Navy Officer’s Murder Trial Goes to Jury

Driven to desperation over Vickie Eddington’s insistence on divorce and half the couple’s property, Leonard Eddington brutally struck his wife in her bed “with one killing blow . . . all for greed,” a prosecutor said Wednesday.

Vickie Eddington was found buried in her Jamul back yard last December, 4 1/2 years after she disappeared during the evening she was to report to her nursing job. Her car had been found four miles from their home. The tire was flat and it was assumed she had been abducted from the side of the road.

Authorities dropped and then revived the Eddington case after neighbors prodded them into action. After sheriff’s detectives looked into the case a second time, they unearthed Vickie Eddington’s skeleton and arrested Eddington, a lieutenant commander in the Navy.

Wednesday afternoon, a Superior Court jury began deliberating Eddington’s case after eight days of testimony.

The state is seeking a first-degree murder conviction against the 44-year-old Navy maintenance officer, including special circumstances that could lead to the death penalty because it is alleged that Eddington killed his wife for financial gain.

Eddington’s attorney has argued that the case against her client is circumstantial, particularly because there were no witnesses to the killing and no murder weapon was found.

“This is a whodunit based on circumstantial evidence,” said Milly Durovic, Eddington’s lawyer. “There is no direct evidence.”

But in the prosecution’s summation Wednesday, Eddington was described as someone who “did not want to be treated like the rest of us when we go through a divorce,” said Jeff Dusek, deputy district attorney.

“He did not want to have to divide his property, like the rest of us,” Dusek said. “He found an option, a solution to his predicament. That was murder.”

Eddington had known that his wife was seeking a divorce long before she disappeared, even remarking to a Navy buddy that he would “take a chain saw to the house, saw it in half, and her too if she got in the way,” before he would surrender it in a divorce settlement, Dusek said.

During the months leading up to Vickie Eddington’s disappearance, Eddington transferred money out of their joint checking account and opened a private account.

A May, 1987, divorce settlement showed that Vickie Eddington would get the house, the mortgage, the Volvo, a skip loader and other items. Leonard Eddington would get to keep his military retirement, Porsche, Chevy pickup, tools and a hot tub. The furniture would be split evenly. Leonard Eddington would also pay $300 to $400 per month in child custody for each of their three children.

The divorce settlement was never enacted. When Leonard Eddington filed for divorce in March, 1989, nearly two years after she was reported missing, he took everything except for half the furniture, court records show.

Leonard met a woman in March, 1987, whom he later promised to marry by December of that year, Dusek said.

Hours before Vickie Eddington disappeared, Leonard Eddington had lunch with the woman and appeared calm, as if “he had come up with a plan and was at peace with himself,” Dusek said. The night of Vickie Eddington’s disappearance, Leonard Eddington canceled a date with the woman, saying he had to help his brother fix a car in Imperial County.

Knowing that Vickie Eddington’s mother, Alice Vess, was due to arrive on July 31, 1987, Eddington planned the murder meticulously, making sure his oldest son was away at camp and delaying a six-month Navy assignment to carry out the slaying, Dusek said.

The night she disappeared and hours before she was to report to work as a nurse at Grossmont Hospital, Vickie Eddington took a nap, Dusek said, dressed in Levis and a long-sleeved blouse.

Leonard Eddington walked into the bedroom and hit her so hard with a weapon that the side of her skull caved in, he said.

“She was killed in her sleep,” Dusek said. “She never got out of that house alive. You’ve got to wonder if she ever saw it coming.”

Wrapped in bedsheets and blankets, some of which she and other family members had made as family heirlooms, Vickie Eddington was taken from her bed into the back yard, where her husband dug a deep hole, dropped her in, and covered it with a piece of chain link fence that was fastened in place, he said.

“Why put the chain-link fence over her?” Dusek asked. “One was to keep her from floating away because of erosion. The other was to keep the animals away. Keep the coyotes away. He had to protect her.”

In the weeks following the disappearance, three neighbors reported seeing Eddington on a bulldozer, smoothing out his property.

Eddington’s defense attorney, however, said during the trial that he had hired someone to cut a pad for his sister’s mobile home, but was never on a bulldozer himself.

Durovic suggested that the neighbors were lying because they were friendlier with Vickie Eddington than with her husband and took her side after she disappeared.

“Everybody remembers everything bad about the husband or bad about the wife,” she said. “It’s the nature of domestic disputes.”

Vickie Eddington, she said, was seen by a convenience store clerk on the night she disappeared, seeking change for a phone call and complaining about a flat tire in a car that had no jack. Vickie Eddington’s Volvo had tire-repair equipment missing the day it was found.

Durovic suggested that whomever picked up Vickie Eddington from the convenience store “was the last person to see her alive.”

But the convenience store clerk said during the trial that he wasn’t exactly sure who he had seen that night. A sheriff’s detective testified that Vickie Eddington had change in her car to make a phone call had she needed it.

Her car was found near her home with a flat tire that experts testified was punctured from the inside to create a slow leak, Dusek said. Leonard Eddington drove the car with a spare to the location where it was found, the prosecutor said, and then replaced it with the punctured tire.

“It was a phony, a setup,” Dusek said. “There are no scuff marks on the side.”

Had Eddington wanted to murder his wife, Durovic countered, he wouldn’t have gone to the trouble to rip the tire from the inside and drive it to the scene.

“What the prosecution has called a cover-up is what I call conduct consistent with innocence,” she said.

Part of Eddington’s cover-up, Dusek said, was to have someone order checks in Vickie’s name and to deposit money into her account after her disappearance to make it appear as if she were still alive.

“He thought he could beat the system and he did, for 4 1/2 years,” Dusek said. “He had to keep the ghost of Vickie Eddington alive. So long as she’s alive, someone’s seen her, there is some activity in her (bank) account, he wouldn’t be charged with murder.”

Eddington’s job self-evaluations for the military were full of superlatives, Dusek said, reading them to the jury:

“A superior aviation maintenance officer . . . Aggressive . . . Meticulous . . . Dedicated . . . Consummate maintenance aviation professional . . . Quickly has become a mainstay of the maintenance department . . . Tireless, dedicated, motivated . . . A top officer in ability to get the job done . . . Forthright in dealing with his peers . . . Has surpassed all expectations.”

The Navy officer “was apparently a pretty smart guy, but not as smart as he says he is here,” Dusek said. “This is how he views himself.”

But, rather than concoct an elaborate plan for how Vickie disappeared, countered Durovic, he could have taken his naval tour the day she was discovered missing and disappeared himself in another part of the world.

“If he had planned all this, why would he have stopped to look at (Vickie’s) car and then called the authorities?” Durovic said.