Toughest Trials Have No Body in Evidence

A Newport Beach woman is hit on the head with an anchor, then pushed off a boat. An Anaheim man is thrown from an airplane into the ocean. A 5-year-old Santa Ana girl is drowned in a bathtub by her parents. A Costa Mesa woman vanishes without a trace.

The circumstances of those deaths, spanning three decades, could not be more different, but in each, detectives faced the same obstacle: They had to build a murder case without the victim’s body.

The Costa Mesa woman, 44-year-old Myra King, disappeared on a July evening more than four years ago. Her son, Raymond Anthony Frost, is scheduled for trial Nov. 3 on charges that he killed her.

In the three previous Orange County cases with no corpse as evidence, the defendants were found guilty. Prosecution of such cases is extremely rare, legal experts say, and proving guilt is difficult because the jury must be convinced that the alleged victim is indeed dead. Prosecutors also must rely on circumstantial evidence rather than physical evidence such as blood, hair and DNA.

“These are the toughest of circumstantial cases,” said Laurie Levenson, associate dean of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “Usually, you get a lot of your good circumstantial evidence from a body.”

Prosecutors also must convince jurors that no one else could possibly be responsible.

“There is no requirement that there be a body to prove a case,” Levenson said. “But there’s a tickler in the back of a juror’s mind: ‘Is that person still alive? Are we going to see this person smiling on the front page one day?’ ”

Levenson pointed to the Billionaire Boys Club case as the most famous murder trial with no corpse. The club, a group of privileged young men, was involved in a fraudulent commodities scheme that resulted in their charismatic leader, Joe Hunt, and several others in the group being charged with killing a Beverly Hills con man.

Hunt denied killing Ron Levin and maintained that Levin was still alive. But Hunt was convicted of the murder in 1987 and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

“The defense will always claim that this person is just missing, part of the thousands of people who disappear annually,” said Robert Pugsley, a professor of criminal law at Southwestern University School of Law in Los Angeles.

Defense attorney Jack M. Earley said motive becomes a key issue in such a trial. “Does somebody else have a motive, and does the victim have a motive [to disappear]?” Earley said.

Earley was preparing to represent a defendant in a murder case with no corpse in the mid-1980s. But on the morning that his client, Newport Beach resident Bruce Bradley Ralph, was scheduled to be arraigned, the body of his missing stepson was found.

“It was buried in a ditch that they were preparing to pave over,” Earley said. “A worker was watering down the area, and a finger came up.”

Earley revised his strategy immediately, but Ralph was convicted in 1985 of murdering 18-year-old Bradley Kaye.

Orange County prosecutors filed their first murder case without a corpse in 1979 after 24-year-old Carolyn Bealer disappeared on a date.

Her companion, Larry Donald Smith, had called the victim’s family demanding $100,000 ransom and was tried the same year for the Garden Grove woman’s murder.

“At that time, we just didn’t have a case like this,” said Superior Court Judge David O. Carter, who was then the prosecutor on the case. “We thought, ‘How do we prove that she’s dead?’ ”

Carter called 30 witnesses, including family members, to testify about Bealer’s life and daily routine. The aim was to convince the jury that she never would have left on her own. One witness told of seeing Smith and a young woman arguing as they boarded a boat in Dana Point Harbor. The vessel returned later, the witness said, without Bealer or the anchor.

Smith was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

In the case of Scott Campbell, 27, authorities were reluctant to investigate his 1982 disappearance. His parents, convinced that he had been killed, set out to find evidence.

Their search led to the sad discovery that their son might have been involved in drug dealing. They gave their information to detectives, who launched an investigation that led to Lawrence Cowell and Donald P. DiMascio.

The two men were charged with Campbell’s murder after they told undercover police agents that they had killed Campbell and dropped his body from a small plane flying 2,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean off Santa Catalina Island. Prosecutors contended that Cowell and DiMascio thought Campbell would be carrying a large amount of either money or drugs and wanted to rob him.

Both were convicted. DiMascio was sentenced to life in prison without parole, and Cowell was sentenced to 25 years to life.

In a third case, Orange County Deputy Dist. Atty. Lew Rosenblum convinced a jury in 1993 that 5-year-old Lisa Morales had not been given up for adoption in Mexico in the 1970s, as her parents claimed. He alleged that Marcos and Beatriz Morales tortured and killed their daughter because they thought she was possessed by demons.

Rosenblum’s case hinged largely on the testimony of the victim’s older sister, whose repressed memory of seeing her sister drowned in a bathtub surfaced during psychotherapy. At the parents’ trial, she testified that after the drowning the family drove to Mexico, where her father buried her sister near a beach.

“The major issue was, ‘How did she die?’ ” Rosenblum said. “There is a tendency for a juror to wonder, ‘What if it’s true that she was given up for adoption?’ It would have been nice to have her body so we could have evidence to corroborate the story. . . . You have to rely on witnesses, so it’s a challenge.”

The testimony was persuasive. Marcos Morales was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison. Beatriz Morales was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to six years.

When Frost’s trial begins next week, the prosecutor will be Deputy Dist. Atty. Debbie Lloyd, who declined to discuss the case.

Police suspected foul play after King’s co-workers called them, alarmed that she had not shown up for work.

The investigation immediately focused on Frost, but detectives worked for 2 1/2 years gathering evidence before charging the victim’s son in 1996.

Frost has denied the allegations and pleaded not guilty.