements to bolster their view of the case. “When they made the decision that she was lying, everything else they did, they skewed to make her look bad,” Abramson said. “They wrote reports that were totally slanted toward her guilt.”

In the immediate aftermath of the crime, the detectives told many people that Kellel-Sophiea was responsible for the murder. The violence shocked and frightened residents of the Sophieas’ neighborhood in the affluent Shadow Hills area of Sun Valley, and the officers hurried to assure neighbors they were not in danger, Romley said.

“Right from day one, the detectives went around telling everyone it was an open-and-shut case,” said Romley, a high school friend of Kellel-Sophiea. “They went around to all the neighbors and told them, ‘Don’t worry, there is not some random killer out there. This was just a domestic dispute.’ ”

The officers also told many of the dead man’s relatives that his widow was the killer. As a result, her in-laws ostracized her when she most needed family support, and also took legal custody of her 6-year-old daughter, Kellel-Sophiea said during an interview.

“These people ruined my life,” she said of the detectives, raising her voice and leaning forward in her chair. “They estranged Greg’s family from me.”

Family was important to both Mary Kellel and Greg Sophiea, who grew up in tight-knit Lebanese communities in Los Angeles and Detroit and who met each other at a national Eastern Orthodox Church conference in 1977.

Kellel-Sophiea recalls that when she met her future husband, he told her he was surprised that the dainty, attractive 26-year-old was not yet married.

After the convention, the Detroit resident began corresponding with her, and later visited several times. About a year later, Sophiea moved to California and they were married.

“We had the same goals and the same type of family--very close and very loving,” she said.

Career success followed for both. He became a Los Angeles-based executive for an international firm and she was a vice president for a national advertising agency until the agency closed her division. They moved about three years ago to an elegant home in Sun Valley.

The couple also adopted a daughter--a war orphan from Beirut--after years of trying unsuccessfully to have a child of their own. For the humanitarian act, they were featured on the cover of their national church magazine. Friends and family considered the pair “the perfect couple.”

But at the time of the murder, the couple was in the process of separating, with irreconcilable differences. The separation was amicable though, and they were sharing custody of their daughter, said Sophiea’s sister, Anita Pollock, who lived near her brother and saw the couple often.

On the night Greg Sophiea was murdered, his estranged wife had driven up from Long Beach, where she was renting a small apartment, to sign papers giving her husband the authority to sell their house. She decided to sleep over rather than return to Long Beach, she said, because it was late and she had to be in the Valley the next day.

Kellel-Sophiea said she was not sleeping in the same room as her husband, but in the middle of the night something awoke her. She said she rushed to his bedroom to see what was the matter, and saw her husband, apparently in distress, on his bed.

Sophiea had a history of severe asthma--once he had to be rushed to a hospital emergency room because of an attack--and her initial impression on glancing into his room was that he was having a similar episode. Kellel-Sophiea immediately called 911. Then, she said, she rushed to summon a neighbor to help her get her husband to start breathing.

But when paramedics arrived, they found him dead. Police found signs of a burglary, including bloody fingerprints all over the house and pry marks on a door.

Parks and Milligan have refused repeatedly to explain what led them to conclude that Kellel-Sophiea had killed her husband and faked a burglary, but they still cling tenaciously to their theory.

“We have 100 years of combined experience in this homicide unit, and this burglary attempt was clearly a feigned burglary attempt,” Milligan said in a recent interview. “It did not occur as it was intended to appear it occurred.”

Kellel-Sophiea said she was stunned when the police took her into custody.

“This cop turns to me, says ‘Your husband is dead,’ and the next thing I know I am in a police car, heading in for questioning,” she said.

“I have never been near a jail, and there I am being handcuffed,” she said. “They were screaming and yelling and telling me I was never gonna see light again, and I just kept thinking this has got to be a dream.”

Abramson said the homicide investigators clearly “blew it--the burglary was as plain as the nose on your face.”

She said she was outraged when she listened to the tapes of the police interviews with Moore, and heard how the police rejected his burglary confession and lied to him, telling him that Kellel-Sophiea had confessed to hiring him to kill her husband.

After Moore admitted the burglary, one of the detectives told him: “Your whole story won’t wash.

“You didn’t break in that house. I don’t know if you even stabbed the guy. You’re saying you did. She says you did, but I don’t know if I even believe that part of it,” the detective said on tape. “You’re taking a lot of heat here, and I don’t know why you are putting this all on your shoulders.”

Abramson said she believes that the investigators would not accept Moore’s confession because they “have very fragile, puffed-up egos. It is impossible for them to admit that they made a ghastly mistake.

“I prayed that they would find the real burglar, then they did find him and they framed her with him,” she said.

As Milligan and his partner continue their investigation, Kellel-Sophiea said she is trying to get on with her life. She is busy mothering her little girl--who has now been returned to her--and mourning the loss of her husband, who she said she still loved very much despite their impending divorce.

She said at night she is haunted by visions of the crime scene. “I have flashbacks,” she said. “I see Greg every night.”

Her in-laws say they are convinced now that she is innocent and is being wrongly persecuted by the police; they do not believe the police theory that Kellel-Sophiea knew Moore.

“As far as I am concerned, she is totally innocent,” said Sophiea’s sister.

But Kellel-Sophiea said she feels a cloud of suspicion still hangs over her. “People don’t know what to say or how to act. They are embarrassed, and sometimes people walk the other way,” she said.

That is why Kellel-Sophiea said she has filed the lawsuit against the two officers: to clear her name. “I am not scared because God knows the truth,” she said.