Jury Acquits San Juan Man in Murder Plot

An Orange County businessman was found not guilty Wednesday of charges that he paid a reputed Las Vegas mobster $21,000 to kill his secretary’s fiance as part of a plot to have an affair with her.

Although a U.S. District Court jury acquitted Julius F. Schill, 58, of San Juan Capistrano in the scheme, it convicted his co-defendant, Richard J. Dota, of murder for hire and conspiracy.

As the verdicts were read by the court clerk, Schill looked down at the counsel table and clasped his hands in prayer, while his wife, Karen, sat in the audience and trembled.

Dota, 55, of Las Vegas calmly stared at the nine men and three women of the jury, who took two days to reach their decision.

“It’s a great relief to me and my family,” said Schill, fighting back tears outside the federal courthouse after the verdict. “I thank God that the jury paid attention and made the right decision. . . . I’m just a conservative guy,” he said.

“This can frighten you to death,” he added as his wife stood by his side with her arm around him.

Prosecutors alleged that Schill desperately wanted to have an affair with his 24-year-old secretary, Cynthia Asher, and was willing to kill her fiance, Wilbur Constable, 26, to get her.

They contended that Schill hired Dota, who in turn hired an admitted hit man and two associates to murder the former Marine at a secluded Irvine parking lot on the night of Oct. 11, 1991.

But Constable miraculously survived a beating with baseball bats and a gunshot to the back of his head.

News of Schill’s acquittal was taken especially hard at the Lake Forest home of Asher and Constable.

“We’re very disappointed about the whole thing,” Constable said. “I feel screwed and very disappointed.”

Asher said her former boss was a “fabulous actor” when he testified and added that his money enabled him to buy a sharp attorney and ultimately his acquittal.

“He had the money to pay for the attempted murder of Wil and then buy his freedom,” she said. “He’s slime.”

Throughout the trial, Schill’s attorney, Allan H. Stokke, maintained that his client had already had a sexual affair with Asher and had called it off at least a month before the attack on Constable.

He also argued that Schill, who was president of the Tustin-based Auto Photo System, met with Dota only on legitimate business concerning the photo vending machine company.

Stokke further suggested that Asher had more of a motive than Schill to kill Constable because she was named as the beneficiary of his life insurance policy, worth more than $180,000.

A crucial point in the trial, in fact, occurred when Asher took the witness stand against her former boss. Asher testified that Schill promised her a horse farm, a car and a condominium in exchange for sex but that she refused his offers.

Stokke, however, produced credit card receipts that seemed to cast doubt on her story. Under cross-examination, Asher admitted that she and Schill went on shopping sprees and ate dinners together. The credit card receipts show that these outings were often followed by the rental of hotel rooms, some of which were reserved for only a portion of the day.

When Schill took the witness stand, he tearfully told the jury that he had had an affair with Asher, whom he described as an “expensive toy.”

Outside the courtroom, jurors said Schill’s acquittal came largely because many of the prosecution’s witnesses, especially Asher, were not credible.

“She’s a snake,” juror David Keeler, 35, of Camarillo said about Asher.

Her testimony was “99% lies and denials of the truth,” Keeler said.

Paul Sonne, 39, of Fountain Valley, the jury foreman, said he and the other jurors “discounted a lot of what she said” and “believed that she and Schill had an affair.”

In addition to Asher’s testimony, the jurors said they were troubled with the testimony of confessed hit man Blake Tek Yoon, as well as with Constable’s.

The jurors said Yoon’s testimony was strong enough to convict Dota, whom Yoon had met and talked to, but was too weak to implicate Schill, whom Yoon never met and whose name he never knew.

Yoon testified that he was told only that the murder contract was being paid by a “wealthy South County” man.

Supporting Yoon’s testimony against Dota were eight taped conversations between them, during which the attack on Constable was discussed.

Constable lost some credibility, jurors said, when he admitted on the stand that he initially lied to police about not having a gun on the night of the attack. He testified that he had been lured to the parking lot by a man who had called him at work and wanted to pay for damage done to Constable’s car in a hit-and-run accident.

“We felt like the whole story wasn’t being told to us,” foreman Sonne said. “We felt like something more happened. . . . The evidence just wasn’t strong enough to convict Schill.”

The prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Atty. Paul L. Seave, said he and his co-counsel, Assistant U.S. Atty. Wayne Gross, “accept the jury’s verdict.”

Seave admitted that the case against Schill had some “weaknesses” and that the credibility of Asher “was one of them.”

Both prosecutors declined further comment on the case.

Asher acknowledged that Stokke’s cross-examination made her look bad before the jury.

“I’m sure I didn’t come off as Mary Poppins or anything,” she said.

But she still strongly denied having an affair with Schill.

Despite the acquittal, prosecutors with the Orange County district attorney’s office left open the possibility that Schill might face state charges of attempted murder if new evidence in the case is discovered.

Stokke, however, called the chance of that happening “very unlikely” and suggested that such charges might even violate the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition against trying a person twice for the same crime.

Dota’s attorney, federal public defender H. Dean Steward, said he plans to appeal the verdict against Dota. He said he will challenge District Judge Gary L. Taylor’s decision to allow prosecutors to refer to Dota as a gangster and somebody connected to the mob.

According to authorities, Dota has ties the Genovese organized crime family on the East Coast.

“That probably had a big influence on the jury,” Steward said.

Dota is scheduled to be sentenced Oct. 5. Under federal sentencing guidelines, he faces about 25 years in prison, attorneys said.

As a result of the trial and the publicity, Asher and Constable said they are moving out of state. “We can’t take it anymore,” said Constable, who added that he wanted to put this ordeal behind him.

Schill also said he wanted put the memories and images of the trial in his past. He called his affair with Asher “unfortunate,” and he wants “to publicly apologize to my family and friends” about his involvement.

Karen Schill, who attended every day of the four-week trial, said she too was relieved to have the trial over.

“I thought I was going to have about 17 nervous breakdowns,” she said. “It’s a big price to pay for having an affair with your secretary.”