Defense Says Witness Is Real Killer

Defense attorneys attempted to poke holes Monday in the testimony of key prosecution witness Larry Nicassio, suggesting he was the real killer of college student Katrina Montgomery.

Under aggressive questioning by lead attorney Willard Wiksell, Nicassio admitted that he was secretly attracted to Montgomery, 20, but denied he was the one who raped her and slit her throat eight years ago.

Instead, Nicassio testified, it was skinhead gang member Justin Merriman who killed Montgomery. Merriman is on trial for charges of murder, rape and related crimes.

Last week, Nicassio told jurors that he saw Merriman rape and kill Montgomery while Nicassio spent the night at the defendant’s home after a party in November 1992. Then, Nicassio said, he and his cousin, Ryan Bush, were forced to help dispose of the body.

Monday, however, Wiksell attempted to show that Nicassio, 24, was lying to cover his own involvement in the killing.

During a nearly daylong cross-examination, Wiksell tried to show that Nicassio--not Merriman--wielded a knife that night. He suggested that Nicassio had a motive to kill Montgomery because she had spurned his advances during the party they had attended in Oxnard.

At one point, Wiksell accused Nicassio of shedding crocodile tears in court last Friday. He asked Nicassio whether he shed any tears the night Montgomery actually died, then flatly accused the witness of committing murder.

“I submit you didn’t cry because you killed her,” Wiksell said. “Did you kill her, Mr. Nicassio?”

“No, I didn’t,” he answered.

Nicassio acknowledged, however, that he handled a steak knife several times during the party that preceded Montgomery’s disappearance.

He told the jury that at one point he jokingly stood behind Montgomery with the knife and mimicked a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 thriller “Psycho.”

Wiksell asked Nicassio to re-create the scene and pulled a toy knife from his briefcase to use as a prop. Prosecutors quickly objected, and Judge Vincent J. O’Neill prohibited Wiksell from giving Nicassio the fake weapon.

Nevertheless, Wiksell pressed on.

“It was you with the knife, wasn’t it?” he asked. “You had the knife three times” at the home of fellow gang member Scott Porcho, he added..

Nicassio admitted he did, but said Merriman had given it to him and told him each time to “get her,” referring to Montgomery. Nicassio told jurors he thought the defendant was kidding.

In late 1992, he was the youngest member of a San Fernando Valley skinhead gang that frequently partied with Merriman’s Ventura gang, Nicassio said. He said he looked up to Merriman--a parolee with a reputation as a tough street fighter--and obeyed him.

Throughout Monday’s testimony, Wiksell tried to trip up Nicassio on details about the party, Montgomery’s death and the alleged cover-up that followed.

Wiksell also focused on Nicassio’s March 1998 agreement with the district attorney’s office, suggesting that he agreed to talk only after cutting a deal that protected him from murder charges.

Nicassio conceded that he had scolded his girlfriend for ruining his chance for a deal after learning she had told authorities he was present during Montgomery’s killing. But that was because he wanted to avoid being charged with a crime he didn’t commit, he said.

Before Monday’s cross-examination, jurors heard a tape-recorded conversation between Merriman and Nicassio that took place at the County Jail while both men were in custody in fall 1998.

On tape, Nicassio was heard telling Merriman that he might tell authorities about Montgomery’s killing.

“Don’t tell me that,” Merriman responds, according to the recording. “You can’t break now.”

Merriman tells Nicassio he’s culpable for the alleged crime because he “hauled that [expletive].” Prosecutors argue that the statement is a reference to Montgomery’s body.

The jury also heard testimony Monday about an incident in which a jail inmate with ties to a white-supremacist prison gang threatened Nicassio for talking to police.

“He said that I would be killed for being a rat,” Nicassio testified. “He said the Nazi Low Riders had put a green light on me.”

Testimony is scheduled to resume today in Ventura County Superior Court.