Famalaro Trial’s Bizarre Nature Grips Spectators

Don Lasseter sits in the front row gathering information for his latest true-crime book. Margie Hampstread brings a scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings about the case with her each day. Mike Jacobson, whose wife was murdered last year, goes as a form of therapy.

They are among the spectators who regularly fill the seats of Department 45 in Orange County Superior Court, where the murder trial of John J. Famalaro is being held. Law students, members of the original 1,200-member jury pool and dozens of the simply curious have also attended the proceedings to listen to disturbing testimony about the murder of Newport Beach resident Denise Huber, who was struck in the head at least 31 times with a roofer’s nail puller and whose naked body was kept handcuffed inside a freezer for three years.

“At first I wondered if there would be enough for a book,” Lasseter, of Stanton, said this week. “Now I think there is enough for two books.”

Famalaro, 40, was convicted last month of kidnapping, sexually assaulting and murdering the 23-year-old Huber, whose fate remained unknown for three years following the crime. The same jury that convicted Famalaro must decide whether he should be executed or serve life in prison without possibility of parole.

“He doesn’t fit the stereotypical silhouette of the typical killer, not at all,” said Lasseter, the author of five books. “There’s no crime record, he’s bright and articulate. That’s what makes it an interesting case to me.”

Those who have watched the trial inside the 11th-floor courtroom have heard graphic details of Huber’s murder. They have watched her parents break down with a grief that will never end. They have heard lurid testimony about Famalaro’s family background, which his attorneys have highlighted in trying to save his life.

“I wanted to know how this guy turned out to be so crazy,” said Dana Holliday, 59, an astrologer who also attended the murder trial of Lyle and Erik Menendez and has astrological charts of more than 100 murderers.

“When I first heard about the freezer, I thought, ‘What in the world?’ ” said Holliday of Los Angeles. “I have never in my life heard of anything like it. If you wrote the character in a movie, no one would believe it.”

Holliday and other spectators said they have been especially fascinated by testimony about Famalaro’s childhood and about his 71-year-old mother, Anne, whose own daughter described her as mentally ill. The mother’s disturbing behavior and the odd way she brought up her children has been the main focus of the trial’s penalty phase.

“You have a bizarre family on one side in the Famalaros and a sweet, dignified family on the other in the Hubers,” Lasseter said.

Hampstread has been so emotionally involved in the case that she felt compelled to watch the trial nearly every day. The Costa Mesa resident began collecting newspaper articles when Denise Huber disappeared after a tire on her car blew out on the Corona del Mar Freeway on June 3, 1991.

Hampstread, 63, lives near the spot where Huber was stranded. For three years she passed a banner hung on the side of an apartment building by Huber’s parents, Dennis and Ione, asking, “Have you seen Denise Huber?”

“Every morning going to work we’d pass the giant banner, and every day we’d think of that family and the tragedy,” she said.

Hampstread said that two days before Huber’s body was found in July 1994, she tearfully peeled a bumper sticker seeking information on Huber’s disappearance from of her leased car, which she had to return.

“I sat crying because nothing had become of the search,” she said. “Then two days later it was all over the news that they had found her body.”

Mystery novelist T. Jefferson Parker of Laguna Beach said curiosity about Famalaro’s background, not research for another book, led him to the courtroom last week. He said testimony about the defendant’s family and childhood left a surprising impression on him.

“I think you would have trouble portraying John Famalaro as a monster,” Parker said. “I don’t see him like that. I see him as a man who committed a monstrous act.”

Parker, the author of the recent “Triggerman’s Dance” and four other novels that take place in Orange County, said testimony about Famalaro’s life was so disturbing he left the courtroom one day last week “feeling a little bit emptied out.”

Jacobson, a Costa Mesa resident, says the trial is sometimes too difficult for him to sit through.

“I had to walk out of the courtroom last week because I didn’t feel well physically or emotionally,” he said. “It was just the sordidness of the whole thing, and innocent people having to be dragged through the filth.”

At the suggestion of his therapist, Jacobson goes to court to prepare himself for the trial of the man accused of fatally stabbing his wife, Donna Jacobson, who was accounting manager at the Daily Pilot newspaper. He has formed a friendship with Dennis and Ione Huber, who sit in the front row each day. He was near tears when they testified about their loss.

“All of this nightmare was visited upon the Hubers, and it was visited upon the Jacobsons too,” he said. “We all experienced the dark side of human existence.”