Obsessed by an Old Murder

Ventura County Deputy Dist. Atty. Ron Bamieh shook his head as he read the 5-year-old case file for the first time.

Why hadn’t anybody solved this murder?

In 1992, an attractive 20-year-old Santa Monica College student, Katrina Montgomery, disappeared after leaving a party in Oxnard. Her bloodstained truck was found abandoned on a winding mountain road. Within days, police had identified three suspects--all linked to a violent white power gang.

Unbelievable, Bamieh thought as he sorted through reports days after being assigned the case. This could have been solved right away if police had pressed harder.

But for various reasons, the case had languished. No body or murder weapon was found. Witnesses refused to cooperate. Jurisdictional issues arose between authorities in Los Angeles and Ventura counties. Now the clues were stone cold.

At 31, Bamieh was the new kid in the Ventura County district attorney’s major crimes unit. After graduating from law school in Chicago, he joined the civil division of the Justice Department in Washington. But his brash style seemed more in line with criminal law. He was hired in Ventura as a misdemeanor prosecutor, and he relentlessly pursued cases. He kept subpoenas in the glove compartment of his car and dug up his own witnesses before trial.

He’d never tried a murder case, but was just cocky enough to believe that with the right investigator--and he had one in mind--they could track down and put away Montgomery’s killer.

“We can do this,” he told Ventura County Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury a day after reading the file. “We need some resources, and we need some time.”

It would take four years.

Along the way, he and investigator Mark Volpei would take unprecedented steps to press their investigation.

“They were like bulldogs,” Bradbury said. “There was nothing that was going to stand in their way.”

Victim’s Pickup Found in Forest

Bamieh knew this much at the beginning:

Montgomery was a striking redhead who once dated a Ventura skinhead gang member, Mitch Sutton. On Nov. 28, 1992, she was expected at a family dinner in Santa Barbara. That afternoon police reported that her blue Toyota pickup had been found on Little Tujunga Road in the Angeles National Forest.

Montgomery’s mother, Katy, had called Katrina’s friends and acquaintances, hoping someone had seen her. One had.

Justin Merriman, 20, was an unemployed parolee and white power gang member whom Montgomery had met years earlier through Sutton. He said he had seen Katrina at a party thrown by gang leader Scott Porcho.

Police then identified three suspects who were at the Porcho party: Merriman and two San Fernando Valley skinheads, Ryan Bush and Larry Nicassio.

In his office Bamieh looked at their mug shots, scanning the expressionless faces for some clue. He felt certain one of them had killed Montgomery--maybe all of them.

“Three people will not remain silent forever,” he told himself. “Someone has to have talked.”

The trick was figuring out which one.

For that, Bamieh wanted Volpei, a former sex-crimes detective with the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department.

Volpei, 40, had a way of getting people to talk. More important, Bamieh knew that Volpei would stick with the case no matter what happened. He was the only investigator in the county as obsessive as Bamieh, the prosecutor thought.

Their strategy was simple: Look at the victim’s relationship to the suspects for a possible motive and figure out who would be the most likely to give up the truth.

They waded in slowly. Bamieh had four other homicide cases demanding his attention and a wife and baby daughter at home. But every day he stared at those photos, as well as a picture of Montgomery, and forced himself to put in extra hours, early in the morning or late at night.

One of those evenings, he grabbed a cardboard box crammed with documents. Fishing through the jumble of loose papers, he found a stack of letters that Merriman had written to Montgomery from prison. Katy Montgomery had given the letters to detectives. It appeared that no one had bothered to look at them.

Bamieh had plans to play basketball later that night with some other prosecutors, but kicked off his shoes and started reading.

I know more about you from letters and them phone conversations than from partying with you and such. Only thing, just handle your booze in the future. I’ve had the rundown on your drunkenness. Pretty impressive, I might add, but hopefully that lip doesn’t turn on ol’ pops. It would get ugly, real ugly.

Bamieh studied the paper. The letter was undated. But it fit like a puzzle piece into a pattern of increasingly sexual letters Merriman wrote to Montgomery from 1990 to early 1992, when he was paroled.

I do give you my humble apologies for the crude and rude but lewd sexual gestures I was putting out during our pleasant stay here. Was it as good for me as it was for you? I’m telling you I walked back to my building with a gang of unused Nazi babies in my pants, and that wasn’t the half of it. I could swear to this day they were all screaming your name while wanting to be planted.

There was more. By the final letter, Merriman’s tone had changed. He was frustrated, angry. He accused Montgomery of stringing him along.

What do you want from me? That [stuff] about you need me for a friend just doesn’t cut the mustard anymore. . . . Get serious, sugar.

By the time Bamieh left the office that night, Justin Merriman had risen to the top of his suspect list.

‘We’ll Get the People’ Who Killed Her

Days later, Bamieh met the Montgomerys for the first time. After nearly five years they knew little more than they did in 1992.

Katy Montgomery showed the lawyer her daughter’s room. Katrina’s brushes still had red hair in them. Bamieh thought of his own child, not even a year old.

“We’ll get the people that killed your daughter,” he told Montgomery.

Weeks later, Bamieh huddled with Volpei and veteran investigator Dennis Fitzgerald, who had worked the case before them.

What we need are admissions--some crack in the wall of silence shielding these guys, they agreed. Let’s lean on Nicassio. He was the youngest suspect and the most likely to have talked.

In November 1997, they wired one of Nicassio’s former girlfriends and arranged for her to meet him in a Ventura motel room. The plan was for her to get him talking about the murder. And despite a few glitches, it worked.

“Don’t say a word,” Nicassio told the woman. “Otherwise me and Ryan and Justin are going to go down.”

Bamieh told police to pick up Nicassio. He refused to talk. The prosecutor charged him with murder. A few weeks later, the investigative team launched a second wire operation--this time focusing on Merriman.

Bamieh had spent several hours with Ventura police detectives who tracked the city’s gangs. Merriman was well known to them.

Tall with sandy-brown hair, Merriman grew up in a small neighborhood of clapboard and stucco houses along the highway entering the Ojai Valley. His mother and adoptive father ran a paving company.

Merriman had hung around a small group of Ventura teenagers who, feeling cut off from the west-side Latino gang and the surfer group at the beach, formed their own gang. They dressed in combat boots and listened to punk music; some, including Merriman, espoused white supremacist beliefs.

At 15, Merriman vandalized a Jewish temple. At 17, he beat a black student with a chair during a class at a juvenile detention center. Three weeks shy of his 18th birthday, he attacked a correctional officer and was sent to Corcoran State Prison in the San Joaquin Valley.

It was there he started the correspondence with Montgomery.

To get at Merriman, Bamieh and Volpei decided to use a former skinhead named Mike Wozny as an informant.

Volpei wanted to put him in a “bait car” equipped with a hidden video camera--a technique used to nab auto thieves.

Bamieh liked the idea. Merriman trusted Wozny and might let his guard down enough to talk about the killing. There was only one problem: Wozny was a state prison inmate with several months left on his sentence.

Bamieh knew that prison officials would be reluctant to cut loose the inmate, who had been temporarily transferred to County Jail, for an undercover operation. So they didn’t ask. They just did it.

On Dec. 18, Volpei walked the informant out a back door of the jail. Tailed by a dozen undercover officers and carrying a cellular phone linked directly to investigators, he went to Merriman’s condo and persuaded him to take a drive.

Merriman looked strung out. His head lolled back against the seat, his eyes closed. Then he began to talk about the Montgomery investigation, accusing Nicassio of talking to prosecutors.

“Are they going to be able to find the body, dude?” Wozny asked.

“I don’t know,” Merriman responded.

From his seat in a car parked 100 yards away, Bamieh felt that they were getting close. It had been six months. He’d invested countless hours. Finally, Merriman was talking.

Then it fell apart.

Unexpectedly, Merriman picked up the informant’s phone and heard a strange voice on the line--Volpei’s. He became agitated and started searching the car for a wire.

Bamieh’s heart raced. Wozny knew that if the situation turned any dicier, all he had to do was say, “It’s a bad day,” and officers would rush in. They waited. And the informant talked his way out.

For Bamieh and Volpei, it was worse than a bad day. They’d spooked the prime suspect. Merriman was onto them.

Wiring the Suspect’s Cell

Bamieh and Volpei felt their luck change in January 1998 when Merriman landed in Ventura County Jail on suspicion of resisting arrest. Bamieh wanted to wire the cell, a technique he’d read about at a homicide symposium.

It had never been done in Ventura County and some district attorney’s investigators said it couldn’t be done.

They did it anyway, running a wire from the plumbing in Merriman’s cell to a tiny room in the Sheriff’s Department building next door. They planted an informant with Merriman and monitored the conversation for five days. Merriman revealed nothing. The operation was a bust.

Tempers flared in the district attorney’s office. Some investigators wanted to scuttle the investigation. Bamieh refused to back down.

During a meeting with his supervisors, he asked for permission to cut a deal with Nicassio. “He’s our ticket,” he insisted. Bradbury gave the go-ahead.

Three weeks later, Nicassio signed an agreement with the district attorney. He would tell them everything and they would reduce the charge to manslaughter.

“Where is she?” Bamieh asked after Nicassio signed the papers. He had a search team standing by. He wanted to find her body that day.

We buried her at Sunset Farms, Nicassio answered, a rural campground area in the hills above Sylmar.

Bamieh knew the area. It had since been developed into an industrial park. The chances of finding Montgomery dimmed. He looked at Nicassio. Tell us what happened, he said.

Merriman called her after the party and asked her to come over to his mother’s condo, Nicassio began. She arrived about 5 a.m., changed into sweat clothes and climbed into bed with Merriman. Nicassio heard them whispering. Merriman wanted to have sex. She didn’t. He slapped her and began to rape her.

Nicassio pretended not to hear the sexual assault, which seemed to last for hours. When Merriman was done, Montgomery got up and put on her clothes. As she was tying her shoes, Merriman walked over and stabbed her in the neck with a knife. She cried out, rolled into a ball on the floor and begged him not to hurt her. Merriman reached into a dresser drawer, grabbed a pipe wrench and beat her over the head. Nicassio turned away. When he looked back, Merriman had a knife to her throat.

Later, Merriman forced them to help dispose of the body, he said. They put her in the bed of her truck, drove to Sunset Farms and then ditched the truck. Later, he and Ryan Bush, a fellow skinhead, went back to bury her.

Bamieh tried to digest what Nicassio was saying. The story made sense. But he didn’t trust Nicassio for a minute. They needed corroboration.

That day, Nicassio led authorities to what had been Sunset Farms. But construction crews had moved tons of soil. He couldn’t find the place where they buried her.

On the car ride back to Ventura, Bamieh turned to him.

“You’re going to have to corroborate your statement, Larry,” he said. “You’re going to have to put on a wire and talk to Justin.”

A Risky but Vital Undertaking

With a recorder hidden in the crotch of his jail pants and microphones tucked near his belt, Nicassio walked uncomfortably into a maximum-security holding tank beneath the jail on April 22, 1998, and faced Merriman.

It was a risky operation, not unlike walking into a lion’s den with a raw steak taped to his groin. If an inmate caught him wearing a wire, he’d get beaten--or worse.

Bamieh wasn’t sympathetic. If you get caught, he told him, curl up on the floor and protect the equipment.

Knowing that Merriman suspected Nicassio of talking to them, Bamieh created a fake probation report to indicate that Nicassio was not cooperating.

When Nicassio entered the holding tank, Merriman grabbed the report from his hands. Then he told Nicassio he would make arrangements for them to receive simultaneous jail visits. Once in the visiting area, they could talk without the guards noticing.

During the next eight months, Volpei wired Nicassio during those visits and captured hours of hushed conversations in which Merriman tried to talk him out of cooperating with the investigation.

On Dec. 1, Bamieh went before the grand jury to seek a murder indictment. If Nicassio was telling the truth, they were going after the right guy, he figured. A week later, after a full day before the grand jury, Bamieh walked back to his office and found a photocopy of Merriman’s booking picture on his desk. In the margins, there were excerpts from a wire operation. Attached was a yellow sticky note from Volpei. “Call me,” it read.

Bamieh grabbed the phone and reached Volpei at his desk. It was a good day, the investigator told him. That morning, he’d gone to the jail and noticed two women waiting to visit Merriman and Nicassio. Volpei ran to his office, grabbed the recording equipment and quickly wired up Nicassio. The microphones were now sewn into the jail shirt, and that day they captured the best recording of the entire investigation.

“Don’t make a statement,” Merriman told Nicassio, reminding him of his role in the killing. “You hauled that [expletive].”

In Bamieh’s mind, it was over.

Defendant Tries to Have Witnesses Killed

The grand jury returned a 25-count criminal indictment in January 1999, charging Merriman with murder, resisting arrest and the rapes of two other women whom Volpei had persuaded to come forward.

Merriman responded by trying to have witnesses killed. He wrote letters, identifying the “rats” who’d testified against him, to gang members in state prison--men with nicknames like Ogre and Demon who were serving time for deadly assault and other crimes.

After jail officials flagged one of the letters, authorities searched Merriman’s cell and found a list of witness names scrawled on a piece of paper, hidden inside a mattress.

This is never going to end, Bamieh thought.

He and Volpei created a chart of imprisoned skinheads to determine who would be the most likely to help Merriman. Then they executed a series of search warrants, raiding prison cells and examining Merriman’s mother’s condo.

Bamieh went back to the grand jury and got another indictment against Merriman--this time for witness intimidation and conspiracy. He also went after Merriman’s mother and two other women who helped get the letters out.

Over the next year, two of the three women pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges. Merriman’s mother, 53-year-old Beverlee Sue Merriman, fought the charges but later pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy.

Justin Merriman’s trial began in January 2001. A jury convicted him in February and in March recommended the death penalty.

Before closing arguments in the penalty phase, Merriman insisted on taking the stand and gave a stiff-armed Nazi salute as he took the oath. He denied killing Montgomery and blamed his defense lawyers for his conviction.

“You saw no remorse; you saw a coward,” Bamieh told jurors in his closing argument.

Three days later, Bamieh headed to Malibu with his family for a private memorial service for Katrina Montgomery. Her family had waited nine years to lay a body to rest, but now it was time to say goodbye.

It was time for Bamieh, too.

After four years, the case had taken its toll. He’d lost 17 pounds, strained his marriage and spent long nights and weekends with Volpei rather than his 4-year-old daughter and a second baby girl.

But at the memorial, holding his own daughter on his lap and listening to Montgomery’s relatives share stories about her life, Bamieh knew it had been time well spent.

“Nothing has moved me like that since I’ve been here,” he said. “Afterward, my wife said she now understood why I had been so passionate about the case.”

A day later, the jury returned with a recommendation for execution, and the judge set a May 1 sentencing date.

Bamieh packed away the last of the case file, but kept the picture of Montgomery on his desk.