SPECIAL REPORT: Beginning Tuesday with jury selection, another high-profile murder trial will draw attention to a Southland courtroom, where . . . : The Stage Is Set for Principals in Ennis Cosby Case

By STEVE BERRY

June 14, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

As national attention focuses on Santa Monica for the start of his trial this week, the 19-year-old Ukrainian immigrant accused of killing Bill Cosby’s son may be finding solace in the old saw about sticks and stones breaking bones, but words never hurting anyone.

Witnesses are expected to say Mikail Markhasev admitted killing 27-year-old Ennis Cosby on a lonely, dark road off the San Diego Freeway 18 months ago in a failed robbery attempt.

But such testimony, like words in the old maxim, is not going to hurt him very much, lawyers say--especially if the jury believes it comes from people who are in so much trouble themselves that they will say anything to stay out of jail.

“I’ve confronted that problem many times, and it’s a real one,” said John S. Wiley Jr., a former federal prosecutor and now a UCLA law professor who teaches criminal evidence.

Nevertheless, it’s physical evidence--the sticks and stones of murder trials--that delivers crushing blows to a defendant’s case, Wiley and other legal experts say.

So when the Cosby trial opens Tuesday, one of the key questions will be whether Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti’s office has found enough hard facts to support the words of key witnesses whose criminal backgrounds may render anything they say as suspect.

Markhasev, a wiry North Hollywood resident who arrived in the United States in 1989 with his mother, has pleaded not guilty to the murder and attempted robbery charges. If convicted, he faces life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

As the testimony and evidence emerges over the next four to six weeks in the same courthouse where the O.J. Simpson civil trial was held two years ago, more than three dozen newspapers and broadcast media will cover part or all of it.

Details of the drama and horror that occurred on the chilly night when Cosby stopped to change a flat tire on Skirball Center Drive will come out for the first time.

Unlike the Simpson civil trial, much of the evidence to be introduced has never been revealed. And there may be some surprises.

Responding to the prosecution’s concern that the defense may offer evidence implicating someone else in the killing, Superior Court Judge David D. Perez has directed Markhasev’s lawyers to alert him before they do.

Sources said last week that prosecutors have not been told of any such plans.

Despite the intense national interest in the case, the media has had little opportunity to report how the court has handled it so far.

Perez, fearing that potential jurors may read or hear something in the media that will sway their verdicts, has closed many important pretrial developments.

He has been conducting hearings in secret and sealing court records that are normally open.

Forty seats have been reserved for the press, but Perez will not allow television cameras in the courtroom because he said they would distract the jury.

Defense attorneys--Deputy Alternate Public Defenders Henry J. Hall and Harriet L. Hawkins--have argued that cameras would turn the case into a media circus reminiscent of the Simpson criminal trial.

The impact of the publicity will be one of the issues that Perez, Hall, Hawkins and Deputy Dist. Atty. Anne Ingalls will weigh when they begin selecting the jurors Tuesday morning.

They will try to weed out those they think have already made up their minds, or who may favor one side or the other.

Ingalls is expected to start explaining her case in an opening statement the following Monday.

The events leading to Cosby’s death started when he left his parents’ Pacific Palisades home and headed for the Sherman Oaks residence of Stephanie Crane, 47, a writer he had met a week earlier at a party.

He was on Christmas vacation from Columbia University Teachers College in New York, where he was studying for a doctoral degree in special education.

About 10 minutes from Crane’s home, his Mercedes-Benz blew a tire, and he drove up the Skirball Center/Mulholland Drive exit in search of a place to change it.

He pulled onto the dirt shoulder off Skirball, about 450 feet from a bank of phones at a park-and-ride lot, where police say Markhasev, Eli Zakaria, 24, and Sara Ann Peters, 22, the latter two of Huntington Beach, allegedly had stopped to call a drug dealer.

Whether Cosby noticed them is uncertain. He called Crane on his cell phone to meet him so he could use her car lights while changing the tire.

Sketchy Details

From this point, details become uncertain. Ingalls, Hall and Hawkins have declined to discuss the evidence, and Perez issued a gag order in October forbidding anyone involved in the case from commenting on it.

Nevertheless, information gleaned from records and press accounts provides the following account:

At the park-and-ride, Zakaria and Peters heard Markhasev say he was going to carjack the man changing a tire and saw him walk toward the place where Crane and Cosby were parked, Zakaria and Peters reportedly have told police.

Crane, sitting in the car watching Cosby change the tire in her headlights, said a man with a gun wearing a light-colored knit hat and fitting Markhasev’s description suddenly accosted her.

Frightened, she drove off, but stopped after going just a short distance. She turned her car around in time to see Cosby lying on the ground and the man running away.

Back at the park-and-ride, Zakaria and Peters reportedly have said they heard a noise. Moments later, Markhasev returned and admitted to the killing, according to news accounts.

When police arrived, Crane provided a detailed description from which artists drew a composite.

Later, two friends of Markhasev, Michael Chang and Christopher So, reportedly told police that several days after the shooting, they helped him search for a gun in a wooded area about five miles from the shooting scene.

Chang, according to court papers, reportedly told police that Markhasev said: “I shot the n-----. It’s all over the news.”

They never found the weapon, but one of them later led police to the area, and the gun was found wrapped in a dark-colored knit hat.

Ballistics tests have linked the gun, a .38-caliber pistol, to Cosby’s death.

In a crucial disclosure in court, Ingalls has said the hat contained DNA evidence that matches Markhasev’s DNA.

Moreover, after police arrested Markhasev in March and put him in jail, Markhasev wrote letters that were subsequently delivered by a jailhouse snitch to authorities, according to the prosecution.

Ingalls has said she will call a handwriting expert to confirm that Markhasev wrote them.

But there are some crucial weaknesses in the prosecution’s story, starting with Crane’s inability to pick Markhasev out of a lineup.

In addition, defense lawyers have indicated that they will vigorously challenge the entire scenario, especially the trustworthiness of the prosecution’s key witnesses.

Integrity Issue

Defense attorneys will try to plant the idea that those witnesses expect a quid pro quo for their testimony.

For example, they will probably point out that Zakaria and Peters are in Orange County Jail facing charges of burglary, theft and receiving stolen property.

But Orange County prosecutor Craig Cazares said Friday that the Los Angeles authorities have not talked to him about the cases.

“I have not been asked to give them any consideration,” he said. Nevertheless, a trial date has not been set for them, and their cooperation with Los Angeles authorities could still influence their fate if they are found guilty.

Moreover, the jailhouse informant who turned over the letters that Markhasev is alleged to have written also faces criminal charges, including a forgery count.

Markhasev has denied writing the letters, Hall said in a recent court hearing. Moreover, he noted that the letters are merely copies, that the originals were “mysteriously” missing and that he would vigorously challenge their authenticity.

As for the purported admission to Chang, legal experts say good lawyers can raise reasonable doubt that the defendant made the statement. Moreover, one of them reportedly tipped police to try to earn a $100,000 reward offered by the National Enquirer for information about the case.

All those areas are ripe for attack, legal experts say.

“I don’t really care what people say,” said Gigi Gordon, a veteran Santa Monica defense lawyer. “It’s easier to attack what people say than it is to attack the physical evidence. The only evidence that really scares me in a case is physical evidence.”

Turning to that in the Cosby case, Gordon said that despite the fact that police found the murder weapon, they still have to show that Markhasev possessed and used it.

More important, there were no usable fingerprints on the gun, which the prosecution could explain by noting that it was exposed to the weather for weeks.

The knit cap with DNA reportedly linked to Markhasev may help prosecutors link the gun to Markhasev, she said, but defense lawyers can still raise serious questions.

The DNA evidence, especially if it comes from hair follicles found in the cap, may become one of the major legal battlegrounds. The usual sources of DNA are blood, skin or semen.

“Using it [hair] is much more unusual and less reliable,” Gordon said.

Gerald Uelman, professor of law at Santa Clara University and a member of the Simpson defense team, said using DNA from hair to match with a suspect “is a very new and recent technology which the courts have yet to accept.”

If the prosecution can withstand such challenges, the DNA and the other physical evidence could be what the prosecution needs to support the testimony, said Wiley, the former federal prosecutor.

“It’s quite predictable that if prosecution anticipates this kind of attack on key witnesses, they will be working overtime to show this testimony is believable,” he said.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Victim: Ennis Cosby

Son of Bill Cosby, known as America’s favorite TV dad. Ennis Cosby, 27, was often described as the model for his father’s television son, Theo Huxtable, who was played by Malcolm-Jamal Warner on the long-running “The Cosby Show.”

Despite his dyslexia, Cosby was working on a doctoral degree in special education at Columbia University Teachers College in New York. He planned to teach children with learning disabilities.

The Defendant: Mikail Markhasev

The 19-year-old from North Hollywood immigrated to the United States with his mother in 1989 from the Ukraine, where his father had abandoned them. He attended Los Alamitos and Reseda high schools and made fairly good grades, but friends say he became involved with a gang. He spent a brief time in a juvenile detention camp in 1995.

The Prosecutor: Deputy Dist. Atty. Anne Ingalls

Although she talks in a near whisper, colleagues say she is a tough, nose-to-the-grindstone lawyer capable of dominating a courtroom.

A graduate of Loyola Law School, Ingalls, 43, joined the district attorney’s office in 1984, working in the Long Beach, Inglewood, Torrance and Compton offices before moving downtown in 1987. She prosecuted hard-core gang cases for eight years before she was promoted in 1994 to the major crimes division, which deals mostly with murders, high profile cases, organized crime or exceptionally complex crimes.

The Judge: David Perez.

Known as a straight-laced, evenhanded jurist, Perez has spent most of his 22 years as a judge trying criminal cases.

Perez, 60, a graduate of Southwestern University School of Law, spent 10 years in the Los Angeles city attorney’s office, serving as chief assistant from 1973 to 1975, before Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown appointed him a Municipal Court judge. Ten years later, a Republican governor, George Deukmejian, appointed him to the Superior Court bench.

The Defense Lawyers: Henry J. Hall and Harriet L. Hawkins.

Both are with the alternate public defenders office.

Hall has been defending indigents for nearly 25 years. With a booming, commanding voice, he has an oratorical style that has been described passionate yet professorial. Hall, a graduatte of USC and Loyola Law School, recently completed a trial in which he represented a woman in the so-called Mother’s Day murders. His client was found guilty of plotting with a man to kill his mother and ex-girlfriend at University City Walk in 1995.

Hawkins has been a lawyer for 10 years. She’s a graduate of Hastings College of Law at UC San Francisco. She was a public defender for the federal court in Los Angeles for six years before joining the alternate public defenders office four years ago.

In the federal courts, she defended people in white-collar, drug, bank robbery, bank fraud and counterfeit cases.

The Charges

* Murder while attempting armed robbery

* Attempted armed robbery

The Evidence

Prosecution Contends:

* .38-caliber pistol is linked to Cosby’s death.

* knit cap found with pistol is linked to Markhasev through DNA.

* Incriminating letters were written by Markhasev in jail.

* Companions implicate Markhasev

The Defense Contends:

* Cosby’s companion failed to identify Markhasev in lineup.