Ninja Attack
Poor William Overson must have died perplexed.
On the morning of April 12, 2004a Mondayhe took a break from his golf course job to run an errand. He told colleagues he’d be back in an hour and pointed his Mitsubishi Montero down a canyon road in the scenic Clairemont section of San Diego.
As he paused at a stop sign a few blocks from the golf course, a man dressed from head to toe in blacklike a ninja warrior, police saidsuddenly leaped from the nearby shrubs and began firing a semi-automatic rifle at Overson’s SUV. The gunfire drew the attention of residents of a condominium building on the canyon rim above, and they watched in disbelief as the tableau unfolded.
After the initial shots, Overson’s vehicle sped away from the assailant, who sprinted after it. But Overson apparently had been hit with gunfire; his vehicle soon slowed erratically. Up above, the onlookers shouted in vain at Overson to keep driving, that the ninja was chasing him. After a couple of blocks, the attacker caught up. He fired more shots, pulled Overson from his vehicle, climbed into the driver’s seat and sped away, leaving the victim in a bloody heap on Sam Snead Avenue.
Moments later, other witnesses saw Overson’s Mitsubishi screech into a parking lot at the Sunset Bowl, at Iroquois Avenue and Clairemont Drive, a half-mile from the shooting. A man inside the bowling alley saw the man in black frantically search inside the SUV. The witness said it seemed like he couldn’t find something that he expected to be there. After a brief pause, the ninja scrambled out of the SUV andstill carrying the rifleleaped into the back of a white Ford Ranger pickup truck, which left swiftly. The Mitsubishi was left with its motor running and windshield wipers flapping.
Overson, hit by two of the nine shots fired at him, was declared dead an hour later at a hospital, and detectives were left with a mystifying homicide. The attack did not seem to be a simple carjacking since the Mitsubishi was quickly abandoned. The getaway rendezvous indicated a carefully planned crime involving at least one accomplice.
It did not seem like a random attack. Other vehicles had passed the same spot moments before Overson without being set upon. But why would an attacker lie in wait at 9:00 a.m. at that particular location, and why would he target Overson?
“We were at a loss,” one San Diego cop said.
Overson, one day short of his 71st birthday, was general manager of Tecolote Canyon Golf Course, an inexpensive par-three course adjacent to a nature park about a mile east of traffic-clogged Interstate 5, owned by the city of San Diego. Police scrutinized Overson’s professional and personal life but found nothing to foretell violence. Overson had been born in Salt Lake City and raised in Washington. After a stint in the Army in the 1950s, he had built a successful life as a businessman in Burlington, Vt. Over the years, he had owned tire companies, a Dodge dealership and a real estate agency. He had two children, Mike and Kristin, and four stepsons. In the late 1980s, Overson and his second wife, Rosemary, traded New England’s climate for sunny San Diego. She worked as a pediatric hemotology/oncology nurse, and he dabbled in real estate.
Overson decided to retire early when he turned 60, but he wasn’t ready for a rocking chair. He had always been passionate about golf, and he took a job working a few mornings a week as a course ranger at Tecolote Canyon. The manager there recognized Overson’s business skills and his tireless and personable personality, and offered him a full-time job. That led to a position as general manager at Lomas Sante Fe Country Club, a posh, private tennis and golf facility in Solana Beach, north of San Diego. After six years there, Overson returned to Tecolote Canyon in 2001 as general manager.
He and Rosemary were on the verge of retiring again in the spring of 2004. They had sold their house in El Cajon and had purchased a motor home, planning to fulfill Overson’s lifelong dream of touring the country at a leisurely pace. But his dream was snuffed out by the bizarre ninja attack that April morning.
Police investigators assigned to the caseincluding Sgt. David Johnson and Detectives Joe Cristinzianzi and John Teffthad precious little to go on. The Mitsubishi yielded no physical evidence such as hair, fingerprints or blood, except that of the victim. The best clues were the slugs and shell casings, which came from a .223-caliber rifle, and the eyewitness description of the getaway vehicle, a white Ford Ranger with a shell on the back.
Police issued a public bulletin about the truck and set up a hotline. But there were thousands of Rangers registered in southern California, and the murder probe seemed to hang on a long, tedious review of those registration records. Then came a break.
In an unrelated drug investigation, police collared a man with a record of methamphetamine offenses. Facing prison, he offered a barter: the names of the Tecolote Canyon killers for a reduced sentence. The informant explained that he ran with a group of San Diego meth heads, and in that circle a rumor had sprung up of the possibility of an easy-money robbery.
Based on a tip from a golf course insider, the group had come to believe that the weekend receipts from Tecolote Canyon were taken to the bank on Monday mornings by the general manager, Overson. According to the tipster, Overson was believed to run the bank errand in his personal vehicle, the light-colored Mitsubishi Montero, and to do so unarmed. Overson typically was the first one in to work every day, often before sunrise, and it was believed he made the deposit run soon after the bank’s 9 a.m. opening. The snitch said Dennis Earls, 35, a local man with a record of drug arrests, had hatched a plan to relieve Overson of the cash, which the meth heads believed would total as much as $60,000.
The getaway driver was identified as Jimmy Derieux Jr., 39, a handsome tile installer with piercing blue eyes. Derieux grew up in the Clairemont neighborhood not far from the golf course. Derieux looked like a San Diego surfer dude, but he was in the process of flushing his life down the toilet, thanks to a meth jones. He had been arrested in the past on narcotics and weapons charges, and he found himself living that spring in a meth flophouse with his girlfriend and a collection of equally pathetic addicts.
The informant identified the killer as Montgomery (Fritz) Bruce, also 39. Bruce lived in the North Park neighborhood with a much older girlfriend and was known for zipping around the city on a sport bike-style motorcycle. Bruce affected a violent, skinhead personal stylecomplete with a shaved pate and a collection of tattoos. He had a record of violence and theft dating to his teen years, including one assault in 1986 in which he bit off part of another man’s ear. One cop described him as “evil.”
Jailhouse informants tell many storiessome true, some not. But this informant’s tale earned traction when investigators ran the three suspects’ names through the California Department of Motor Vehicles database. Jimmy Derieux, the records showed, owned a white Ford Ranger pickup.
Detectives impounded Derieux’s truck but found no evidence to incriminate him in the murder. He denied being in the vicinity of the golf course on the day of the slaying, even though his cell phone records indicated otherwise.
On May 25, six weeks after murder, Derieux was arrested on a meth charge not directly related to the Overson case. During an interview with the suspect, Detective Tefft suggested that he may have been involved in the murderperhaps as the getaway driver. This prompted a response from the suspect that was tantalizing close to an admission of guilt.
“I’m thinking that you fellows are pretty bright,” Derieux replied. “You’ve probably got a really good idea of what you think is going on. You might even be right on the money, you know. You might be. But right now at this point sitting here where I’m at, I’ve got to have an attorney.”
Two weeks later, four police teams served synchronized search warrants at the North Park home of Fritz Bruce, along with three other locations he was known to frequent. Under his bed they found the remnants of the barrel and firing chamber of a .223-caliber Ruger Mini-14 rifle, a lightweight semi-automatic. The gun was of the same caliber as that used to kill Overson, and the barrel had been cut in half. On June 11, Bruce was invited into the police interview room for a chat. But when detectives mentioned the Overson homicide, he clammed up and said he wanted an attorney.
On August 13, four months after the homicide, Deputy District Attorney Jim Koerber filed murder charges against Derieux and Bruce. (Earls, whom Koerber hoped to flip against his co-conspirators, was not publicly identified.) Although authorities were certain they had the killers, the case was far from locked up.
Detectives hoped that ballistics tests could confirm that the gun remnants found under Fritz Bruce’s bed were those of the weapon used to kill Overson.
Rifle barrels are grooved to increase a fired projectile’s distance and accuracy. This rifling creates distinct scratches and indentations on the fired slug, similar to a fingerprint. For more than a century, ballistics experts have been able to match slugs fired from the same weapon, and this form of evidence has been featured in courtroom testimony in countless criminal prosecutions. But the barrel of the .223 was not intact, which made testing it much more difficult.
Mary Jane Flowers, a San Diego police forensic criminologist, made a series of test fires through the lower portion of the barrel, but the results were inconclusive. She asked Timothy LaFrance, a renowned gunsmith who often works as a police consultant in difficult ballistics cases, to reassemble the barrel. LaFrance agreed to take on the risky work. Gun barrels are not meant to be cut then put back together. Every shot from a firearm is a controlled explosion, with expanding gas pushing a projectile down the barrel at great speeds. Any flaw in the barrel or the firing chamber can cause a potentially deadly fragmention of the gun metal.
LaFrance’s first attempt to reforge the Ruger’s barrel into one piece failed in its first test fire. He tried again and managed to stabilize the barrel long enough to make six successful test fires, pulling the trigger from a remote location, in case the gun blew apart. When LaFrance and Flowers compared the rifling marks on the test slugs to those from the murder, they concluded that without question the Ruger Mini-14 found under Bruce’s bed had been used to kill William Overson.
The ballistics evidence was revealed at a three-day preliminary hearing in November 2004 before Judge Kenneth So. By then, detectives had collected additional damning evidence against Bruce and Derieux, who had fallen into the trap of so many criminals: They could not keep their mouths shut.
One key witness for prosecutor Koerber was Bruce’s housemate, Deborah Clark, 53. Police had pressured her to testify by threatening to add her name to the murder conspiracy. She was granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for her testimony. Clark said Bruce left a pile of bloody black clothing with her on the day of the Overson murder. She said she washed and bleached the clothing, then took the articles to Mission Beach, where she burned them in a bonfire. Clark said Bruce had freely discussed all the details of the murder with her. “He admitted that he was the shooter and that somebody named Jimmy was the driver,” Clark said. “He said he had cut the gun up…that the evidence was gone.”
After Clark left the stand, Derieux’s tile company employer, Matthew Martine, added testimony that linked the second suspect to the murder. The two men were close friends, having grown up together in Clairemont. In the weeks after the Overson murder, Martine said, he became aware that police were following Derieux. He asked Derieux why, and Derieux admitted he was involved in the Tecolote Canyon case. “He said he had signed up for a robbery to make about $10,000,” Martine said. “He said he was just going to drive.”
After the preliminary hearing, Judge So concluded there was sufficient evidence to reasonably suspect the men were involved in the murder. He ordered them bound over for trial. A few weeks later, Koerber announced prosecutors would seek the death penalty against Bruce and life in prison without parole for Derieux.
Behind the scenes, Jimmy Derieux was said to be livid at Fritz Bruce for turning their planned easy-money robbery into a murder. Derieux began angling to save his own neck. But by then detectives had accumulated a small mountain of evidence, and Derieux wasn’t really needed to assure a conviction against Brucein part because police had already flipped the third conspirator, Dennis Earls. On Oct. 21, 2005, Derieux decided to cut his losses and plead guilty, following Earls’ lead. Under the plea agreements, Derieux was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison for second-degree murder. Earls was sentenced to six years for conspiracy.
Under his deal, Derieux agreed to give police a blow-by-blow account of the crime. He confirmed the informant’s story that the meth heads believed Overson would be carrying as much as $60,000 to the bank that morning. Derieux and Bruce had cased the golf club to identify Overson and his vehicle. On the chosen morning, Derieux dropped Bruce at the ambush position, then drove his Ranger to the top of the canyon, where he watched through binoculars as the crime took place.
He said the plan went bad when Overson refused to stop and surrender his vehicle after Bruce pointed the rifle at him. He said he watched in horror as his criminal partner began blazing away with the .223. Derieux said he considered fleeing but decided to complete his role in the crime by driving to the rendezvous point for the getaway. He had motivation: the $60,000 the men believed was in the SUV. Derieux said that he had exchanged angry words with Bruce that morning and that they had not spoken since the murder.
Fritz Bruce was scheduled to go on trial for first-degree murder one week after Derieux pleaded guilty. With a likely sentence of death looming on the other side of his trial, Bruce pleaded guilty on the day before jury selection was to begin. He admitted to a laundry list of felonies: murder, conspiracy, carjacking, robbery, lying in wait, murder during commission of a carjacking and murder during a robbery. In exchange, prosecutors dropped their pursuit of capital punishment.
At Bruce’s sentencing a few weeks later, Rosemary Overson got the opportunity to confront the man who took her husband away. “There’s no way to express what he’s done to me,” she said. “Everything we planned is gone. Everything that I thought was ahead of me is gone.” She said she had been forced to quit her nursing job, and she tearfully described the heartrending decision to sell the motor home that was to carry the couple into their dream retirement together. She glared at Bruce and said, “He thinks he’s such a big man, but look at him now.” She called him a “laughable, pitiable figure.”
In a letter, Overson’s son, Mike, said, “I wonder if you’ll ever understand what you’ve done, or if you even care?”
Prosecutor Koerber added, “William Overson was a man with family, friends and a life, and all he was to Montgomery Bruce was an obstaclean obstacle to getting money.”
The convict’s attorney, Lee Plummer, suggested that Bruce was a follower in the scheme, not the leader. Plummer said Bruce made “a horrible mistake.” Bruce’s step-sister, Joni Fabela, added tearful testimony on behalf of his family.
In the end, Judge So did what was expected of him. He handed down the sentence spelled out in the plea agreement, life in prison without possibility of parole, plus an additional 31 years to life.
The judge noted that a theme had developed in the pre-sentencing letters he received from Overson’s loved ones and friends. “In several of the letters, the word ‘senseless’ was used,” So said. “That is an apt description of this crime.”
Murder by the Book: William Overson
How senseless?
It turned out that William Overson was not going to the bank on the morning of the murder. He was not carrying a bag of cash receiptsthe thing for which Bruce frantically searched inside the Mitsubishi as the puzzled witness in the bowling alley watched. The San Diego meth heads, the gang that couldn’t think straight, got nothing in their supposed easy-money robbery of William Overson because he had left work that morning to get an oil change on his car.
