Game of Dare Ends Between Detectives, Wealthy Suspect : Crime: Son of Fresno millionaire is charged with hiring hit men to kill his family. He maintains his innocence.

Dana Ewell was a rich kid with the ultimate alibi.

On Easter Sunday, 1992, as a gunman executed his father, mother and sister inside their adobe ranch house, he was 200 miles away, spending the holiday with his girlfriend and her FBI agent father in the Bay Area.

The 21-year-old Ewell, the only surviving heir to an $8-million fortune, offered a $50,000 reward for the killer’s capture. He vowed to make his father proud by taking over the family farms and airplane dealership.

But Fresno County Sheriff’s Detective John Souza didn’t buy the aggrieved son demeanor. He believed that the college student with high-roller tastes and a reported 180 IQ had masterminded the sensational triple murder, and Ewell was publicly named as the prime suspect.

So began a three-year game of dare between the wealthy, cocky Ewell and the local detective who shadowed him and his cohorts around the state in a hunt for elusive evidence. After an investigation that tested his marriage and ballooned his blood pressure, Souza arrested his man this month on three counts of first-degree murder.

The photograph on the front page of the local newspaper captured it all: the short, potbellied detective leading by the arm the lanky, hard-jawed Ewell, his pink buttoned-down Ralph Lauren Oxford still crisp after a night’s stay in jail.

When a reporter asked Ewell, now 23, if he had hired a triggerman to kill his father, Dale, 59, mother, Glee, 57, and sister, Tiffany, 24, he shot back the denial he had issued publicly over the course of the investigation: “Absolutely not. . . . This is ridiculous.”

The charges against Ewell, a computer whiz with a business degree from Santa Clara University, could carry the death penalty. The suspected motive: the millions he stood to gain from his parents’ estate.

Three of Ewell’s friends from the San Fernando Valley--all graduates of Chaminade College Preparatory, the prestigious Catholic high school in West Hills--were arrested within days as accomplices in the murders.

Joel P. Radovcich, 24, the suspected hit man, has been charged with three counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances. He and Ewell were roommates at Santa Clara.

Radovcich’s brother, Peter, 26, was also booked on three counts of first-degree murder but released without charges after he agreed to cooperate against his brother and Ewell. Authorities say Peter, a 1986 graduate of Chaminade and a plumber by trade, helped destroy and dump the murder weapon--a 9-millimeter semiautomatic assault rifle.

Jack Ponce, 26, a 1986 Chaminade graduate who has a history degree from UCLA, was charged on the same counts but he, too, was freed and is expected to become a government witness. Police say the murder weapon belonged to Ponce, who led sheriff’s detectives to the barrel of the assault rifle, which was buried in Southern California.

Among Fresno’s wealthy agribusiness families, Dale and Glee Ewell had been quiet about their fortune. In 1972, Dale took over a Piper airplane dealership from a Fresno man convicted of using the planes to smuggle tons of marijuana from Mexico. He invested shrewdly in farmland and real estate, building his wealth.

His wife, outgoing and friendly, did volunteer work and served on a state commission to evaluate judicial nominees. They lived with little fanfare, careful to guard their privacy.

A different portrait emerges of son Dana, in interviews with classmates, their parents, family members and longtime employees. They recall a smart but nerdy kid who had a tough time making friends. At San Joaquin Memorial, a Catholic high school, his attempts to draw people close to him were described as sad.

“Dana was a very bright kid, and like a lot of bright kids he had a hard time finding his place in the high school world,” said the mother of one of Ewell’s few friends. “He was insecure and tried to buy his friends.”

His parents, modest when it came to themselves, indulged Dana with the best computer and stereo equipment and an $800 a month allowance. They bought him a new Mercedes 190 for his graduation.

“Dana wrecked the car on the coast and his father didn’t want anyone to know,” said Bob Pursell, who worked for Dale Ewell at the Western Piper dealership in Fresno. “So he went out and bought him a brand new one that was identical.”

The younger Ewell took on the exaggerated persona of a young man on the move. He became obsessed with money. His heroes were Michael Milken, the convicted junk bond king, and Joe Hunt’s Billionaire Boys Club, whose efforts to make a fortune in the commodities market ended in murder convictions.

Ewell hung a framed photo of Milken in his dormitory room and became enamored of Hunt after watching a TV movie on the case. Investigators say he wrote Hunt in prison and boasted that he was going to try to break him out.

At Santa Clara University, Ewell credited himself with his father’s lengthy accomplishments. He dressed in elegant suits and told people he sold mutual funds and built a bankrupt airplane dealership into a $4-million windfall.

Ewell began dating Monica Zent, whose father, John, was an FBI agent based in San Jose. The young couple decided that Easter weekend, 1992, would be a perfect opportunity for their families to get together.

Glee Ewell and daughter Tiffany, a graduate student at Cal State Fresno, drove to the family beach house near Watsonville. Dale Ewell, an expert pilot, insisted on flying there alone--ever fearful that a plane or car crash would kill the whole family.

The Zents drove over from the Bay Area town of Morgan Hill and spent Saturday with the Ewells. Glee Ewell and Tiffany drove back to Fresno early Sunday; Dale Ewell was close behind in his plane. Dana spent the day in Morgan Hill with the Zents.

Already, sheriff’s investigators contend, the triggerman had gained access to the house and was lying in wait.

There was no sign of forced entry. Glee and Tiffany were gunned down first, inside the house. Dale Ewell, a tall beefy man, arrived a short time later and was shot from behind.

Rumors swirled in Fresno about drug smugglers and Filipino mobsters. At least one rumor was nurtured by Dana Ewell, who let slip to the pastor at the memorial service that his mother had worked for the CIA in Argentina. The pastor speculated to the press that the murders might have been related to foreign intrigue. Glee Ewell did work for the CIA, but as a Spanish translator in the 1950s.

Ewell’s behavior confounded family and friends. Receiving the line of mourners, he stopped suddenly to admire a diamond ring on the finger of his father’s former secretary.

“He said, ‘Oh my God! Who got you that rock?’ ” the secretary recalled. “Then he turned over my hand to admire it some more. I was embarrassed for him. It was so odd.”

During the ensuing months he took helicopter flying lessons and bought a $130,000 airplane. A classified ad announced the sale of his mother’s fur. “Call Dana Ewell,” it read.

Fresno sheriff’s investigators focused on Ewell and Joel Radovcich, who had dropped out of school and returned to West Hills. Souza and his partner, Ernie Burke, followed Ewell and Radovcich in Fresno, Santa Clara and the San Fernando Valley. Undercover detectives at phone booths in Northern and Southern California listened as Ewell and Radovcich discussed strategy, authorities said.

In one conversation, according to detectives, Radovcich seemed frustrated with Ewell’s failure to make good on money allegedly owed him.

“I don’t want . . . stock options. One-quarter million, and I want it now. I want to go around the world,” Radovcich is alleged to have said in a raised voice.

Ewell seemed to think of the whole thing as a game, according to employees of his father’s airplane dealership. He would show up at the dealership near the Fresno Air Terminal and derisively refer to Souza and Burke as “Mutt and Jeff” and the “Bert and Ernie” team.

“He thought we were a bunch of dummies,” said one sheriff’s official. “It was a game to beat the cops.”

Throughout the investigation, Ewell maintained his innocence in public statements. He offered a $50,000 reward for the arrest of the killer even as he hired a criminal defense attorney.

In November, 1992, after detectives publicly confirmed that Ewell was the prime suspect, the Fresno Bee printed an unusual letter to the editor from FBI Agent Zent. He proclaimed Dana Ewell’s innocence and scolded sheriff’s investigators. “Perhaps it isn’t apparent, but Dana is a victim,” Zent wrote.

Souza said the letter stuck in his craw. He hung a copy beside his desk. Last week, after the barrel of the gun was recovered and two of the defendants agreed to cooperate, the veteran detective broke his silence only long enough to credit his wife, his superiors and Zent’s letter for motivating him.

Zent has declined comment. For Ewell, the charges could not have come at a more inopportune time. This week, he was going to collect the first big chunk, $1.5 million in cash and property, of his parents’ estate. On Monday, arraignment of Ewell and Radovcich was postponed until April 3 while the estate goes through probate.