Accused’s Comment on Wife’s Death Told

Three years after a Navy corpsman reported that a hit-and-run accident caused his wife’s death, he reportedly told investigators that he knew who fired the gunshot that killed her.

A sheriff’s detective testified about the conflicting stories at a preliminary hearing Monday for Charles Richard Schmidt and the man Schmidt allegedly hired to gun down his wife.

Patricia Schmidt was killed June 15, 1989, while jogging along Quarry Road in Spring Valley. Though her husband said she must have been hit by a car while they were jogging, an autopsy that week turned up a bullet in her head. Schmidt was not a suspect because authorities believed his wife was killed in a drive-by shooting.

Nearly three years later, after police received a tip from Mexican authorities, prosecutors charged Schmidt, 28, with paying Noel Patrick Armstrong, 22, $400 to shoot the woman.

Detective Joe Santibanez testified that Schmidt told him May 8 “that Armstrong was the one that shot and killed Patricia Schmidt.”

Prosecutors say the two men met while working together at Le Meridien Hotel in Coronado.

“(Schmidt) portrayed his relationship as him being a father figure to Noel Armstrong,” Santibanez said.

The two men have pleaded not guilty to murder charges, but prosecutors said both defendants have admitted their roles in the killing. Additionally, Schmidt is also charged with two counts of murder for hire.