Jury Hung in ’75 O.C. Murder

Attempts to win a conviction in Orange County’s oldest “cold case” failed Wednesday when jurors deadlocked over whether Larry Donnell Paige was responsible for the murder of a Santa Ana man 25 years ago as the victim’s stepson looked on.

The case, which relied on cutting-edge technology that sharpened blurry fingerprint images, is the oldest of dozens of unsolved murders that detectives now claim to have solved. In many of these cases, forensic advances have provided authorities with remarkable breakthroughs. However, not all juries have been persuaded.

Jurors in the Paige case deliberated less than three days before announcing they were hopelessly divided. The panel determined that Paige was innocent of first-degree murder, and it split on a second-degree murder charge, with eight of 12 jurors leaning toward innocence.

The jury foreman said a lapse in time between the crime and the trial was one factor in jurors’ discussions. The crime scene had been torn down, witnesses had died and evidence was very old.

But the biggest sticking point was whether jurors actually believed the prosecution’s claim that Paige helped in a robbery that resulted in Larry Wheelock’s shooting death. Prosecutors claimed that while Paige did not actually fire the murder weapon, his alleged participation in the robbery made him guilty of first-degree murder.

“I think most of us felt that the evidence presented in court did nothing to prove there was a robbery,” said jury foreman Tom Malatesta, 50, of Rancho Santa Margarita.

Prosecutor Chris Kralick argued that Paige, 44, was one of two men who sought to rob Wheelock and that Paige assisted by distracting Wheelock’s 4-year-old stepson by playing with him.

The stepson, Jacob Scott, now 29, testified last week that the man who played with him shouted at the gunman to stop when he raised his handgun. Prosecutors say that the shouting came too late and that Paige was already an accomplice by that time.

Paige, who sat bowed over the defendant’s table for much of the trial, cocked his head toward the courtroom audience and cracked a smile when jurors announced they were hung.

Paige’s legal struggles are far from over, however. After the jury’s announcement Wednesday, Judge Francisco P. Briseno said he would schedule a new trial for Oct. 9. For now, Paige will remain in jail.

Prosecutors have yet to decide their next move. A spokeswoman for the Orange County district attorney’s office said officials were reviewing the prospect of a second trial and would announce their decision in early October.

Paige’s lawyer, Deputy Public Defender Ed Eisler, said he hoped prosecutors would learn from the mistrial and opt against a new trial.

“I don’t think this guy should be allowed to be tried at all,” Eisler said. “In the light of the split, it is an indication that the evidence is 25 years old. It’s too old.”

Wheelock was gunned down in the family’s Santa Ana apartment on Oct. 18, 1975. Fingerprints found at the Bristol Street home were smudged and barely readable, though, and without a match, the case gathered dust.

Last year, new digital technology helped police produce clearer and larger images of the prints, which were lifted from Wheelock’s car and a paper bag containing beer cans. Investigators said they matched those images against fingerprints from Paige, a Long Beach man with a criminal record of minor thefts and drug sales.

In the quarter century it took authorities to make the arrest, 12 witnesses from the original investigation have died, 95 have moved and the car from which one of Paige’s prints was reportedly found is gone, defense attorneys said.

After the jury’s decision Wednesday, Wheelock’s stepson said he was disappointed.

“You wait that long for justice and it just doesn’t come through,” Scott said.

While advancements in DNA and fingerprint technology are allowing detectives to revive cases previously thought unsolvable, convincing juries has become another matter.

In Santa Ana, police in 1999 and 2000 made arrests in 22 “cold” murder cases. One has resulted in a jury conviction, according to detectives. But jurors in another case recently acquitted an alleged gang member accused in a 1989 shooting.

Four more cases, police said, resulted in guilty pleas and four were cleared when police identified suspects and discovered they were dead or already serving life terms. The remaining 12 cases, including the Paige case, are still working their way through the courts.

Assistant Dist. Atty. Lew Rosenblum, who oversees all homicide prosecutions, said the age of a case was not necessarily a concern to prosecutors.

“What we’re concerned with is whether or not we have sufficient evidence,” Rosenblum said. He added that many cases are tried successfully years after the crime.

“I think we’re going to be seeing more and more of these cases prosecuted because of scientific evidence.”