Fate of Murrieta man accused of killing girlfriend in hands of jury
Wade Griffin III, 41, is accused of killing 34-year-old Ever Council on March 19, 2007.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Jurors today began deliberating the fate of a former Marine from Murrieta who allegedly beat and strangled an ex-girlfriend, because she had left him and was seeing someone else.
Wade Griffin III, 41, is accused of killing 34-year-old Ever Council on March 19, 2007.
In addition to a charge of first-degree murder, Griffin faces two special circumstance allegations of lying in wait and committing murder during an attempted rape.
He faces life in prison without parole if convicted of all charges and allegations.
Jurors deliberated for a little more than an hour before calling it a day.
During the trial, Deputy District Attorney Brandon Smith tried to show that the defendant was waiting outside Council’s apartment in the 33000 block of Mapleton Avenue when she opened her door to leave for work.
“He knew Ever would never see him coming,” the prosecutor said.
Council and Griffin had broken up the month before, and she had started seeing another man, an active-duty Marine from Camp Pendleton, according to trial testimony.
“Ever moved on with her life and the defendant just could not let her go,” Smith told the jurors on the first day of trial.
Smith said the defendant caught the victim by surprise, pushed into her residence and stripped, beat and strangled her before ingesting two bottles of pills — Soma and Vicodin — and passing out, naked, on her body.
Photos displayed to the jury showed a gruesome scene of a bloodied and beaten woman lying naked on her apartment floor, only one sleeve of her suit jacket still on her arm.
Griffin was found unconscious atop the dead woman, police said.
Defense attorney Colleen Lawler called witnesses to try to prove that someone else was to blame for the killing, and that Griffin found Council lying dead on the floor.
Lawler tried to show that Griffin panicked and tried to clean her up but didn’t immediately call police, because he believed he would be blamed.
He took the pills because he was upset, Lawler contends.
According to trial testimony by the woman’s boyfriend, he was speaking to her on her cell phone as she prepared to leave for work when he heard her scream.
The boyfriend drove to her apartment, couldn’t get an answer at her door, then drove to the bank where she worked. When he didn’t see her there, he went back to her apartment and got the manager and a maintenance supervisor to open the door, according to testimony.
Maintenance supervisor Ricardo Zepeda testified that he was in the office when a man in military fatigues asked the manager of the complex to check on a woman in one of the apartments.
The three went to the unit and knocked and rang the bell twice before unlocking the door and deadbolt, Zepeda said.
The manager and Zepeda peeked in, then went a little farther in, and Zepeda spotted the bodies, he said. They immediately exited the apartment and called police, he testified.
The District Attorney’s Office opted not to seek the death penalty against Griffin.
Tags: Defense attorney Colleen Lawler, Deputy District Attorney Brandon Smith, Ever Council, Murrieta, SWRNN, Wade Griffin III
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