Judge Orders Naval Officer to Stand Trial in 1987 Slaying of His Wife : Justice: Bail raised to $3 million for Navy Lt. Cmdr. Leonard Earl Eddington II, whose spouse’s remains were found buried in his Jamul back yard last December.

Declaring “there is no other conclusion that this court can reach,” a Superior Court judge Thursday ordered Navy Lt. Cmdr. Leonard Earl Eddington II to stand trial for murder in the 1987 slaying of his wife, whose skeletal remains were unearthed in his back yard last December.

Eddington, 43, a Naval maintenance officer who most recently served in the Persian Gulf, was married to Vickie Eddington, 29, for 12 years before she disappeared in August, 1987.

Superior Court Judge William D. Mudd ordered Eddington held on $3-million bail, although the prosecution had asked for only $2 million. As Mudd set the higher bail, members of Vickie Eddington’s family wept in the courtroom and congratulated one another.

Until Thursday, Eddington had been free on $400,000 bail, raised through equity on the property he and his wife own in Jamul, his mother’s property and monthly payments from his Navy paychecks.

In setting the new amount, which Eddington apparently will be unable to meet, Mudd said he considered “the sophistication and planning that are in involved in this type of crime.”

“Up until today, Mr. Eddington was of a belief, or at least up until the time his wife’s body was found, that he would get away with this,” Mudd said. “He now knows differently.”

Prosecutor Jeff Dusek said he might seek special circumstances in the case, which would make Eddington eligible for the death penalty. Eddington, he said, might have murdered his wife to keep her from seeking a divorce and obtaining a portion of the couple’s property in a settlement.

Eddington’s court-appointed attorney, Milly Durovic, said her client will seek to prove at trial that someone else murdered Vickie Eddington and buried her in the back yard, probably while Eddington was on a sea tour.

“Anyone could have put the body there,” she said. “Our belief is that it was somebody who knew both of them.”

The parents of Vickie Eddington, who now live in Idaho, wiped tears from their eyes and clasped each others’ hands as Dusek urged Mudd to order Eddington to answer to murder charges.

Barely able to catch his breath, his speech interrupted by sobs, Vickie’s father said the high bail amount left him “over-elated,” and that results of the preliminary hearing have convinced him and his wife that their former son-in-law will be convicted.

“I have had feelings that he might get off, but I don’t think he’s going to now,” Elmer Vess said. “We have sweated over Vickie missing and have had our own suspicions, and they have been proven to us.”

Although no witness or evidence directly ties Eddington to his wife’s murder, Dusek said his strange and disturbing pattern of behavior following her disappearance makes “this one of the best circumstantial cases you will ever see.”

Eddington called sheriff’s deputies Aug. 31, 1987, and reported finding his wife’s maroon Volvo abandoned on California 94, about 4 miles from their home, as he took their three children to swimming lessons in La Mesa.

He had last seen Vickie, he said, on her way to her night nursing job at Grossmont Hospital in La Mesa.

Vess, his wife, Alice, and other members of their family said they thought it strange that Leonard Eddington ordered them off his property and steered them away from an area where Vickie’s remains were eventually found.

Neighbors reported seeing Eddington atop bulldozing equipment filling in a ravine shortly after Vickie’s disappearance. Up to a year later, he was reportedly still inspecting the area.

In his closing argument Thursday, Dusek said Vickie Eddington probably never left her bed, much less got into her car, on the night she was killed. She most likely had been taking a nap in blue jeans and a blouse before getting up for work that evening, he said.

When her body was found, medical experts found that the left side of her head had been smashed with a blunt object. She was wrapped in bed quilts that she and her mother had made.

“She was probably killed in her bed, where he was able to wrap her up and consume and compile all the blood she obviously left when she had her head caved in by this man,” Dusek said.

Dusek said it was then that Eddington concocted his alibi, puncturing the tire to her car in two places and making it look as if she had had a flat on California 94. Although a clerk from a nearby 7-Eleven convenience store said a woman with a flat came into the market asking for change, police found plenty of change in the car, and Dusek said the woman was not Vickie Eddington.

Leonard Eddington’s fingerprints were the only ones found on a spare-tire cover. A Navy subordinate testified during a preliminary hearing that Eddington feared a divorce, and rather than lose his property, said “he would go up on the roof and saw the house in half, and her too, if she got in the way.”

At about the time his wife disappeared, Eddington began to date several women whom he contacted through personal ads. Dusek said Eddington lied to these women about his job and what had happened to Vickie. He proposed marriage to two different women and offered them Vickie’s rings before abruptly breaking off the engagements.

“He’s got to be petrified of going to jail,” Dusek said in court Thursday. “He’s not the type of guy who has the courage to stand through trial, knowing what is waiting for him after that.”

Eddington’s oldest son, Michael, 14, grimaced in court Thursday and muttered to himself as Dusek attacked his father. He sat next to Leonard Eddington’s new wife, whom he married after his arrest, and his bail bondsman.

When deputies arrested Leonard Eddington last Dec. 21, Michael had to be restrained and was charged with interfering with an investigation.

Durovic, Eddington’s attorney, argued in court Thursday that search warrants obtained to permit digging in his back yard were flawed because they purposely did not include information that would be critical to her client’s defense.

Although the search warrants were allowed into court, Durovic said they did not contain information favorable to Eddington that sheriff’s detectives have had for years, including the results of a Naval Investigative Service probe.

During that investigation, in August, 1987, an F-14 fighter plane equipped with infrared photographic equipment passed over the Eddington property and determined that there was no body on the land, Durovic said.

NIS spokesman Mike Burke confirmed that his office did assist the sheriff’s office in an investigation but said he could not comment further because the matter is still in court.

The photographs and files of the investigation have been destroyed, and there is no record of who flew the plane, what areas had been photographed or who took the photos, Durovic said.

She said she would be seeking the information through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.

“Everything that is favorable to our case no longer exists,” she said. “If it had been properly investigated in 1987 . . . we would be in a better posture to defend ourselves rather than rely on witnesses recollections of what happened five years ago.”

Everyone involved in the case agreed that it should not have taken so long to solve and was marred by a slipshod investigation out of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department.

“I’m not privy to what the problem was with the Sheriff’s Department in this case,” Judge Mudd said, “but in 20 years in this community and nine years on the bench, and having gone through a number of homicide cases, the way this one started out was shoddy at best.”