Drop ’75 Killing Case, Lawyers Say

Attorneys for a man arrested last year in a 25-year-old Orange County murder want the charges dismissed because they say authorities took too long to crack the case, crippling his defense efforts.

In the quarter-century it took authorities to arrest Larry Donnel Paige for a Santa Ana murder, 12 witnesses died, 95 others moved and several pieces of evidence were destroyed, defense attorneys alleged in court documents.

Authorities arrested Paige last year after linking his fingerprints through a state database to prints at the scene of the murder. In their motion, defense lawyers faulted Santa Ana police for not linking the prints sooner, noting Paige was fingerprinted 10 times during unrelated arrests from 1976 to 1997.

“If it were one year [after the crime], I could bring a whole panoply of resources to the case, but there’s been a 25-year delay,” said Deputy Public Defender Ed Eisler. “The problem here is that we have an innocent man. . . . How are you supposed to prove what you were doing and where you were 25 years ago? It’s completely unfair.”

Prosecutors and Santa Ana police say they tried to solve the Oct. 18, 1975, slaying of Lawrence Dean Wheelock. Investigators ran the crime-scene fingerprints through a state database several times without success. In 1999, using digital technology, they linked the prints to Paige.

Superior Court Judge Francisco P. Briseno is scheduled to consider the defense motion this morning.

If Paige prevails, the ruling could have far-reaching effect on a wave of recently solved cases of old crimes now winding through the California courts. No appeals court has ever resolved what defense attorneys call “the absolute unreasonableness” of bringing a murder suspect to trial 25 years after the crime.

Still, legal experts called the motion a longshot.

“It’s not an easy motion to win,” said Richard Schwartzberg, a Santa Ana lawyer who specializes in criminal appeals. “There’s something that’s not often said, but even assuming all these things are true, judges are terrified at the thought of releasing someone who’s believed to be a killer into society on what a lot of people would say is a technicality.”

Paige, now 44, is accused of shooting Wheelock to death in front of the victim’s 4-year-old son, Jacob.