Man Charged in Scheme to Kill Witness : Courts: The intended victim was due to testify against the Costa Mesa resident in a grand theft trial set for this month.

LAGUNA NIGUEL —  A Costa Mesa man charged Wednesday in a murder-for-hire scheme told a police informant he had contemplated the killing for nine months, offered to supply plastic explosives to execute the job and said just dying was too good for his intended victim, according to court records.

Municipal Judge Ronald P. Kreber scheduled an April 14 arraignment on a charge of solicitation of murder for Eric Vincent Holt, 35, an ex-Marine and the owner of a Volkswagen repair and towing shop. If convicted, Holt could serve a maximum of nine years in jail.

Holt--a short, dark-haired man with a black mustache--appeared briefly in South County court Wednesday in his bright orange Orange County Jail jumpsuit but did not offer a plea. He was ordered held in jail in lieu of $250,000 bail.

Police say the man Holt wanted killed, Eugene Soliz, 35, also of Costa Mesa, was scheduled to be the chief witness against him in a grand theft trial set for April 27. About a year ago, Holt was arrested on suspicion of stealing 50 palm trees and decorative rocks valued at about $40,000 from a Santa Ana Heights storage yard after Soliz blew the whistle.

Rene Grivel, a San Juan Capistrano landscaper who owned the trees which were stolen, said he had been mystified by the disappearance of the palms, which he had stored in large wooden planter boxes. Then he got a telephone call from Soliz, who claimed to know who had taken the palms.

Soliz later led Grivel and police to Holt’s Center Street home, where investigators found the stolen trees. In a search of Holt’s home, police also found 19 military “tracer” bullets and a stolen law enforcement badge, police records indicate.

About a week after the raid, Holt turned himself in and was booked on suspicion of grand theft of the palm trees as well as on misdemeanor charges for the contraband.

The police report shows Holt’s brushes with the law go back many years. He spent two years in the California Youth Authority as a juvenile. In 1986, Holt shot and killed a teen-ager driving away from his repair shop. Holt told investigators that he suspected the 15-year-old victim of stealing wheels from his shop, and he was never indicted.

Records also depict him as an eight-year veteran of a Marine reconnaissance detail who was handy with explosives and had “laughed about” his detonation of a bomb in an Alpha Beta parking lot several years ago, a crime Costa Mesa police never solved.

“He’s a strange guy,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. M. Marc Kelly. “He keeps digging a deeper and deeper hole for himself.”

Holt was arrested just before 11 a.m. Monday in the parking lot in front of Chick’s Sporting Goods on Alicia Parkway in Laguna Hills. It was there that Holt and undercover sheriff’s investigator William Davis, sitting in Holt’s gray Isuzu Trooper, produced a Polaroid picture of Soliz and concocted the plan to kill him for $5,000, according to the police report.

In a discussion recorded by investigators on tape via a hidden microphone, Holt said that Soliz had worked for him helping drywall his home and had participated in the theft of the palms. But when Holt found out that Soliz, whom he had known for 20 years, had turned on him and was going to testify, Holt got mad and wanted Soliz “off’d,” according to the report.

When Davis asked if Soliz should be told at the time of his murder that Holt was the one responsible, Holt said he would not mind, according to the report.

While the two men sat in the car, Holt talked about how the murder could be carried out, according to the report. He suggested that Davis lure Soliz to a remote job site for the murder, or possibly commit a drive-by shooting on a motorcycle with a full helmet to hide his face, the police report said.