Marine Murder Case Can Be Tried Impartially in County, Judge Decides

VISTA —  Attorneys for Laura Troiani and four of five Marine co-defendants lost their bid Monday to have their murder-for-hire trial moved outside San Diego County because of pretrial publicity.

Superior Court Judge Gilbert Nares said he was “satisfied the defendants can receive a fair and impartial trial” in Vista on charges that the six murdered Marine Staff Sgt. Carlo Troiani, Laura’s husband, in an ambush shooting Aug. 10, 1984, on a road in Oceanside’s San Luis Rey River valley.

The district attorney’s office contends that Laura Troiani grew tired of her marriage, fell in love with another Marine and hired him and four others to plot her husband’s death. She was to pay each of them $500 from her husband’s life insurance proceeds, prosecutors contend.

The Marines bungled several attempts to kill Carlo Troiani, 37, before Laura Troiani finally lured her husband to a secluded stretch of North River Road on the pretext that she had car problems, prosecutors allege. As Carlo Troiani approached his wife, who was sitting behind the wheel of her car, he was shot twice in the back and killed by Mark Schulz, who was hiding alongside the road with Russell Harrison while the other three Marines waited elsewhere for the deed to be done, the prosecution has charged.

Each of the six was arrested within hours of the killing after several of the defendants boasted to fellow Marines at Camp Pendleton that they had killed the man, according to testimony during the preliminary hearing.

Monday’s hearing included the replaying of television news reports of the murder and preliminary hearing. Each of the defendants watched the video replay of the news reports intently, and Laura Troiani closed her eyes when an image of bloodstains on the shoulder of the road filled the TV screen.

Jack Campbell, Troiani’s attorney, argued that the amount of newspaper coverage on the case would diminish the chance that jurors could be found who had not heard of the six-defendant murder case.

But Deputy Dist. Atty. Paul Pfingst argued that much of the newspaper coverage to date has focused on procedural matters and relatively little on the substance of the case itself. Furthermore, Pfingst argued, little has been written on the case since March, 1985, when most of the proceedings were closed to the press and public in order to help insure a fair trial.

Besides Troiani, 24, the defendants are Mark Schulz, 21, the accused triggerman; Russell Harrison, 21; Russell Sanders, 22; Jeff Mizner, 22, and Kevin Watkins, 20. Sanders did not seek a change of venue.

Pretrial motions will continue today with arguments by the defense that the state attorney general’s office should prosecute the case instead of the district attorney’s office because of animosity between defense and prosecuting attorneys, and arguments by an attorney for the Copley Press that the pretrial hearings be conducted in public.

Still to be decided is whether Schulz should be allowed to change his plea from innocent to not guilty by reason of insanity, and whether the six defendants should face trial together or separately.

The district attorney’s office has said it will seek the death penalty for all six defendants.

Indicative of the length of the pretrial process was a request aired Monday on behalf of the Oceanside Police Department that Carlo Troiani’s car, which had been held as evidence, be released from a private storage garage and turned over to his family because the department was hard-pressed financially to keep paying the storage cost.

Nares ordered each of the defense attorneys to give reasons next week why the car should not be released.