Jurors Split Verdict in Insurance Murder Case : Courts: Panel convicts Melvin Eugene Hanson, but cannot decide if his partner, John Barrett Hawkins, is also guilty.

In business, they were partners, and in the courtroom they sat side-by-side, both accused of killing a man to use his corpse in a $1.5-million life insurance scam.

But on Wednesday, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury could not decide if John Barrett Hawkins--who made off with most of the money--deserved equal blame. They convicted his partner, Melvin Eugene Hanson, of murder, but deadlocked over whether Hawkins was guilty of the same crime.

Both had been found guilty earlier this week of conspiring to murder.

Now Hanson, 53, may face the death penalty for the murder conviction while a mistrial has been declared in Hawkins’ murder case.

A spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office said no decision has been reached on whether to retry Hawkins, 32.

Prosecutors contended that both were equal partners in what was “almost the perfect crime.”

Hanson and Hawkins, partners in an Ohio athletics clothes business, planned the 1988 scam, then recruited Glendale neurosurgeon Richard Pryce Boggs to help them kill a man and make it appear to be a natural death, prosecutors said.

Hawkins was in Ohio when police in 1988 found a corpse that Boggs claimed was Hanson’s. Hanson, meanwhile, was at a nearby hotel, registered as Wolfgang Eugene von Snowden.

Hawkins, prosecutors said, identified the corpse as his partner, claimed it, and had it cremated. The Los Angeles County coroner originally listed the cause of death as a “heart ailment,” but an insurance investigator discovered that fingerprints taken from the body did not match Hanson’s prints on file with the Department of Motor Vehicles.

But Hawkins, along with Hanson, had vanished. Authorities arrested Boggs, and the Harvard-educated, Rolls-Royce-driving doctor was convicted of murder and insurance fraud in a 1990 trial. During his trial, Boggs denied killing Ellis Henry Greene, 32, but admitted helping swap bodies after Hanson had threatened to expose Boggs’ secret gay lifestyle.

While Hawkins fled through at least nine foreign countries with the bulk of the insurance payments on “Hanson’s” life, Hanson was nabbed as he returned from getting plastic surgery in Acapulco and stewed in prison.

A second trial for the businessmen was delayed in part by a three-year international manhunt for Hawkins, a former Studio 54 bartender known as “the Chameleon” for his ability to change his appearance. He was arrested in August, 1991, aboard his catamaran Carpe Diem (“Seize the Day”) near the Italian island of Sardinia.

However, the Italian government refused to extradite him unless prosecutors promised not to seek the death penalty.

Hanson was not so lucky. He was arrested in Texas, and was therefore eligible for the death penalty. Prosecutors charged him with first-degree murder, coupled with the special circumstances of lying in wait and killing for financial gain.

Wednesday, the jury convicted Hanson of murder for financial gain, but found that he was not lying in wait. The penalty phase of the trial begins Aug. 21.

The jury, which split 8-4 over Hawkins’ murder charge, also deadlocked 11-1 over one remaining fraud count against him.

Defense attorneys argued that Boggs was solely responsible for procuring the body, and that Greene indeed died of natural causes. Hawkins did not testify, but Hanson took the stand in his own defense, and said Boggs had “volunteered” to supply the corpse. Hanson said he first saw the body in Boggs’ Glendale office.

But prosecutors said Hanson helped Boggs lure a drunken Greene into his office, where he was shocked with an electric-charge weapon and suffocated.