Defense in Cosby Slaying Says Confession Letters Are Forged

Citing what they say are forged confession letters, defense lawyers have asked Los Angeles Superior Court to free the man convicted of killing the son of Bill Cosby.

Alternate Public Defender Henry J. Hall, in a petition prepared earlier this week, said that the informant, convicted forger David Gomez, admitted during an unrelated trial that he fabricated the jailhouse letters.

In those letters, Mikhail H. Markhasev allegedly admitted to Gomez that he killed Ennis Cosby in January 1997 in a botched robbery of Skirball Center Road.

Markhasev, who has denied writing the letters, was convicted Aug. 11 of murder and sent to prison for life without parole.

Spokespeople for the offices of Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti and state Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren, who handles criminal appeals from state courts, would not comment. Efforts to reach Hall were unsuccessful.

Prosecutors never called Gomez to testify, and a judge rejected Hall’s request to call him.

Prosecutors said the letters contained details about the case that only the murderer could know and called a handwriting expert who said the letters matched Markhasev’s handwriting. Prosecutors never explained why Markhasev allegedly wrote to Gomez.

Although Hall tried vigorously to shake the expert’s testimony, he did not offer his own expert to rebut the prosecution’s.

Several jurors acknowledged the importance of the letters.

Hall says in his petition that Gomez forged the letters to earn $10,000 by selling them to the National Enquirer and to curry favor with prosecutors in his own pending case.

But Gomez’s cooperation did not do him much good in his case: He received a 91-year sentence on convictions for forgery, robbery, rape and other felonies in March.

After his and Markhasev’s convictions, Gomez was called to testify in another case on Oct. 21, in which he provided letters that he told prosecutors he had received from a man accused of murder.

But on the stand, Gomez said he fabricated the letters in that case and Markhasev’s case.

“I was just involved in the Markhasev case,” he said in answering a prosecutor’s questions. “If you read the National Enquirer, the forged letters, the Markhasev letters, I did those. Ten-thousand dollars from the National Inquirer. I did those. I’m a dirty bird.”

The disposition of that October case could not be determined Thursday, and it was not clear why prosecutors called Gomez to testify. But transcripts indicate they were surprised by his admissions.

Although Hall did not explain how he thinks Gomez obtained the details of Cosby’s killings to write letters of confession, he suggests that Gomez received information about the case from a private investigator. A jail guard caught the investigator trying to slip the papers to Gomez during a visit.