Jury Told Navy Officer Killed Sleeping Wife : Trial: Prosecutor contends he buried her body in back yard of Jamul home where deputies unearthed it four years later.

For more than four years after his wife’s disappearance, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Leonard Eddington II tended to the couple’s three young children, fretting aloud to family members whether Vickie would ever be found.

Attempting to answer that question themselves, Vickie’s family, friends and neighbors had long ago reached the conclusion that Eddington might have killed her.

Maybe it was the bulldozer that he used repeatedly to smooth over his property. Maybe it was his perceived indifference in searching for his wife. Maybe it was the way he ordered Vickie’s family away from the recesses of the back yard.

Last December, sheriff’s deputies knocked on Eddington’s door and handed him a search warrant that authorized them to excavate his back yard in the rural East County town of Jamul. They had been examining his property from the air and noticed that a ravine had been filled in unevenly.

“You’re here to find Mommy in the back yard,” detectives quoted 8-year-old Lydia Eddington as saying when she answered the door.

Using a backhoe, investigators “struck pay dirt,” prosecutor Jeff Dusek said Monday during opening arguments at Eddington’s murder trial.

Eddington was charged last December with killing his wife in a case that has drawn local notoriety since her disappearance more than five years ago. He is free on bail.

Three hours into digging, detectives found a chain-link fence laid flat, hammered 12 feet under the surface of the earth with two wooden stakes, he said.

Underneath were several layers of blankets, sheets and a pillow, all of which were from Eddington’s home and some of which Vickie made herself.

“They cut a hole in the blanket, reached into the blanket and found a knee bone,” Dusek told jurors in a hushed voice.

Vickie Eddington was identified through dental records. She had been dressed in a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved blouse.

Her skull had been smashed, just above her left ear.

“The evidence will indicate that Vickie was killed in her sleep,” wrapped in blankets and sheets, and carried to the back yard, where she was buried, Dusek said.

But Eddington, 44, who appeared in court Tuesday dressed in a Navy officer’s uniform adorned with ribbons, has said he had nothing to do with his wife’s death.

Vickie Eddington reportedly disappeared July 30, 1987, on the way to her night nursing job at Grossmont Hospital. Eddington told deputies that he was unaware she was missing until he passed her Volvo on the side of the road the next day, about four miles from their home. He was taking the children for swimming lessons at the YMCA in La Mesa.

Defense attorney Milly Durovic said a convenience store clerk will testify that he saw Vickie Eddington on the night of her disappearance. The store is two miles from the spot where Vickie Eddington’s car was found.

“She was agitated and said she needed change for a $20 bill because she had a flat tire and no spare in the car,” Durovic said.

The defense will argue that Vickie Eddington could not have been killed in her sleep because she had visited the convenience store around the time she was supposed to be at work.

Countering allegations that Eddington was moving dirt with a grader, Durovic said Eddington hired someone to run a bulldozer over his property to cut a pad for his sister’s mobile home, so that she would be closer to his home and help baby-sit his children. On another occasion, his sister finished the job with another run over the property.

Durovic agreed that Eddington shooed his wife’s family off the property but did so only because they were riding motorcycles and dirt bikes over his yard and causing a mess.

Little new information emerged from the first day of court testimony but Dusek did add some detail that fleshed out the killing. During a court break, Dusek said the defense turned over Vickie Eddington’s wedding ring--it had been found in Leonard Eddington’s car.

The ring matches the description of a ring that was offered by Eddington to several women following his wife’s disappearance. Superior Court Judge Herbert J. Exarhos ruled earlier in the trial that the ring could not be admitted as evidence because it would prejudice the jury.

Dusek said that he would introduce evidence that Vickie Eddington’s legs were tied with the same type of plastic tie that Navy mechanics at North Island Naval Air Station use to tie hydraulic pipes.

As a maintenance officer, Eddington supervised Navy mechanics.

Dusek argued Monday that Eddington probably punctured the tire himself from the inside, allowing it to leak slowly while he drove it to the area where it was found on California 94.

He said Eddington’s fingerprints, and Eddington’s alone, were found all over the car, including on the jack and tire cover.

During Monday’s testimony, a naval legal assistance officer said Vickie Eddington came to him in either 1984 or 1985 seeking a divorce.

“She wanted her freedom to raise her kids,” said Robert Wesley, who is now a private divorce attorney. “She felt like she was being trapped or smothered.”

Vickie Eddington never went through with the divorce, Wesley said. Divorce was granted a year after Vickie’s disappearance, at Leonard Eddington’s request.

The trial is expected to last two weeks.