Slain Nurse Was Kneeling When Shot, Expert Testifies

Kellie O’Sullivan never had a chance to put up a fight, a ballistics expert testified Tuesday, saying the Westlake nurse was on her knees and under a leafy, low-slung tree limb in the Santa Monica Mountains when she was fatally shot.

Using a mannequin dressed in the clothes O’Sullivan was wearing when she was killed, Paul Dougherty also showed the Ventura County jury how the woman apparently was kneeling when the first shot was fired into her chest.

As she fell forward, two more shots were pumped into her back, Dougherty said.

When her partly decomposed body was discovered 12 days later, Dougherty said, O’Sullivan still was wearing her sunglasses and carrying her purse.

With murder defendant Mark Scott Thornton only a few feet away from the mannequin, which was propped up on the prosecution table, Dougherty used the model to re-enact the murder before the riveted jury.

The defense had asked to keep the demonstration out of the trial, but Superior Court Judge Charles R. McGrath allowed it.

Evidence suggests the nurse was shot in the same spot where her body was found, Dougherty testified. Two other witnesses testified Tuesday that they found the body off Mulholland Drive under some large tree limbs that resembled a cave.

Based on the angle of the shots that killed O’Sullivan and the small size of the area where her body was found, Dougherty said he concluded that she could not have been standing at the time of her death.

“I believe she was on her knees, and that’s because of the physical limitations of the site,” he testified.

In response to questions from Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael K. Frawley, Dougherty also said he concluded that O’Sullivan was unable to put up a struggle before dying. Prosecutors have said that she was caught off guard and never expected her assailant to shoot her.

Tuesday’s testimony appeared to be some of the most damaging to the Thornton defense. Thornton, 20, is charged in a multiple-count indictment with murder under special circumstances--kidnaping and robbery--that could send him to the gas chamber if he is convicted.

Prosecutors say he kidnaped O’Sullivan from outside a Thousand Oaks pet store and took her to the mountains, where she was shot. They say Thornton then used her truck to kidnap his girlfriend and go on a five-day sojourn to Northern California and Reno, where he was eventually arrested.

Dougherty testified that the three bullets extracted from O’Sullivan’s body matched a .38-caliber revolver Thornton pointed at police officers during his arrest.

After spending most of the first two weeks of the trial establishing a motive for the killing, prosecutors this week have shifted their focus to the slaying of the 33-year-old nurse.

In other testimony Tuesday, the two people who discovered O’Sullivan’s body described for the jury how they came to find it.

Veterinarian Richard Stevens and Tricia Beers, one of his employees, said they were among the more than 200 volunteers who combed the Thousand Oaks area in the days after O’Sullivan disappeared.

On the morning of Sept. 26, they testified, they were searching an area off Mulholland Drive because it seemed probable that someone could reach it with a four-wheel-drive truck without being detected.

Beers said she quickly realized that she might have stumbled onto the body. “I smelled something dead,” she remembered. “I was hoping it was a deer, or something.”

The smell was coming from the thick foliage beneath a large tree in the 3100 block of Mulholland. Stevens got on his hands and knees and crawled under the tree limbs, he testified.

“Oh my God! Oh my God!” the veterinarian said he screamed. Stevens said he emerged from the cave-like site and grabbed Beers. “It’s her!”

Stevens said the sight and smell left him disoriented. He told the jury: “Where Kellie’s body was, I was approximately a body’s length away.”

Also Tuesday, the first police officers who arrived on the scene described how they cordoned off the area and made certain that evidence was preserved.

Some of the jurors frowned in apparent repulsion when a Los Angeles County coroner’s investigator described the difficulty in removing a body that had been exposed to the elements for 12 days.

Defense attorneys have been worried that such testimony could make jurors less sympathetic toward the defendant. Investigator Mitchell Sigal also said O’Sullivan had been shot at the crime scene, testifying that no scuff marks were found on her shoes to indicate that her body had been dragged to the area where it was discovered.