Business Partners Convicted of Conspiracy in ’88 Slaying : Courts: Jurors are unable to decide who killed the man whose corpse was used to collect insurance money.

Two business partners were convicted Tuesday of conspiring to commit murder in a $1.5-million insurance swindle, but jurors were unable to decide who actually killed the man whose corpse was used to collect the proceeds.

After 17 days of deliberations, the Los Angeles Superior Court jury found Melvin Eugene Hanson and John Barrett Hawkins guilty of conspiracy to murder, insurance fraud and grand theft in the 1988 crime. Judge Paul Flynn ordered jurors to continue deliberations on the murder count.

Hanson, 53, a mustachioed, balding man with gray hair, stared ahead without expression as the six guilty verdicts were read, while Hawkins, 32, with brown, slicked-back hair, shook his head while gazing at the jury.

Lawyers for both sides declined to comment. Verdicts on the remaining counts will conclude a strange and complicated case that started when Hawkins and Hanson tried to take cash out of their athletic clothes business in Ohio by staging Hanson’s death with the help of a Glendale doctor.

On this much the prosecution and the defense agreed: The body found seven years ago in a Glendale doctor’s office was not that of Hanson, also known as Wolfgang Eugene von Snowden.

The lawyers also agreed that a key player in the scam was Richard Pryde Boggs, a Harvard-educated, Rolls-Royce-driving neurosurgeon now serving a life prison sentence for his 1990 murder conviction in the case.

Judging by their verdicts, the jurors had few problems accepting that scenario.

But now the panel appears stuck on the trial’s central issue: whether the corpse found on the doctor’s examining table on April 16, 1988, got there via a slaying or through mere cadaver-snatching.

A spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office said the penalty for conspiracy to murder is 25 years to life in prison. Prosecutors added special circumstances to the murder counts, allowing them to seek the death penalty.

But Hawkins was arrested in Sardinia after a long manhunt, and Italian authorities refused to extradite him unless U. S. officials agreed not to seek the death penalty.

During the trial, Deputy Dist. Atty. Albert H. MacKenzie contended that Hawkins and Hanson--along with Boggs--had committed “nearly the perfect crime.” The prosecutor argued that the two business partners planned the insurance scam, then recruited Boggs, who because of his medical expertise “had the ability to kill someone and make it appear as if it was a natural death.”

Indeed, the Los Angeles County coroner initially listed the cause of death as a heart ailment. Hawkins, “playing the part of the bereaved business partner,” the prosecutor said, claimed the body, identified it as Hanson’s, had it cremated and scattered the ashes at sea.

That nearly was the end of the story. But several weeks later, an insurance company investigator discovered that the fingerprint taken from the body did not match Hanson’s prints on file with the Department of Motor Vehicles.

By then, however, Hawkins already had collected $1.5 million in insurance benefits and disappeared.

The cause of death was revised to suffocation, and it was listed as a homicide, touching off a lengthy investigation and international manhunt.

Just what caused 32-year-old Ellis Henry Greene to die would become the central dispute of two murder trials five years apart.

In the first trial--in July, 1990--Boggs, the Harvard-educated neurologist, was convicted of murder and insurance fraud. He is serving a life prison sentence at the state medical prison in Vacaville. During his trial, he denied killing anyone but admitted participating in the body-swapping scheme, without stating where he had obtained the corpse. Boggs insisted he did so only after Hanson had threatened to expose his secret gay lifestyle.

The second trial--for the co-conspirators--was delayed in part by a three-year international manhunt for Hawkins, a former Studio 54 bartender police dubbed “the Chameleon,” because of his ability to change his appearance. Hawkins passed through at least nine countries before being arrested in August, 1991, aboard his fire-engine-red catamaran, the Carpe Diem, near the Italian island of Sardinia.

Hanson, the scars still fresh from a face-lift and hair transplant, earlier had been arrested in Texas as he stepped off a plane from Acapulco.

The second time around, the once-sensational case played out before a nearly empty courtroom--the same Downtown courtroom that had been packed for Boggs’ trial.

Boggs did not testify against Hawkins and Hanson, though prosecutors tried to persuade him to cooperate during a prison visit shortly before the trial began. Nor did Boggs rally to the aid of the defense.

Despite the stranger-than-fiction body of facts and a cast of characters that even Aaron Spelling might consider over-the-top, much of the testimony was dry as dust, focusing on elaborate paper trails and arcane medical terminology.

Prosecutor MacKenzie alleged that Boggs, assisted by Hanson, lured a drunken Greene to his office during the early hours of April 16, 1988, rendered him helpless with a stun gun, then suffocated him.

When police arrived, Boggs allegedly passed the body off as Hanson’s, and presented a phony medical file and EKG tapes that portrayed Hanson as a longtime patient with a history of heart disease. The corpse was dressed in Hanson’s clothes, and Hanson’s birth certificate and other identification cards were in the pockets.

Defense attorneys Henry Hall and Joan Whiteside Green acknowledged that misrepresenting Greene’s body as Hanson’s was illegal, and that the admittedly fraudulent insurance scheme was in dubious taste. But the aim of the “caper,” the defense lawyers argued, was money--not homicide.

The defense contended that Hawkins and Hanson never asked Boggs to kill anyone, and that Greene had died of natural causes.

Hawkins did not testify, but Hanson took the witness stand for the defense, stating that Boggs agreed to supply a body for $50,000, $25,000 of which was paid in advance. Hanson testified that Boggs “volunteered” to supply the corpse, and that he never questioned the doctor about his source.

The scheme did not hatch smoothly, Hanson testified, and there was one early false alarm. Hanson said he first flew to Los Angeles in January, but said Boggs “failed to deliver” the corpse as promised.

Hanson flew out again in April, and this time he saw a body lying face up on the examining table in Boggs’ Glendale office. He testified he was shocked, and did not touch the body.

Greene’s demise was not a crime at all, the defense contended, since there was no proof he did not die of natural causes.

And so the trial became a battle of medical experts as two nationally prominent forensic pathologists squared off.

Testifying for the prosecution was controversial former New York City Medical Examiner Michael Baden, who said his review of photos, documents and slides showed that death was caused by suffocation. He testified he had based his determination on tissue samples, slides from the coroner’s office and photographs of the body.

The defense called upon Pittsburgh pathologist Cyril E. Wecht, who said the death most likely resulted from natural causes--an intestinal hemorrhage and inflammation of heart aggravated by his cocaine and alcohol use. Greene’s blood alcohol was 0.29%--0.08% is considered legally drunk--and he also was HIV-positive, which contributed to his weakened condition, Wecht testified.

Through Hanson, the defense laid out its version of an admittedly fraudulent scheme that was never intended to result in a homicide.

Hanson had wanted to retire and sell his share of the business to his young partner, Hawkins, who had opened the first Just Sweats franchise in Lexington, Ky., with his model-girlfriend, the defense acknowledged.

To make that happen, Hanson testified, the two partners decided they needed to cash in the proceeds from Hanson’s life-insurance policy, which was written to assure the company’s future financial health, even after the loss of a partner or “key man.”

Attorney Hall asked his client just what that meant.

“That it would be better if I died,” Hanson drolly responded.

And so, the scheme began to unfold around Thanksgiving, 1987. Initially, the pair thought all they needed was a phony death certificate. Hanson and Hawkins had hinted to friends, lawyers and business associates that Hanson might be dying of acquired immune deficiency syndrome. Hanson wrote his family out of his will, making Hawkins the executor and sole beneficiary.

The legal maneuvering also gave Hawkins the power to quickly claim the body, identify it as Hanson’s, and order a cremation. He scattered the ashes at sea, and within two weeks began filing insurance claims.

Hanson said he never intended for Boggs to kill anyone, adding that he preferred not to think about where the corpse might come from. He said Boggs had said he would get it from the morgue.

“Did it occur to you that perhaps Dr. Boggs had murdered somebody?” defense attorney Hall asked Hanson.

“No, it did not,” Hanson said.

Prosecutor MacKenzie, however, cited a large flaw in the defense scenario: A corpse, after all, is not the easiest thing to obtain. Nor does a body just appear from the morgue without leaving a paper trail.

There was no paper trail for the late Ellis Greene, who was last seen alive at several North Hollywood bars less than eight hours before his corpse turned up in the doctor’s office, MacKenzie said.

“You know, you can’t just go to the Price Club or K mart and say, ‘I want a body that is going to fit my description,’ ” the prosecutor argued.