Third Trial Ordered for Ex-Marine in Coin Shop Killings : Courts: After an overturned conviction and a hung jury, Thomas R. Merrill will again be tried for the murder of two people during a 1989 holdup at a Newport Beach store.

A judge Wednesday cleared the way for a third murder trial of former Marine Thomas R. Merrill, accused of killing two people during a robbery at a Newport Beach coin store in 1989.

Orange County Superior Court Judge Everett W. Dickey rejected a defense request that he dismiss the murder charges, after Merrill’s second trial ended in May with a hung jury.

Dickey said the crime was serious enough that prosecutors deserve another chance to persuade a jury that Merrill shot the shop owner and killed the owner’s wife and a friend during the March, 1989, holdup. The jury in the second trial deadlocked, 7 to 5, in favor of conviction.

“I have seen situations . . . where the prosecution was able to succeed in a retrial where the evidence was not sufficient” to win a conviction in a prior trial, Dickey said.

“This kind of case is about as serious as a case can get,” he said.

Dickey set a trial date of Aug. 28.

Urging Dickey to dismiss the charges, Merrill’s lawyer said that shop owner William D. King would again testify that Merrill was not present when he was wounded and his wife, Renee King, and a friend, Clyde Oatts, were slain.

William King opposes trying Merrill again, said defense attorney John D. Barnett.

“He was there. He lost his wife, and he lost his eye,” Barnett said during the hearing. “He of all people has a right to have justice done. . . . He says Tom Merrill is innocent.”

Merrill, 30, received the news in court without expression.

His mother, Sara Merrill, reacted angrily to news that her son will face a third trial but vowed to prevail.

“We’ll face it a fourth time, a fifth--however many they want to put on us,” Sara Merrill said from her home in Baltimore. “We have an innocent man here, and we are going to prove that.”

The prosecutor in the second trial predicted that the new trial would last about a month and said that there is no new evidence.

“We just feel there is a reasonable probability of a verdict,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Rick King, who will also prosecute the third trial, after the hearing. “The judge agreed with us. We are going to be gearing up and will be ready.”

Merrill’s first trial ended in July, 1991, with a conviction. Also convicted at that trial was fellow Marine Eric J. Wick. Merrill, whom prosecutors accused of being the actual gunman, was sentenced to two life sentences without the possibility of parole. Wick was sentenced to 37 years to life in prison.

But Merrill’s conviction was overturned after new defense lawyers argued that the original prosecutor had illegally withheld information that pointed to Merrill’s innocence and that the first defense lawyer had made serious mistakes in the case.

During the second trial, Wick, the son of an FBI agent, testified for the first time that he had accompanied Merrill to the store near John Wayne Airport but that it was Merrill who had fired the shots.

But shop owner William King testified that Merrill was not even in the store and said that he had never seen him before. King said he was talking to Wick when he was shot, though he said he never saw Wick holding the gun.

Prosecutors said the wounded King told police on the way to the hospital that “Tom shot me” and was not a reliable witness on the earlier events because of the trauma. The defense said the injuries made William King’s statement about “Tom” equally unreliable.