Santa Clarita / Antelope Valley : Jury Told of Defendant’s Role in Slaying

A prosecutor told jurors Thursday that a 23-year-old Lancaster man played a key role last year in the slaying of an ATM customer outside a local bank, a crime partly recorded by a security camera.

During her opening statement at the trial of Wesley Dale Harper, Deputy Dist. Atty. Pamela R. Rogers told the jury that Harper faces a first-degree murder charge in the March 5, 1993, slaying, even though another man is believed to have fired the fatal shot.

Harper, Rogers said, “was the person on that morning who drove in his father’s pickup truck around the Lancaster area, looking for banks, going through parking lots where ATMs were (located), looking for victims.”

She said Harper and his passenger, Christopher Arthur Mann, 20, spotted a man using an automated teller machine outside a Bank of America branch on Lancaster Boulevard. Mann then left the truck, asked the customer to light his cigarette, followed the customer back to his car and shot him in the head with a sawed-off rifle, the prosecutor said.

Mann dragged the ATM customer, Hans Christian Herzog, 44, of Lancaster, from the vehicle, she said, and then drove away in Herzog’s car as Harper left in the pickup.

Herzog had made a deposit just before he was shot, but had not withdrawn money from the bank machine, she said. His death received widespread attention because random slayings are rare in the Antelope Valley, authorities said.

Even though Mann, who will be tried separately at a later date, is accused of pulling the trigger, Harper still can be found guilty of committing first-degree murder during a robbery, Rogers said. She said jurors will hear evidence that in addition to driving Mann to the bank, Harper provided the weapon used in the slaying.

The prosecutor said jurors would see portions of the shooting incident that were captured by a bank security camera.

Harper’s attorney, Edward Consiglio, said he would postpone his opening statement until later in the Lancaster Superior Court trial. Harper wore an orange Los Angeles County Jail uniform as he sat next to his attorney Thursday, showing little emotion.

During a preliminary hearing last May, a sheriff’s investigator testified that Harper had told him that he and Mann had been using methamphetamine, a stimulant, before the shooting.

The first witness in Harper’s trial, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy William Gordon, described the scene when he arrived at the bank shortly after the shooting. “I saw a male adult, lying on his back, with a large pool of blood under his head,” he said.

Gordon testified that he covered Herzog, who was still breathing, with a blanket. Paramedics treated Herzog, then took him to Antelope Valley Hospital, where he was pronounced dead later that day.

X-rays showed that a bullet was lodged inside Herzog’s head, the prosecutor said.