Jury Frees S.F. Man Accused of Revenge Murder of Man Tied to Fiancee’s Death

Bothered by the credibility of the prosecution’s two star witnesses, an Orange County jury on Monday found San Francisco accountant Richard Dale Wilson innocent of charges that he murdered a Manhattan Beach man four years ago to avenge the death of his socialite fiancee.

The 47-year-old Wilson let out a huge sigh of relief as the jury returned the verdict, immediately embracing his two attorneys. Jubilant, he shouted to jurors and court personnel minutes later as he left the courtroom: “It’s the last you’ll see of me!”

Tale Began in 1983

Freed of the legal problems that have dominated his life for the last year, Wilson said he now plans to return to his tax accounting practice and to marry his current fiancee, legal secretary Joyce Seymour of San Francisco.

The verdict, reached after two days of deliberations, culminated a four-year saga that began with the 1983 beating death of San Francisco businesswoman Joan McShane Mills, who was then Wilson’s fiancee, and included courtroom tales of drugs, sex, revenge and alcoholism.

Jeffrey Molloy Parker, 36, of Manhattan Beach was gunned down in Costa Mesa in 1983, two days before he was to stand trial for allegedly beating Mills to death after a night of drinking, drugs and sex in Beverly Hills. Police, acting just last year on an anonymous phone tip, arrested Wilson and prosecutors charged him with killing Parker out of revenge.

But Wilson’s defense attorneys, in a courtroom showing that was praised by jurors, described the evidence as circumstantial and placed Wilson in San Francisco at the time of Parker’s killing.

And the attorneys painted the prosecution’s two key witnesses--Wilson’s own brother and brother-in-law, who claimed that Wilson admitted the killing to them--as liars and alcoholics.

The jury, finding the testimony of those two witnesses “convoluted” and “tainted,” saw no basis to find Wilson guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, jury foreman John R. Straton Jr. of Mission Viejo said after the verdict.

The credibility of those witnesses “kind of fell apart” under tough cross-examination, said juror Mark Beery of Newport Beach.

Added a third juror, Ed Byrd of Yorba Linda: “We tried to build (prosecutor Douglas H.) Woodsmall’s case and examine it piece by piece, and it just wasn’t there.”

Evidence Defended

Nonetheless, Woodsmall, an Orange County deputy district attorney, defended the strength of the evidence against Wilson and his reliance on the testimony of the defendant’s brother, Okel Wilson, and brother-in-law, Robert C. Hale, who were tarred by defense attorneys for emotional and alcohol problems.

“It doesn’t help that they had those problems,” a disappointed Woodsmall said after the verdict, “but they were the key witnesses so you had to put them on the stand.”