16 Years of Painful Waiting for 3 Families

Sixteen long years have passed since 20-year-old Ginger Fleischli was stabbed to death in a Laguna Beach apartment. But pull out her photo album, which her older brother, Jack Fleischli, keeps tucked neatly on a bookcase beneath his office window, and his tears begin to flow.

There she is in her blue volleyball uniform, there she is smiling on the family couch, there she is at his college graduation. . . .

“The hurt and anger I felt over Ginger lasted for years,” said Jack Fleischli, now 47 and a Newport Beach attorney and part-time actor. “There is a whole chapter of all of our family’s life that is missing, not to mention the loss of Ginger herself. . . . If there was anything I could do to bring Ginger back, of course I would do it, but there is nothing I can do.”

The gruesome rape and murder plunged three Orange County families into a tragedy that is still unraveling. Their emotional wounds were reopened two weeks ago when Thomas Martin Thompson of Orange, the man convicted of slaying the young woman, exhausted his last state appeal. Now, only the U.S. Supreme Court, which reviews death penalty cases if petitioned to do so, can save him from becoming the next person executed in California.

For Fleischli, the passing of time has changed nothing. He’s just as eager now as in 1981 to see Thompson pay the ultimate price.

“Anybody who has a daughter or a sister can imagine this happening to them,” Fleischli said. “This kind of pain and sorrow shouldn’t exist. It’s an outrage.”

The wait is also agonizing, in a distinctly different way, for the two mothers whose sons were convicted of the crime and who cling to the belief that the whole truth has never come out. Inge Lochrie of Orange is Thompson’s mother. Shirley Leitch of Laguna Beach adopted David Leitch, who was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 15 years to life.

For Lochrie, whose son has been on death row for 14 years, the years have been tortuous. With each new appeal that is lost, “the wound gets torn open again,” she said.

“You just try to carry on day to day,” said Lochrie, 66, who still lives in the Blueridge Avenue home in Orange where Thompson was raised. “I can’t imagine anything, day to day, being worse than this. . . . You don’t know how many nights I lie here and think of him, how he is lying in that tiny cell, how cold he is. He has been punished very badly.”

Shirley Leitch, who knew Ginger Fleischli well, said she feels pain for all three families.

“We are all suffering in different ways,” said Leitch, 73. “There are no winners here.”

None of the family members know what brought on the savage end to that Friday night, Sept. 11, which began at a Balboa Island pizza parlor, was fueled by beer, whiskey, rum and hashish, and ended at the apartment at 1261 Oceanfront in Laguna Beach shared by Leitch and Thompson.

Fleischli was a 1979 graduate of Corona del Mar High School and Thompson attended Villa Park High School for three years before moving to Chicago with his father in his senior year. Leitch, the son of a respected Newport Beach architect, attended private schools before finally finishing his education at a continuation school.

According to court testimony, on the night of the murder, Thompson, 25, Leitch, 22, Fleischli and other friends went from Mione’s Pizza to the Sandpiper Lounge in Laguna Beach, right around the corner from the studio apartment overlooking the beach.

There, two separate juries were later convinced, Thompson raped Fleischli and then stabbed her five times in and around the ear, severing her carotid artery. She bled to death. Leitch helped dispose of her body, which was found three days later in a shallow grave at an Irvine nursery.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Mike Jacobs, who prosecuted both men, argued that Thompson did the killing to cover up the rape. Jacobs also maintained Leitch was involved in the crime because he was eager to get rid of Fleischli because she was interfering with his attempts to reunite with his ex-wife, who was her roommate at the time.

“It was a particularly savage killing,” recalled Jacobs, noting that Fleischli did not die instantly. “My goal was to make sure that neither of them would ever get out of jail again.”

Even now, none of this makes sense to Lochrie, who believes her son’s account that he fell asleep, overcome by the alcohol and drugs, and slept through the slaying. Until that night, Thompson had an “absolutely clean” record, without so much as a fistfight in his past, she said.

“I still cannot believe he did it,” she said. “It has never been proven to me.”

Thompson got a reprieve in 1995, when U.S. District Judge Richard A. Gadbois Jr. ruled that his attorney had not properly challenged the evidence that a forcible rape occurred. Gadbois overturned the rape conviction, a ruling that would have removed the special circumstances from the conviction and taken Thompson off of death row. But an appeals court subsequently reinstated the rape conviction.

Lochrie still believes that Gadbois was right and the evidence did not substantiate the rape charge against her son.

“That is the big wrong here. This should not have been a death penalty case,” she said.

Shirley Leitch shares many of the same emotions. Her son, like Thompson, has married while in prison.

She saw Ginger Fleischli, who she describes as “a beautiful girl, tan all the time and very, very sweet,” on the morning of the murder.

“She was very excited. She had just gotten a new job, where she would be taking care of two children and living with a Newport Beach couple,” Leitch recalled.

Leitch was stunned three days later by the news of the murder. And then her son was charged and found guilty.

“It took me six months to get over the crying,” she said.

But certainly no one has endured the depths of tragedy like the Fleischli family. Ginger Fleischli was only two years out of high school when her life ended in a pool of blood.

Until that day, Jack Fleischli had charted a course to be a criminal attorney. As a Pepperdine Law School student, he had clerked in the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles as well as the office of the Orange County public defender.

After graduation, he spent five years with the county public defender’s office. But the brutality of the attack on his sister derailed his career. Fleischli abandoned criminal defense for real estate law.

“I just couldn’t walk through the door of the courthouse and think about defending someone accused of crimes,” said Fleischli, who lives in Irvine. “It became repugnant to me. It was an emotional reaction.”

Always a believer in the death penalty--even when he was a public defender--the murder of a sibling convinced Fleischli that society needs a response as final as execution. He rejects arguments that the death penalty is barbaric and doesn’t deter crime.

“It really isn’t a question of deterrence, although I think it does deter some people,” he said. “The most important issue is that society must have a way of responding, however long it takes, to a crime that is beyond reprehensible, that just shakes the core of your humanity.”