D.A. Won’t Quit in Dallies Case--Yet

After planning to dismiss charges against the man accused of killing a Garden Grove police officer six years ago, prosecutors said Monday they will move ahead with the case but left open the possibility of dropping the charges later.

The Orange County district attorney’s office resolved last week to set aside charges against John J.C. Stephens of Buena Park because of insufficient evidence, but it changed course after a lengthy meeting with police Friday, Deputy Dist. Atty. Rick King said.

At the meeting, prosecutors learned more about the credibility of some of the witnesses in the case surrounding the shooting of Officer Howard E. Dallies Jr., a killing so intensely investigated that prosecution files now run to 85,000 pages, King said.

He and the police declined to provide more detail about the new information.

Despite pushing ahead, King acknowledged that he is uncertain whether Stephens would ever be brought to trial. Prosecutors, King said, will call on witnesses to testify at a preliminary hearing--which was scheduled for Monday but was continued until today--and then take a second look at the evidence.

“If the case is not there, we’re not going to proceed,” King said.

Stephens has spent two years in Orange County Jail awaiting trial on charges that include the murder of Dallies and the attempted murder of a Santa Ana security guard. He has always maintained his innocence in both cases.

The investigation into the shooting of Dallies while on routine overnight patrol March 9, 1993, has at times set prosecutors and police officials at odds.

The latest dispute came when Garden Grove police officials learned Wednesday that the district attorney’s office planned to drop the case.

Many in the Police Department had been close to Dallies. And investigators have spent at least 16,300 hours on the case--the most complex and expensive investigation the department has ever conducted, Capt. Dave Abrecht said. He estimated the department’s cost at about $440,000.

Increasing the complexity is the lack of evidence left by the gunman. Besides some early false leads, police had to work with only two substantial clues: a witness who saw a motorcycle race away from the scene and Dallies’ dying words to describe his killer: “White, male, young.”

Investigators slowly accumulated an array of evidence that they say links Stephens to the murder, including testimony from a former girlfriend who said Stephens told her that he was present when his “uncle” killed Dallies.

Police and prosecutors would not release the name of the “uncle” and refuse to discuss him.

But the case was built largely on circumstantial evidence. Investigators never found the .38-caliber handgun used in the killing and linked to the shooting of a Santa Ana security guard three months earlier. And police never unearthed forensic evidence or any witnesses who could positively identify Stephens as Dallies’ killer.

Recently, prosecutors became increasingly concerned by retractions from some of their witnesses, who had implicated Stephens in statements to police. Stephens’ former girlfriend, Lola Duvall, even testified that an investigator slapped her during an interrogation.

When police heard about plans to dismiss the charges against Stephens, they insisted on meeting with prosecutors and spent seven hours in an effort to persuade them to keep the case alive. On Monday, their efforts seemed to have paid off.

“We’re very glad to see the case moving forward,” Abrecht said about prosecutors’ decision to go ahead with the preliminary hearing.

At that hearing Monday, Superior Court Judge John J. Ryan granted defense attorneys’ request to continue the hearing for a day so they could review transcripts of testimony by witnesses.

The slightly built Stephens--wearing a navy-blue sweater vest over a white shirt that his attorneys had brought in for him--sat passively during the 10-minute proceedings. Afterward, his attorneys declined to comment about the prosecutors’ wavering on the case.