Suspect in 1992 Killing Was Protected by Fellow Skinheads, Lawyer Says

The 1992 slaying of a Santa Monica City College student went unsolved for years because members of a violent Ventura skinhead gang lied to police to protect fellow white supremacist Justin Merriman, a prosecutor charged Thursday.

During opening statements, Deputy Dist. Atty. Ron Bamieh told jurors that Merriman, 28, slit Katrina Montgomery’s throat because he feared she would tell police he had raped her at his Ventura condominium.

For the next eight years, the prosecutor said, Merriman and his fellow gang members lied and threatened witnesses to shield him from prosecution.

“The terror these people caused in the community is the reason why nobody would cooperate, the reason why nobody would come forward and the reason why a family has never been able to bury their daughter,” Bamieh said.

The trial, expected to last a month, began Thursday in Ventura County Superior Court. Defense attorneys plan to present their opening statement in court this morning.

Bamieh’s account to jurors began with Merriman’s flight from police on Jan. 30, 1998, when they saw him illegally riding a bike on the sidewalk.

“You will find out that he was running, not because he had a bike on the sidewalk,” Bamieh said. “The defendant was running because of a 20-year-old woman who disappeared in 1992.”

That was Montgomery, a student and waitress at Jerry’s Famous Deli, who had known the defendant while she was a teenager in Ventura.

The two corresponded while Merriman spent two years in prison for assault. The letters show he wanted to have a sexual relationship with her after his release, but she rejected the idea, the prosecutor said.

Months later, Bamieh said, Merriman met Montgomery at a party in Oxnard hosted by skinhead gang leader Scott Porcho, whose wife was a friend of Montgomery’s.

Afterward, Merriman, Larry Nicassio and Ryan Bush went to his condominium in Ventura. Montgomery showed up at the home shortly thereafter to spend the night.

Merriman raped Montgomery in front of the two men, Bamieh said. He then stabbed her in the neck, saying to Nicassio and Bush he didn’t want her to “rat” on him, the attorney said.

Then Merriman beat Montgomery on the head with a pipe wrench and slit her throat, Bamieh said.

Merriman allegedly told the two men to bury the body. It has never been found.

Bamieh told jurors that investigators learned the truth in the summer of 1997 when they began to re-interview gang members and other witnesses who eventually implicated Merriman.

Prosecutors are now seeking the death penalty against Merriman, who was indicted by a grand jury on rape and murder charges in January 1999. Four months later, he was indicted a second time on conspiracy charges for allegedly using a statewide network of white-power gang members to try to have witnesses killed.

In addition to those charges, Merriman is accused of raping two women in 1994 and 1995, and assaulting police officers during a SWAT team standoff before his arrest in January 1998. He was held in connection with that incident from January 1998 until the indictment a year later.

The charges against Nicassio and Bush were reduced in exchange for their testimony against Merriman.