Skinhead Is Found Guilty of First-Degree Murder

A Ventura County jury Tuesday convicted a 28-year-old skinhead gang member of first-degree murder with special circumstances for the 1992 murder of Santa Monica College student Katrina Montgomery, making him eligible for the death penalty.

Justin Merriman rocked in his chair and showed no emotion as the verdict was read on the murder charge with the special finding that the killing occurred after Montgomery was raped.

Merriman faces execution by lethal injection or life in prison without possibility of parole. Testimony in the sentencing phase is set to begin Feb. 27.

Merriman was also convicted on 18 additional counts, including conspiracy, witness intimidation and the rapes of two other women.

Seated a few feet away, Katy Montgomery, Katrina’s mother, burst into tears as the verdicts were read in the courtroom.

It was a moment she and her husband, Mike, had prayed for, the couple said in a statement.

“We will live with the pain of losing Trina for the rest of our lives,” the couple wrote. “But it helps to have this part of it finally settled.”

After sitting through four weeks of often-harrowing testimony, the jury of nine men and three women took two days to find Merriman guilty of all but one rape charge, which prosecutors conceded in closing arguments they hadn’t proved.

Katrina Montgomery disappeared on Nov. 28, 1992, after leaving a party in Oxnard. Her bloodstained pickup truck was found abandoned in the Angeles National Forest near Sylmar the same day, but her body has never been found.

For years, the investigation went nowhere. Then a series of breaks led authorities to Merriman, who was indicted on murder charges in January 1998.

During the trial before Superior Court Judge Vincent J. O’Neill Jr., prosecutors presented evidence to show Merriman wanted a relationship with Montgomery, a 20-year-old who grew up in Ventura.

When she spurned him, witnesses said, he raped her, stabbed her in the neck and beat her with a wrench.

Two San Fernando Valley skinhead gang members, Larry Nicassio and Ryan Bush, testified they saw the attack while spending the night at Merriman’s home but were too scared to intervene.

Nicassio told jurors he stared out a window, but turned to see Merriman holding a knife to Montgomery’s throat, asking: “Where’s her jugular?”

In closing arguments last week, defense attorneys admitted Merriman had killed Montgomery but insisted it had been a rash, unintentional act. But Deputy Dist. Atty. Ron Bamieh told jurors there was clear evidence of premeditation.

Merriman killed Montgomery because he feared she would “rat” on him, the prosecutors argued, suggesting the case went unsolved because Merriman used a network of white-power gang members to protect him.

Bamieh praised jurors for finding Merriman guilty.

“Obviously they thought the evidence was as compelling as we did,” he said.

As Montgomery’s relatives embraced and cried in the court hallway, defense attorney Willard Wiksell expressed disappointment at the verdict.

“We felt there was reasonable doubt in the testimony of the two informants, Nicassio and Bush, but the jury saw it differently,” Wiksell said.

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Times correspondent Jenifer Ragland contributed to this story.