Detective Says Suspect Sought Help in Disposing of Bodies

The preliminary hearing in the disappearance of a Newport Beach yachting couple opened Friday with testimony that the prime suspect repeatedly asked an acquaintance for help in disposing of bodies in the sea.

Newport Beach Sgt. David Byington disclosed the allegations at a hearing for Skylar Deleon, his wife and a second man, who are charged with killing yacht owners Tom and Jackie Hawks in a conspiracy to steal their boat and loot their bank account.

Byington is one of three detectives expected to testify at the preliminary hearing, which will continue at 10 a.m. Tuesday in Santa Ana.

The man who declined to help Deleon dispose of the bodies did, however, give him the name of a notary public willing to authorize backdated documents for a phony boat sale, the homicide detective testified.

Two other defendants, including a man who signed his name as a witness on the forged boat sale documents, opted Friday to sever themselves from the others. The move paves the way for an agreement with prosecutors that could involve them testifying against the other defendants, defense attorneys said.

The three defendants at the hearing sat in the back row of the jury box, each separated by two empty chairs. Deleon, who turned 26 on Friday, sat in the middle and spoke twice to his wife, Jennifer Henderson-Deleon, 24, who smiled but did not look at or speak to him.

The Long Beach couple told Byington and another detective during interviews Nov. 29, two weeks after the Hawkses were last seen, that they had purchased the boat for $465,000, according to Friday’s testimony. At the time, the couple and their 1-year-old daughter were living in a converted garage.

Byington testified that he thinks the Hawkses were killed between 4:30 and 5:30 p.m. on Nov. 15. That information, he said, comes from cell phone records and an unidentified person believed to have witnessed the couple being handcuffed to the boat’s anchor and thrown overboard alive between Newport Harbor and Santa Catalina Island.

Their bodies have not been found.

The alleged role of defendant John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 40, a Long Beach resident, has not been disclosed.

Tom Hawks, 57, and his wife, 47, had been living on their 55-foot yacht, Well Deserved, since August 2001 but had decided to sell the boat and spend more time with their first grandchild.

The Deleons told police that they had exchanged their money for the boat ownership documents Nov. 15 in Newport Beach.

Among those documents were some giving Skylar Deleon power of attorney for the Hawkses, notarized by a woman who told police she did not witness the transaction but instead placed her seal on them 10 days later in a Long Beach hotel room as the Deleons watched, Byington testified. The notary public, Kay Harris, told police that 20 $100 bills were left for her on a table in the room.

Senior Deputy Dist. Atty. Matt Murphy would not say whether Harris has been given immunity for her testimony.

Harris met the Deleons, Byington testified, through Adam Rohrig, who used to work with Skylar at a Long Beach dive shop. Skylar Deleon had asked Rohrig several times in advance of the Hawkses’ disappearance for help throwing bodies into the ocean and Rohrig refused each time, according to the testimony.

Then Deleon asked Rohrig if he knew a notary who would backdate documents, and the couple’s number was passed on to Harris.

The signed witness on the documents was Alonso Machain, 21, a jailer at Seal Beach City Jail who met Skylar Deleon when Deleon was serving time in a work-release program for a burglary in Anaheim. Machain and co-defendant Myron Gardner Sr., 42, of Long Beach agreed Friday to the prosecution’s motion to split their cases from the others.

Deleon is also a suspect in an unrelated slaying that occurred while he was in the work-release program. Murphy said outside court that the “investigation was progressing well,” but he would not give details or name the victim of the 2003 throat-slashing.