Man’s Efforts Help Win Indictment in Sister’s Death : Crime: Perseverance and money are key in case against man with a history of hurting women, children.

If it were not for her brother’s money, Stephanie Bouck’s husband might never have been indicted for her 1987 murder.

But just as O. J. Simpson’s fortune is financing his high-powered defense, so builder Jack Shine’s money helped bring about the prosecution of Guy Dean Bouck, a 45-year-old Vietnam veteran with a well-documented, 20-year history of hurting women and children.

The Encino-based real-estate developer spent $850,000 on a complex probate case that one lawyer described as “the civil equivalent of a murder prosecution.” The lengthy court battle not only blocked Bouck’s claims to his wife’s estate, but helped persuade prosecutors to reconsider criminal charges against a man who had drawn the attention of law enforcement authorities before but spent little time in prison.

“I don’t think anyone like that should be allowed to go free when he killed somebody,” Shine said, according to a grand jury transcript made public last week.

Other public records show that Bouck’s history of domestic violence dates to 1971, when he was investigated for the beating death of his stepson just a few months after he returned from Vietnam.

In 1977, in Los Angeles, the former Army paratrooper was convicted of abusing a girlfriend’s daughter, but the charge was withdrawn when he completed probation and was granted a pardon. A decade later, he was arrested for Stephanie Bouck’s fatal shooting in their Canyon Country home, but prosecutors declined to file charges, citing lack of evidence.

Then, in 1990, two weeks before his wife’s complex probate case was to begin, Bouck raped his alibi witness. He was convicted, and is serving a 13-year prison sentence.

And last month, through a change of heart by the alibi witness and the perseverance of Stephanie Bouck’s family, Bouck was formally charged with murdering his wife, who allegedly was tortured, forced to beg for her life and shot four times--the final two described by a judge as “coup de graces” shots to the head.

His lawyer, Deputy Public Defender Charles Klum, said it was difficult to comment on the criminal case because it was in its “earliest stage.” But he did call it a highly circumstantial case and said, “You can’t convict somebody just because you suspect they are violent or evil.”

A review of thousands of pages of court records shows that the criminal justice system gave Bouck every benefit of the doubt when investigating and prosecuting abuse allegations involving 4-year-old Michael Kelley and a 2-year-old Los Angeles County girl.

But Stephanie Bouck’s family went to extraordinary lengths to assure that Bouck would be tried for her slaying.

Newly released grand jury transcripts disclosed last week that Shine financed the probate battle waged by his niece Deborah Carll, who found her mother’s body after she failed to keep a family appointment.

Shine, a generous supporter of the arts and local political figures and builder of the American Beauty housing developments in the Santa Clarita Valley, declined to comment.

But in January he told a grand jury in Los Angeles why he spent more than four times the value of his sister’s estate.

“I hired counsel and told him to do everything possible legally to see that (Bouck) didn’t get his hands on a penny,” Shine testified. “We were told that in order to ultimately get him convicted and do the right thing, we would have to get, by a preponderance of the evidence, a conviction for murder.”

Not everyone involved in the case is comfortable with what might appear to be another example of the best justice money can buy. A lawyer who defended Bouck, Yvonne Renfrew of Santa Monica, said she still is troubled by what “in essence was a private murder prosecution.”

The Shine family’s “concerted effort,” Renfrew said, led to a “result that was wrong.”

“They couldn’t get a criminal prosecution going, for the simple reason there was no evidence,” Renfrew said. “The evidence was invented out of whole cloth. It was all bubbles and smoke and mirrors.”

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Richard C. Hubbell and an appellate court viewed the matter differently.

In April, 1994, following a three-week civil trial, Hubbell found by “a preponderance of the evidence” that Bouck had killed his wife, and barred him from inheriting her estate. In issuing his decision, Hubbell accepted the family’s citing of the state “slayer’s statute,” which bars killers from profiting from their crimes.

A preponderance of the evidence, often described in layman’s terms as a tipping of the scales, is the civil standard of proof--and a much smaller hurdle to leap than the criminal standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

The 2nd District Court of Appeal upheld Hubbell’s decision.

Shine’s money not only allowed his niece to successfully challenge Bouck’s claim to her mother’s estate, it also laid the groundwork for the criminal prosecution.

New evidence uncovered by the civil case--including inconsistent statements and a new estimate of the time of death--eventually helped the family prod the district attorney’s office to take a second look at an 8-year-old slaying that prosecutors initially rejected as unwinnable.

“The family brought the matter to the attention of this office,” said Head Deputy Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, who runs the San Fernando office and said his superiors downtown asked him to look into the Bouck case.

But meanwhile, Cooley said, another prosecutor was developing information--from a rape victim. Bouck’s alibi witness, a girlfriend, alleged he restrained her and raped her in January, 1990--just two weeks before the probate trial was set to begin.

Once the civil case was decided, prosecutors had a wealth of records, statements and testimony, including a deposition from Bouck that conflicted with his earlier versions of the events surrounding his wife’s death.

They also learned that the coroner had miscalculated the time of death, overlooking early signs of decomposition--a tip-off that Stephanie Bouck had died much earlier than investigators initially thought and that her husband’s alibi could be refuted.

But the alibi already had weakened when the rape led the witness to switch sides.

Testifying before a Los Angeles County grand jury in January, the woman asserted that Bouck held her at gunpoint, confessed to her that he had killed his wife, and threatened to kill her and her children if she ever told his secret.

In late January, eight years after Stephanie Bouck was shot to death, a grand jury in Los Angeles indicted her husband for murder, alleging three special circumstances that could bring the death penalty.

The grand jury charged that Bouck killed his wife for financial gain--an $80,000 insurance policy and a house worth $180,000; that he laid in wait for her, surprising her with a gun hidden under a bed pillow, and that he tortured her, by restraining her and bending her thumbs back until her hands were deeply bruised.

John Quisenberry, the Century City lawyer who assumed the role of a prosecutor in the civil case, said Shine was “not looking for money” when he kept the pressure on.

“There’s no question in my mind that he went the extra mile for his sister,” Quisenberry said. “He would not give up. There were many times during the case when an ordinary person would have given up.”

The civil case also lays bare Bouck’s troubling past, how his repeated acts of violence went virtually unpunished, and his pleas for help unheeded. Although the grand jury investigating him for murder never heard of his record, it is described in detail in the probate case’s voluminous court files.

Bouck returned from Vietnam Oct. 19, 1970. Within three months he was married and had a 4-year-old stepson. Within five months, he was in trouble with the law for abusing the boy, whom everyone called “Mikey.”

On March 28, 1971, in Fort Carson, Colo., Michael Gennaro Kelley was hospitalized with severe bruises, including a mark on his cheek shaped like a palm-print. His entire body--including his genitals--bore lash marks. Bouck admitted spanking the boy with a belt he had folded in two.

According to one police report, Bouck “related that maybe he had spanked Mike too hard for his age. That it didn’t seem hard to him but that maybe it would to Mike.”

A board of Army doctors determined that Michael was an abused child, and placed him in the custody of his maternal grandmother, who lived in North Hollywood. Bouck was criminally charged with child abuse on April 1, 1971, but the case was never pursued and he was neither convicted nor acquitted, later probation reports show.

Several years later, the chief of police in Colorado Springs wrote Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies investigating the 2-year-old girl’s case: “. . . Same was turned to the District Attorney’s office and they felt subject should be handled though the military authorities to receive mental help for his problem. It is apparent no such help was received.”

Nor was there anything to stop the couple from reclaiming Michael from his grandmother, which they did in late August, 1971.

Within a week, Michael was in a coma. Within two weeks, he was dead. An autopsy showed he died of a skull fracture and subdural hematoma, common injuries in child abuse cases.

Bouck told authorities Michael had run into a table, and later fell from a stool in the bathroom.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Jeffrey C. Jonas and other attorneys who have viewed the records suspect Bouck may have won the sympathy of military doctors. They cite one investigative report, which quotes an Army physician praising the moral character of paratroopers, the unit to which Bouck was assigned.

The Colorado Springs police chief later wrote in the same letter that “Our case No. 91197, Homicide (child abuse) was given to the Grand Jury for action against both parents. However, due to conflicting stories given by the Army Medical Staff, the Grand Jury felt there was not sufficient evidence to warrant an indictment.”

Bouck subsequently received an honorable discharge from the Army, according to court records. By 1976, he had returned to Southern California, where he had grown up.

Soon after, he moved in with a woman in Downey who had a 2-year-old daughter. Police reports and other records in that case show that the child received medical treatment nine times and was hospitalized twice during the two months Bouck lived with her mother.

On Aug. 25, 1976, the girl was admitted to a hospital in Norwalk after she failed to wake up from a nap. She had thumb-size bruises on both cheeks, bruises under both eyes and swelling on both sides of her head. She also had bruises on her legs.

Bouck told police she had fallen from a swing at the park that day, then later added that she fell and hit her head on a stereo. But there had been a host of other mishaps before, involving a child who seemed to become accident-prone after Bouck moved in.

He explained other injuries, saying the girl bumped her head on a merry-go-round at a shopping center and fell out of bed. He said he had once stepped on her accidentally, and that another time he had accidentally pulled her leg too hard when she squirmed in her car seat.

On Aug. 5, 1976, her mother reported the girl missing; she was found a few hours later sitting inside a cardboard box in a church parking lot. She was wet, soiled, crying and wearing a cast on her left leg.

The child told police what had happened to her--”Guy took me out,” she said.

Bouck eventually admitted to police that he struck the child with karate-like blows when she rejected his attention. He also admitted he directed the blows at existing bruises so new ones wouldn’t appear.

In March, 1977, Bouck pleaded guilty to a single count of child abuse and received a five-year suspended sentence. He was placed on probation and ordered to spend 90 days at a state prison diagnostic center.

In a letter to a judge while his case was pending, Bouck admitted beating Michael Kelley and promised to enter a Veteran’s Administration Hospital for treatment (although it is not clear from court records whether he ever did). Facing state prison for the first time, he was remorseful.

“You see, I am not a bad person,” Bouck wrote. “I am just a person who needs a little help . . . I also love children. I can be with an unhappy child, and in a minimum of time that child will be happy. That’s why I don’t understand what’s happening. I know I couldn’t have hurt this child knowingly because that just isn’t my nature. It isn’t me.”

He explained what happened in Colorado:

“You see, I had married into a ready-made family. I never had to punish a child before. And a couple of times I got carried away with the spankings. I loved my stepson . . .

“I was proud of that boy and I hate it, thinking that it might have been something I did to him to cause his death. I often think of the things that I did to him and I would cry over it.”

Bouck promised that once released from custody, “I give my word that I’ll never be in this kind of trouble or any other again.”

In 1983, he won a pardon, and the charge was dismissed.

When Stephanie Bouck was shot to death during the first weekend of 1987, nearly everyone who knew her immediately suspected Bouck, her fourth husband.

After eight years of marriage, the couple was having problems, friends told the grand jury. “Stevie,” as Stephanie Bouck was known, planned to divorce him but seemed fearful of Bouck’s explosive temper, they said. At age 46, the petite accountant also was reluctant to acknowledge that her fourth marriage was a failure.

The family had never liked him.

“He was sullen. He was odd. He was strange. He drank a lot,” his mother-in-law told the grand jury.

Bouck became drunk at an American Beauty Christmas party just weeks before his wife’s death, and openly threatened members of her family, one of her friends told the grand jury. He also had threatened to blow up the couple’s home if Stephanie Bouck retained ownership after their divorce, and it was clear the couple was increasingly estranged, the same friend testified.

“He was not coming home at night. He was drinking heavily,” Stephanie Bouck’s confidante told the grand jury. “She said it just wasn’t going to work.”

Although she was anxious to end her relationship with Bouck, she was also loathe to divorce for the fourth time and feared the violence of Bouck’s reaction as well as his disapproval of her friends and family, the woman testified.

“Her other marriages were less than two years in length. And she says, ‘I just can’t have people saying things about me, that I have made another mistake.’ ”

The friend also testified that Stephanie Bouck had told her: “I have to do this right. I can’t make him mad. I can’t risk making him mad.”

Initially, the criminal investigation of Bouck led nowhere.

Sheriff’s deputies, including the two homicide detectives who built the case against the “Night Stalker,” arrested Bouck Jan. 4, 1987--the day after Stephanie Bouck’s nightgown-clad body was found sprawled on her bed.

But Bouck was released 48 hours later when the district attorney’s office declined to file charges. No murder weapon had been found, and Bouck seemed to have an iron-clad alibi: the girlfriend with whom he had been having an affair while married to Stephanie Bouck.

Soon after, Bouck filed his claim to Stephanie Bouck’s life insurance policy. But Carll, her daughter and the executor of her estate, moved to block his claim and with her uncle’s help started the proceedings that led to Hubbell’s ruling. All the while, Bouck remained free, continued to work as a tire store manager, and dated his alibi witness.

But as the pressure of the civil case mounted, so did his girlfriend’s doubts. Jonas, the prosecutor, told the grand jury that when Bouck raped her, he had intended to intimidate her, or perhaps even kill her, to ensure her silence.

The woman explained her evolution from defender to accuser when she addressed the Superior Court judge who sentenced Bouck for her rape in December, 1990:

“The faces of the victims vary, however, the actions and the words and the attitudes of the perpetrator are the same,” the former alibi witness said. “Michael Kelley and Stephanie Bouck are dead. (The other women and children) and I are alive. All have experienced the wrath of Guy Bouck and all of us live in terror that one day he will finish the job.”