Jury to Weigh High-Tech Evidence in Murder Case : Courts: A security guard is accused of strangling a woman at her new townhome. The findings of a DNA test and special fingerprinting process are debated in closing arguments.

Either the Torrance Police Department conducted a brilliant technical investigation that bagged a murderer, or the department botched the case so badly that an innocent man is on trial.

Now, it’s up to a jury to decide.

Closing arguments concluded Friday in the sharply contested death penalty trial of Keith Campbell, 27, a former Plaza del Amo security guard accused of trying to rape and then strangling local golf star Tracy Morrigan as she spent her first night in her new townhome on May 30, 1989.

Prosecutors argue that hi-tech sleuthing--including a type of DNA evidence never before admitted in a Los Angeles County case--prove that Campbell, who was assigned to guard Morrigan’s complex that night, instead broke into her apartment and attacked her.

Campbell’s attorneys have characterized the unusual scientific evidence as a smoke screen intended to mask a series of mistakes made by the detectives and investigators assigned to the case.

“They want to convict my client on this level of terrible police work,” defense attorney Leslie Abramson told jurors during her closing statements Friday. “At the very least it should make you nervous. It should make you worry.”

The case has featured plenty of criminal science and few witnesses, attorneys on both sides acknowledge.

Much of Deputy Dist. Atty. Bob Martin’s case relies on microscopic evidence from two sources. The first is a faint palm print on a second-floor windowsill that was analyzed using special chemicals and a mobile laser unit. And the second is replicated DNA gathered from the follicles of three pubic hairs found at the crime scene.

Combined with four of Campbell’s fingerprints found on a bent window screen in Morrigan’s condominium, the scientific evidence has spawned two sharply different theories about what happened the night Morrigan died.

According to Martin’s closing statements to jurors, Campbell thought Morrigan was not scheduled to move in for another few days and decided to burglarize her newly furnished townhouse while she wasn’t there. The guard propped a ladder against Morrigan’s unit some time around midnight, climbed up, pried a screen from her upstairs window and slipped inside, Martin said.

Once inside, Campbell surprised Morrigan, struggled with her, beat her and strangled her, possibly with the 26-year-old woman’s own bra, the deputy district attorney said.

When questioned by detectives in the days and months following Morrigan’s death, Campbell “insisted again and again that he had never been inside that lady’s apartment,” Martin said. “If that’s so, how did his fingerprints, his palm print and his pubic hairs get there?

“Everything . . . is open to some possible or imaginary doubt,” Martin told jurors. “But (I) believe that the evidence you have heard is absolutely sufficient and clearly indicative beyond any doubt . . . that Keith Campbell is the murderer of Tracy Morrigan.”

Defense attorney Abramson, warning jurors that the evidence is not nearly so clear, theorized that an unknown burglar entered through the townhome’s unlocked ground-floor patio door and attacked Morrigan, who grew up on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

Abramson scoffed at the prosecution’s second-floor window theory.

“You’re supposed to believe that my client somehow got a phantom ladder to get in a 15-foot window in the dead of night, next to a halogen light lighting the whole alleyway,” she told jurors. “He was balancing precariously to get his right fingerprints on the left side of that screen . . . and used one single palm to levitate himself into that room.”

The palm print, she said, is so blurry and dim that there is no certainty that it is Campbell’s. And DNA experts, using a relatively new process called polymerase chain reaction testing, could conclude only that some of the hairs found on and around Morrigan’s body were genetically similar to Campbell’s.

But because of the limited genetic material that can be measured, the tests provide little more certainty about who the perpetrator might be than does standard blood typing. Experts believe Campbell’s DNA type may be found in roughly 17% of the general population, or about one in six people worldwide.

“Surely a 17% margin of error creates reasonable doubt,” Abramson argued. In addition, she charged, investigators made a number of errors in handling the case.

Too many people were allowed into the crime scene before Morrigan’s body was removed and the location vacuumed for microscopic evidence, including the pubic hairs used to create the DNA evidence against Campbell, she said.

A coroner’s investigator called to the scene could not determine an exact time of death because the thermometer he would have used to measure Morrigan’s body temperature was broken and the county had not yet replaced it.

When Torrance detectives asked for fingerprint identification cards for security guards who worked at the complex, the security company accidentally submitted the wrong card for Campbell. Detectives did not notice the error for nearly five months.

Once the error was corrected and Campbell’s fingerprints were matched to those found on a bent window screen at the crime scene, Campbell was arrested. But it wasn’t until after his arrest that detectives conducted a complex laser analysis of the palm print on the windowsill.

Then, when defense attorneys demanded access to the townhouse to examine the palm print themselves, police revealed that they had painted over the site after completing their analysis.

The laser process slowly destroyed the print itself, Martin explained, but the object was not to preserve it. “The object,” he said, “is to preserve the print in photographs as part of the evidence in this case.”

Abramson argued that Campbell may have handled the window screen, leaving his fingerprints, while it was being stored in a garage before its installation. She theorized that the palm print, if his, was placed there weeks before Morrigan’s death as Campbell explored unoccupied units.

Martin called Abramson’s theory “non-evidence and inelegant diversions devoid of facts.”

“So far she has found a reason to disbelieve almost every witness in the case,” he said. “It reminds me of the mother who goes to the parade and says, ‘Look, everybody’s out of step except Willie.’ ”

Jurors are scheduled to begin their deliberations Monday in Norwalk Superior Court.