Man Facing Sentence for Fatal Overdose Retracts Guilty Plea

A 25-year-old Arleta man who was to be sentenced Friday for second-degree murder recanted his earlier plea of guilty to giving his 73-year-old benefactress a fatal dose of pain medication.

Marshall Louis Deerwester told San Fernando Superior Court Judge John H. Major that he was pressured into pleading guilty to killing Retha Pauline Terry in her Arleta home by his attorney, deputy public defender Tim Murphy. He said he wants to withdraw his plea and have the case tried.

To withdraw the guilty plea, Deerwester must convince the judge that he entered the plea under duress. Major ordered Deerwester to return to court Dec. 29 for further discussion.

“I am sorry that Retha Terry is dead, but I can’t come out and say that I killed her,” Deerwester said in court. He said he pleaded guilty because “Mr. Murphy told me I would be a fool not to take the deal.”

Deerwester was originally charged with first-degree murder, with the special allegations that he killed for financial gain and used poison to kill Terry on Oct. 11, 1987. Had he been convicted of those charges, he could have been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The two had met 2 1/2 years earlier at the First Baptist Church of Arleta, when Deerwester was living in a van parked in the Hansen Dam Recreation Area. Terry, who was recovering from a foot injury, agreed to let him live in her house in exchange for him doing chores, running errands and driving her around town.

The pair gradually grew closer and she rewrote her will in August, 1986, to name Deerwester and his younger brother as the beneficiaries of her $150,000 estate. Prosecutors said Deerwester deliberately gave Terry an overdose of medication after she told friends that she wanted to change her will a second time to leave the estate to her church.

On the eve of his trial in November, Deerwester accepted a deal offered by prosecutors and pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. Under the agreement, he was to have been sentenced Friday to 15 years to life in prison.

Murphy said in November that Deerwester accepted the plea offer because “he’s not a gambling person” and did not want to risk a lifetime prison sentence.

But Deerwester now says he wants to have a trial on the charges. In prior statements to police officers, Deerwester admitted giving Terry pain pills on the afternoon of her death, prosecutors said. But he said he did it because she was suffering tremendous pain from a variety of maladies, and he believed she wished to die to end her suffering.

Terry was overweight, had diabetes, a kidney problem and a bad foot. In statements to police, Deerwester said Terry, a church member, wanted to commit suicide but was afraid to do so because it was a sin.

Family members present for the sentencing hearing Friday were angered at Deerwester’s recantation.

Russell Llewellyn, Terry’s nephew, said in court Friday that he and Terry’s three surviving sisters believe, as do the prosecutors in the case, that Deerwester killed Terry to prevent her from rewriting her will. He said he and other family members saw her shortly before her death and that she did not appear to be suicidal or depressed.

In a statement to the court, Llewellyn, of San Bernardino, asked that Deerwester be sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

The family members are enmeshed in a legal battle to reinstate a will that Terry wrote before she knew Deerwester. That will left her estate to her oldest sister, Llewellyn said.