Unsolved Mysteries --for Now

A pregnant wife is raped and stabbed to death in the couple’s Costa Mesa apartment. A famous car race promoter is gunned down in front of his garage, his wife shot in the family van. A young secretary’s nude body is discovered in her Fullerton home.

These unsolved crimes took place 10 to 20 years ago and have nothing in common other than that law enforcement officials now believe they have a shot at solving them. The three homicides are among two dozen that the district attorney’s office has placed at the top of its “cold case” file.

As police detectives continue to investigate the crimes, each case was recently assigned to a prosecutor who will review it and prepare to draw up charges when--and if--a suspect is arrested.

The 24 homicides were selected from Orange County’s roughly 1,000 unsolved murders dating back to the 1960s because officials felt they had the best chance of being solved. All have seen recent activity, with police investigating new leads and in some cases issuing search warrants.

“We hope to file charges on two or three of [the 24 cases] within the next six months,” said Assistant Dist. Atty. Mike Jacobs, who heads the agency’s homicide unit.

Solving “cold cases” is a laborious task of painstakingly eliminating possibilities and digging for new ones. Many local police departments have focused more attention on unsolved murders in recent years, in part because declining crime rates give detectives more time. Dist. Atty. Anthony J. Rackauckas has also made the effort a greater priority since taking office in January.

Here is a look inside a few of these cases:

Couple Were New to O.C.

It’s a murder that has haunted Lt. Ron Smith for more than a decade.

“I would just love to crack this case like no other,” Smith said recently.

Malinda Gibbons was 22 years old in 1988. She and her husband, Kent, had just moved from a small town in Utah to make a new life in Southern California. Kent had been hired by Western Digital in Irvine after graduating from the University of Utah. The couple was expecting their first child.

On July 18, Kent Gibbons left his wife early in the morning at the couple’s ground-floor unit in the Mediterranean Village complex on Harbor Boulevard in Costa Mesa. She had a full day ahead of her, unpacking boxes of belongings that would make their empty apartment a home, according to police.

Her husband returned in the early evening to find her bound and gagged, raped and stabbed. She had bled to death. It was Kent Gibbons’ first day of work.

There were no signs of forced entry, physical struggle or other clues.

“They were very trusting people,” Smith said, adding that Malinda Gibbons may have left her front door unlocked.

Smith was a rookie sergeant at the time; this was his first homicide case.

The department has since spent thousands of hours trying to solve the crime, with one detective devoted primarily to the case, he said.

“We have gone through every parolee in the area at the time, sex offenders, checked for similar crimes across Orange County and the nation,” Smith said. “We don’t have a good suspect yet, but I don’t want the crook to think we are not on to him.”

Solving the murder, he said, may be a matter of time.

“Every day there is something going on in this case,” he said. “There are many more people to track down.”

Malinda Gibbons was the oldest of five children in a devout Mormon family from the small town of Harrisville, Utah, said her brother Mathew Godfrey.

“Our family has put this behind us . . . but we are still hopeful the perpetrator will be caught. Not from a vindictive standpoint, but we would hate for something like this to happen to anyone else.”

The sad ironies of his sister’s death still haunt him.

“She was the first to move out to a big city,” he said. “It was glamorous, and then she was murdered less than a year later.”

Stranger Seen in Area on Day of Her Killing

A friend couldn’t reach 20-year-old Deborah Leim by telephone on a Saturday night in June 1977, so he drove to her Fullerton apartment only to make a grim discovery.

Leim, a secretary, was stabbed to death, her nude body left in the bathroom. An autopsy showed no evidence of rape, and there were no signs of a struggle. Police quickly ruled out robbery but had little else to go on.

The most intriguing clue: Neighbors in the Yorba Linda Boulevard apartment complex reported seeing a stranger in the area earlier in the day. Detectives created a composite sketch of the man: about 30 years old, 5 feet, 9 inches, stocky build with dark hair. Within a day, they had interrogated one suspect but released him for lack of evidence.

Little has been written about the case since. For years, Fullerton police detectives remained frustrated at their inability to solve the mystery.

But thanks to developments in evidence-gathering technology, investigators recently were able to blow up a partial fingerprint lifted at the crime scene. The print matched that of an inmate in the prison database.

With the help of a prosecutor, the detectives obtained a warrant to collect biological samples from the man. He was eventually ruled out as a suspect.

“We were able to eliminate a suspect through that search,” said Fullerton Police Sgt. Joe Klein. “Clues that help us limit the focus is as important as direct focus” on a particular suspect.

The search for Leim’s killer goes on.

$1 Million Reward Is Offered in Murders

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s detectives have been investigating the murder of race promoter Mickey Thompson and his wife, Trudy, for over a decade now.

The couple was gunned down in front of their San Gabriel Valley mansion in 1988. The case has been much publicized, and Thompson’s sister, San Juan Capistrano Councilwoman Collene Campbell, has since put up a $1 million reward for information leading to the arrest of the killers.

Jacobs, the Orange County prosecutor, said he recently received a request from the Los Angeles investigators to assist them in the case because many of the clues led them to Orange County.

Witnesses at the time told police they saw two men flee the scene on 10-speed bicycles. The men didn’t take anything from the house or from the couple, who had nearly $70,000 in jewelry and $4,000 in cash on them, leading investigators to believe that it was a contract killing.

Authorities at one point named Thompson’s former partner, Michael Goodwin, as a prime suspect. Goodwin had lost a $500,000 lawsuit to Thompson after the two parted ways. Two weeks after the murder, Goodwin left the country on a yacht for the Caribbean, authorities said.

Goodwin, who for years lived in Laguna Beach, was later arrested on unrelated federal fraud charges and served 30 months in prison.

After 2 Years, Her Husband Is Arrested

An arrest in a 2-year-old mystery made headlines last month--and officials hope it will be only a beginning.

The district attorney filed charges against Eric Christopher Bechler, 32, suspected of murdering his wife, Pegye, off the coast of Newport Beach. It came after an exhaustive investigation by the Sheriff’s Department.

Pegye Bechler, then 38, was seen leaving the docks with her husband on a rented speedboat. He returned alone. He has steadfastly maintained that his wife disappeared after the couple were knocked over by a large wave.

Bechler’s case was the first one to lead to charges since Jacobs has instituted the “cold case” system.

“We knew we had a suspect from the very beginning so the question was when the case would break,” Jacobs said of Bechler.

Officials have declined to comment on the new evidence that led to Bechler’s arrest, but a former girlfriend has since told reporters she has assisted sheriff’s detectives in drawing an alleged confession from him. Bechler has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, and the ex-girlfriend now says she believes Bechler is innocent.