Web of Deceit Shielded Murder Defendant for Years, Jury Told

The 1992 slaying of Katrina Montgomery went unsolved for years because members of a violent Ventura skinhead gang lied to police to protect fellow white supremacist Justin Merriman, a prosecutor charged Thursday.

During opening statements, Deputy Dist. Atty. Ron Bamieh told jurors that Merriman slit Montgomery’s throat because he feared she would tell police he raped her at his Ventura condominium.

For the next eight years, the prosecutor said, Merriman and his fellow gang members weaved an intricate web of deceit and violent threats to shield him from prosecution.

“The terror these people caused in the community is the reason why nobody would cooperate, the reason why nobody would come forward and the reason why a family has never been able to bury their daughter,” Bamieh said.

The prosecutor told jurors that investigators learned the truth in the summer of 1997 when they began to re-interview gang members and other witnesses who eventually implicated Merriman in the Nov. 28, 1992, killing.

Prosecutors are now seeking the death penalty against Merriman, who was indicted by a grand jury on rape and murder charges in January 1999. Four months later, he was indicted a second time on conspiracy charges for allegedly using a statewide network of white-power gang members to try to have witnesses killed.

In addition to those charges, Merriman is accused of raping two women in 1994 and 1995, and assaulting police officers during a SWAT team standoff before his arrest in January 1998. He had been held in connection with that incident from January 1998 until the indictment a year later.

Merriman’s trial culminates a lengthy investigation for authorities who have spent years targeting Ventura County’s so-called “brotherhood” of white supremacists.

The trial, expected to last a month, began Thursday in Ventura County Superior Court. Defense attorneys plan to present their opening statement this morning.

Thursday, Bamieh used a daylong opening statement to lay out the prosecution case before a courtroom packed with Montgomery’s family and other observers.

He began with Merriman’s standoff with police on Jan. 30, 1998.

That night, officers patrolling a high-crime area along Ventura Avenue in Ventura spotted a man illegally riding a bike on a sidewalk. When they pursued the man, later identified as Merriman, he darted into an empty lot and pulled a gun.

With officers in pursuit, he leaped over three backyard fences and demanded entry into an acquaintance’s house. SWAT team members circled outside, tear gas was lobbed into the home, and Merriman was apprehended after a struggle with police.

“You will find out that he was running not because he had a bike on the sidewalk,” Bamieh told the jury. “The defendant was running because of a 20-year-old woman who disappeared in 1992.”

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That was Montgomery, a Santa Monica College student and waitress at Jerry’s Famous Deli, who knew the defendant while she was a teenager growing up in Ventura.

In 1991, they began corresponding while Merriman served a two-year prison term for assault. The letters, which were found by Montgomery’s mother after her disappearance, show Merriman wanted a sexual relationship with Montgomery and became angry when she spurned him, Bamieh said.

The prosecutor told jurors they will hear testimony about how Merriman on two separate occasions choked and tried to rape Montgomery after his release from prison in spring of 1992.

Months later, Merriman met Montgomery at a party in Oxnard hosted by skinhead gang leader Scott Porcho, whose wife was a friend of Montgomery’s.

Afterward, Merriman and two younger skinheads from the San Fernando Valley, Larry Nicassio and Ryan Bush, went to his condominium in Ventura. Montgomery showed up at the home shortly thereafter to spend the night.

Bamieh told jurors Merriman raped her in front of the two men. Montgomery tearfully pleaded to use a bathroom and Merriman let her, he said. Merriman then stabbed her in the neck with a knife and explained to Nicassio and Bush that he didn’t want her to “rat” on him, Bamieh said.

Merriman grabbed a pipe wrench and beat Montgomery on the head, the prosecutor said, then slit her throat.

After the killing, Merriman ordered the younger gang members to dispose of the body, Bamieh said. They put Montgomery in the bed of her blue Toyota pickup truck, drove to a remote area near Sylmar and placed her body, wrapped in a pink blanket, in a large corrugated pipe, he said, adding that days later, they returned and buried her.

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The blood-stained truck was found abandoned in the Angeles National Forest, touching off a Los Angeles Police Department investigation. That probe went nowhere, Bamieh said, because Porcho and other gang members in Ventura and the San Fernando Valley lied and concealed information.

Five years after Montgomery’s disappearance, investigators in the Ventura County district attorney’s office began to pursue old leads and gradually broke through the silence shielding Merriman and his gang associates, Bamieh said.

First, they leaned on Nicassio, the youngest gang member, who was charged with Montgomery’s murder in late 1997. He cut a deal with prosecutors and described seeing Merriman rape and kill Montgomery.

Nicassio also showed authorities where he and Bush buried her--only to discover that the once-rural hillside area known as Sunset Farms had been developed into an industrial park.

Montgomery’s body has never been found. But prosecutors built their case against Merriman, who they had long suspected was the killer, using Nicassio and other skinhead gang members as informants.

In return, the defendant allegedly tried to contact fellow white-power gang members in prisons throughout California, urging them in letters to kill witnesses, or “rats,” who had turned against him.

Bamieh told jurors that during the investigation authorities were able to stay one step ahead of Merriman, at one point relocating an informant from Ironwood State Prison just days before a letter arrived calling for his murder.

In closing Thursday, Bamieh told the jury that in coming weeks they will hear evidence about how the defendant ran from his alleged crimes and escalated his violent threats “to make sure people were quiet and the truth wasn’t told.”