Court Dismisses Oceanside Employee-Murder Suit

A state appellate court Thursday dismissed a $10-million lawsuit against the city of Oceanside filed by the survivors of Laverne Duffy, a city employee murdered in 1983 by a co-worker, ruling the city could not have prevented her killing.

In a unanimous opinion, a three-judge panel of the 4th District Court of Appeal ruled that Duffy’s boss had once told her that their co-worker, Joseph Henry Larroque, was an ex-convict with a history of sexual assaults.

That warning fulfilled the city’s sole legal obligation, which required superiors to tell Duffy, a city secretary, that Larroque might be dangerous, the court said. The city was not required to avoid hiring ex-convicts or to watch them continuously, the court said.

Larroque was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to 35 years to life in prison in the May, 1983, slaying of Duffy, a 32-year-old mother of two. The killing shocked city employees, many of whom knew the victim and the killer--as did the revelation that the city had hired him despite his record of violent crime.

Larroque, now 66, went to work in Oceanside’s engineering department in 1978, after his parole from state prison, where he served four years for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl. In the mid-1960s, he was confined to a state mental hospital after being convicted of kidnaping and raping his 15-year-old sister-in-law.

On an audiotape played at Larroque’s trial, he told police that he considered himself a “psycho.”

Testimony at the trial established that Larroque lured Duffy out of her office at lunchtime on May 19, 1983, by asking her for help with his broken-down car.

Afterward, he kidnaped her and took her to his home, where he stripped, bound and gagged her before returning to work. Duffy strangled when she tried to slip free of the self-tightening noose Larroque had left around her neck.

According to the lawsuit, filed in Vista Superior Court in January, 1984, on behalf of Duffy’s two children, now teen-agers, city officials failed to provide Duffy with a safe place to work. If it had, by warning her about him, she never would have become friendly with him, the suit said.

However, the 4th District court ruled Thursday that Duffy was warned, when Bettie Whitson, Duffy’s supervisor, once told her that she should not be too friendly with Larroque, that he had a felony record and that his record included crimes against women.

Judge Richard J. Huffman wrote the opinion. Judges Charles W. Froehlich Jr. and Lillian Y. Lim, a San Diego Municipal Court judge appointed specially to the appellate court to hear the case, concurred.

Originally, the suit also included a variety of other claims against the city and a claim against the state, alleging that the state failed to properly supervise Larroque’s parole.