3 Women Receive Prison Terms in Hawthorne Beating Death

JoAnn Jones was constantly feuding with the manager of the Hawthorne apartment complex where she lived. Eventually, after one especially vitriolic exchange, manager Margaret Trapp decided to get even.

Giving a pass key to her niece and another young woman, Trapp told them to beat up Jones and yank out a hairpiece Jones had borrowed from Trapp and woven into her own hair.

On Friday, all three women were sentenced to more than 11 years in state prison for killing Jones.

According to Deputy Dist. Atty. Stephen Sitkoff, the beating that Iandria McGhee and Monique McDaniel were supposed to administer on July 16, 1989, turned into a slaughter.

They found Jones, a petite 5-foot-2 woman who weighed 90 pounds, asleep in her bed and began beating her with their bare fists. When she began to struggle, they gagged her and hit her in the face with objects they found in the apartment, including a guitar and its stand, Sitkoff said.

By the time the pair left the apartment to triumphantly return the hairpiece to Trapp, Jones was dead. Her body was discovered by friends two days later.

Relatives of Jones, furious that murder charges against the three women were dropped last month to allow them to plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter, asked Torrance Superior Court Judge Cecil J. Mills to sentence the trio to the highest terms possible.

Mills, noting the severe violence involved in the killing, agreed.

McGhee was ordered to serve 11 years in state prison for the death, plus an extra year for using the guitar as a deadly weapon. McDaniel, who already is serving two years in state prison for her participation in a Playa del Rey gang rape in late 1989, was ordered to serve an additional 12 years in state prison in this case. Trapp was ordered to serve 11 years.

Sitkoff defended the plea agreement as the best prosecutors could get.

Legal rules limiting the use of statements made by one defendant against another would have made it extremely difficult to convince jurors that the trio should be convicted of murder, he said.

“I really feel for the family in this,” Sitkoff said. “They lost a family member in such a violent way. . . . But we feel we’ve done the best that we could.”