Trial Wrap-Up in ’79 Slaying Starts

Circumstantial evidence is enough to send a man to death in a 25-year-old case, a Riverside County prosecutor told jurors Tuesday as both sides began closing statements in the murder trial of convicted child molester James Crummel.

Prosecutor Bill Mitchell methodically led the jury through the evidence linking Crummel to the killing of 13-year-old James “Jamie” Trotter in 1979. The prosecutor argued that it revealed beyond a reasonable doubt that Crummel abducted the boy -- both were Costa Mesa residents -- and molested him off Ortega Highway in Riverside County “to enjoy his sadistic sexual pleasures,” then killed him “to avoid detection and going back to prison.”

The teen vanished after telling his mother he would ride a city bus to school. In 1990, Crummel told authorities he had found human bones while hiking near Ortega Highway. Six years later, the bones, and teeth fitted with braces, were identified as the boy’s. The next year, authorities who had researched Crummel’s criminal record charged him with molestation and murder of the boy, making him eligible for the death penalty.

Crummel’s attorney, Stuart Sachs, said in his closing statement: “A man with his background finding those bones, and then contacting the police: Why would he do that? All indications are that [Crummel] did stumble upon those bones. If his motive was to cover up the crime, why turn the bones in? It doesn’t make one bit of sense.”

Addressing the question of why, Mitchell told the jury, “We can never understand the sick, twisted, perverted mind like the defendant’s, and we can never understand the workings of a guilty conscience. We can understand he did not stumble upon these bones while hiking.”

Since 1975, Mitchell said, Crummel had made documented visits to the area, and witnesses testified that Crummel enjoyed having sex in “wooded, remote areas.”

Pointing to the pale, balding 60-year-old defendant, Mitchell said the victim “was taken there by this man, was assaulted there by this man and was murdered there by this man.”

Crummel, serving a life sentence for molesting a teenager, had “a lifelong habitual desire to have sex with young boys,” Mitchell said. And after two previous convictions for child molestation, the prosecutor said, Crummel knew it was critical to silence his victims.

Mitchell read a statement Crummel made to a Wisconsin probation officer after one such conviction, in which the victim was beaten but survived: “I knew if he died, he couldn’t tell.”

Said Mitchell: “Crummel went to prison [in Wisconsin], and he should’ve stayed there the rest of his stinking life, but they let him out, and by the mid-1970s he was living in Costa Mesa.”

The defense questioned the credibility of a prisoner who testified that Crummel told him in 2001 that he smothered James Trotter. The witness testified that Crummel said he was high on cocaine and alcohol on the day of the teen’s death and that he killed him after having sex with him because he believed the teen would report the abuse.

“Why would James Crummel confess such a thing to a stranger, in prison?” defense attorney Mary Ann Galante asked jurors.