Navy Officer Put on Trial in Wife’s Murder : Court: The mother of three disappeared five years ago. Investigators discovered her body buried behind the couple’s home last December.

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 about whether Vickie would ever be found.

Attempting to answer that question themselves, Vickie’s family, friends and neighbors had slowly 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 eastern San Diego 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 and digging for three hours, 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. The case that has drawn local notoriety since her disappearance more than five years ago.

Twelve feet underground, the investigators found a section of chain-link fence laid flat and secured by two wooden stakes. Below the fence, Dusek added, were several layers of blankets and sheets and a pillow, all of which were from Eddington’s home and some of which Vickie Eddington had made herself.

“They cut a hole in the blanket, reached into the blanket and found a knee bone,” Dusek told jurors in a low 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, 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, who was a night nurse at Grossmont Hospital, had not been seen since July 30, 1987. 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 away from where her 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 she would be closer to his home and help care for his children.

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