Fugitive in ’82 Slaying Jailed After Asia Stay

A former sailmaker from Laguna Beach was arrested Tuesday when he stepped off a plane from the Philippines, after being in hiding for more than a decade since he was charged with killing a Westminster councilman’s brother, FBI and sheriff’s officials said.

Kelly Russell Daniels, 44, will be arraigned today on charges of fatally shooting Barclay Hodges at a restaurant bar at John Wayne Airport, FBI Agent Gary Morley said. Morley declined to say how agents traced Daniels to an island in Southeast Asia, where the cooperating Philippines government arrested him and put him on a plane to Los Angeles International Airport.

“Sometimes it takes a short time to bring someone in. In this case, he was able to hide out for quite a while,” Sheriff’s Lt. Dan Martini said.

Witnesses to the shooting told investigators that Daniels, Hodges and a third man had been sitting at a corner table in the bar for about six hours in June, 1982, when shots were fired, scattering panicked customers.

Sheriff’s deputies from the nearby security station found Hodges with a bullet wound in his head and a small-caliber handgun nearby.

Daniels, a self-employed sailmaker, was arrested at the scene. The third man fled, but was later found and discounted as a suspect.

Daniels pleaded not guilty and was released on $75,000 bail. When he didn’t appear at his preliminary hearing, U.S. Magistrate Ronald W. Rose issued a felony arrest warrant, officials said.

*

On Tuesday, FBI officials and a deputy from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department arrested him without incident on a federal charge of unlawful flight to avoid prosecution, Martini said.

Martini would not comment on the motive for the shooting, saying the investigation was now reopened.

Hodges, then 40 and facing charges of peddling cocaine, was the brother of Guinn (Gil) Hodges, then 38, who had been elected to the Westminster City Council in 1977.

A year after Barclay Hodges was killed, Gil Hodges was convicted of falsely verifying information submitted to a federally insured lending institution. Hodges resigned from his Westminster City Council seat when he was sentenced to three months in jail.

He did not serve the time, pending his appeal, and in 1985 a federal appeals court overturned the conviction. Hodges did not return to public office.

During the trial, Gil Hodges testified that he had worked in early 1982 as a clerk and courier at a real estate company he had helped his older brother, Barclay, establish.

Prosecutors alleged during the trial that the elder Hodges had set up the real estate business to launder profits from cocaine sales.

Daniels was being held in Orange County Jail in lieu of $500,000 bail. His arraignment will be in Orange County Superior Court.