Dismembered Corpse Won’t Result in Murder Case

Three months after fugitive murder suspect Karen Lee Huster was found in a San Fernando Valley apartment with the dismembered corpse of her 73-year-old lover, Los Angeles police detectives say that they have abandoned their homicide investigation of her because the coroner’s office was unable to determine the man’s cause of death.

Huster, who had been in Los Angeles’s Twin Towers jail since her arrest Nov. 10, was extradited earlier this month to Washington County, Ore., where she remains in custody. The 41-year-old is facing murder charges in the death of her daughter Elisabeth, who disappeared four years ago at the age of 10.

The child’s body has never been found, however, and prosecutors are facing the difficult task of getting a murder conviction without a body.

“I don’t know how they intend to prove it without any physical evidence,” said Huster’s attorney Tim Dunn.

Huster’s case has garnered intense media coverage in Oregon and nationwide. After the dissolution of her marriage, she served jail time from 1997 to 1999 for custodial interference after refusing to tell a judge the whereabouts of her daughter. After she was indicted in April 2000 by an Oregon grand jury on charges of murdering the child, authorities lost track of her until she was found by Los Angeles police in James Cameron’s Canoga Park home.

Cameron’s remains were discovered in two refrigerators in the apartment. Huster later told investigators she had dismembered Cameron after he died of a heart attack.

According to LAPD Det. Mike Oppelt, coroner’s examiners were unable to determine if Cameron died before the mutilation or because of it. Without such a finding, Oppelt said, there is not much of a case.

Although mutilation of a corpse is a felony in California, prosecutors here did not file such charges because they didn’t want them to delay the Oregon murder trial, said Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles district attorney’s office.

But the grisly circumstances and Huster’s involvement may come into play in her Oregon trial. Washington County prosecutors have requested material from the LAPD investigation into Cameron’s death, and Oppelt surmised that they might use it to show how Huster is alleged to have done away with her daughter’s body.

Dunn, who expects Huster to plead not guilty, said he will fight to have thrown out any evidence from the Cameron case--which he calls “unfairly prejudicial and irrelevant.”