Failure to Find Trace of Poison Weakens Murder Case

A murder charge against a Glendora man accused of poisoning a business rival with oleander extract may have to be dismissed for lack of evidence, prosecutors said Tuesday.

Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Harvey Giss, appointed by the Ventura County district attorney’s office to prosecute David W. Sconce, said that sophisticated tests so far have found no signs that the alleged victim died of oleander poisoning.

Sconce, 35, is accused of using oleander to kill Burbank mortician Timothy Waters in 1985, and prosecutors previously intended to seek the death penalty. But on Tuesday, the first day of trial, prosecutors unsuccessfully sought to delay the case because the tests have not uncovered the evidence they expected.

“It doesn’t look favorable that we’re going to get the results we want,” Giss told Ventura County Superior Court Judge Frederick A. Jones. “But we will have to see it through to the end and wait for the report.”

Giss said that chemist Jack Henion, a Cornell University professor who is analyzing tissue samples from Waters, has found no signs of oleandrin, the poisonous juice of the oleander plant. Henion, hired by both the defense and the prosecution, now is looking for a substance that is formed when oleandrin breaks down in the body.

Henion is working on remains taken when the body was recently exhumed.

If that substance does not turn up either, “it would lean toward the conclusion that it never was there,” said Kevin De Noce, a Ventura County deputy district attorney who is assisting Giss.

Giss asked for a week’s postponement of the trial until Henion could complete his tests. “I don’t want to be criticized if we start jury selection and then we dismiss the case a week from today,” Giss told the judge.

But Jones ruled there was “insufficient good cause for the delay.” The judge will consider a motion today that the trial be moved because of pretrial publicity.

Sconce’s attorney, Roger Jon Diamond, opposed delaying the trial unless prosecutors were willing to release Sconce on his own recognizance during any continuance. Sconce is being held without bail in Ventura County Jail.

When the 300-pound Waters died in 1985 at age 24, the death was attributed to a heart attack. But three years later, after informants alleged that Sconce had bragged about spiking Waters’ drink with oleander and killing him, investigators reopened the case.

A Pennsylvania chemist said he found signs of oleander poisoning in Waters’ remains, and Sconce was charged with murder in February, 1990. Giss said Tuesday that the Pennsylvania test was not reliable because it used less sophisticated equipment than the current testing.

Sconce, whose family owned a Pasadena funeral home, has denied killing Waters but admitted hiring two men to beat him up.

Sconce served more than two years in prison for assault and for convictions stemming from illegalities at the mortuary. If the murder case is dismissed, he still faces a charge of conspiracy to commit murder in an unrelated case, Giss said.

Although Waters lived in Burbank and Sconce in Glendora, the case is being tried in Ventura County because Waters died at his mother’s home in Camarillo.

Giss was named to handle the murder trial by Ventura County Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury because he is familiar with Sconce’s other cases.