Murder Trial Begins 25 Years After Boy Vanished

Nearly 25 years after a 13-year-old Costa Mesa boy left for school and disappeared, the trial for the man charged with molesting and murdering him began Monday in Riverside County.

“The crimes against Jamie Trotter have gone unpunished for a long time,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Bill Mitchell told jurors in Riverside Superior Court Judge Dennis A. McConaghy’s courtroom. “We are here today, because, after 25 years, the truth has a mysterious way of finding daylight.”

James “Jamie” Trotter left to catch a school bus in Costa Mesa in 1979, and vanished. In 1990, James Lee Crummel told authorities he had found human bones near Ortega Highway in Riverside County. Six years later, the bones were identified as Trotter’s.

The following year, authorities who had researched Crummel’s criminal background charged him with the molestation and murder of Trotter, making him eligible for the death penalty.

“We are here today, because James Crummel is a pedophile, a serial child molester who could not be rehabilitated,” Mitchell told the jury, referring to Crummel’s convictions in the 1960s in Missouri and Wisconsin.

“We are here today because the lesson James Crummel learned is that dead boys don’t tell, dead boys don’t testify and dead boys don’t send you to prison.”

Mitchell said Crummel lived on the street where Trotter was supposed to catch the bus.

Years later, he led authorities to bones charred by a 1989 wildfire.

“The evidence may not establish [Crummel’s] reason for locating the remains -- a guilty conscience or confidence law enforcement could not tie it to him -- but the evidence will show it was not a coincidence, that he did not just stumble upon these remains,” Mitchell said.

The prosecutor produced photographs that police took from Crummel’s residence showing he had visited Ortega Highway in the Cleveland National Forest in the 1970s, near where Trotter’s bones were found. Mitchell said a former friend of Crummel’s has said Crummel enjoyed having sex in remote, wooded areas.

Defense attorney Mary Ann Galante countered in her opening statement that the case “is based upon a series of assumptions based on Mr. Crummel’s past ... what you will not hear is proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Galante said other hikers could access the area where the remains were found, and that mountain lions were also capable of killing a boy of Trotter’s size.

“We don’t know how or where Jamie died, or how he got to that spot,” Galante said.

“Mr. Crummel has a bad history, but there is no evidence of proof that he is guilty in this case.”

Galante told jurors there is dispute as to whether the bones are Trotter’s.

“Credibility is an issue you must decide,” she said.