Jury Hears Closing Arguments in Murder-for-Hire Trial

Editor's note: The man referred to in this article as John Canvin was incorrectly identified in previous articles as John Camden. Fountain Valley Patch regrets this error.

Lawyers for the prosecution and defense in the attempted-murder and conspiracy trial of Mary Sharpski, Michael Shores and Antonio Ortega used their closing arguments Monday to trade barbs with one another and offer alternate theories to the crime.

In a not-so-subtle jab at Ortega's attorney, Derek Bercher, prosecuting attorney Lynda Fernandez cited the significant DNA evidence against Ortega and challenged the jury to weigh it against what she called the "some other dude did it" defense.

Ortega, 25, of Santa Ana, along with Sharpski, 48, and Shores, 40, both of Fountain Valley, are charged with plotting to kill Frank Sharpski, known to friends and family as Rick, in March 2009. As part of the alleged conspiracy with Shores and Sharpski, Ortega is accused of attacking Rick Sharpski with a machete in an alley outside of the couple’s home and leaving him to die on the morning of March 3, 2009, fracturing his skull, severing a thumb and fingers, partly severing his nose and causing several other machete wounds.

Fernandez portrayed Ortega as someone "obsessed with knives and swords" who was also comfortable using large blades like the one used in the attack because of his job as a meat clerk. She showed jurors Ortega's booking photo as she reminded them of Rick Sharpski's statements to police that his attacker looked like the Grim Reaper.

"Picture this face in a hooded sweatshirt in the pre-dawn hours with a giant machete, hacking at you," she said. "The Grim Reaper description is pretty accurate."

Fernandez also fired the latest volley and what has been a recurring chicken-or-egg exchange between her and Bercher regarding Ortega's former girlfriend, April Bivens. Fernandez argued that Bivens, who testified that she knew about the attack and that she helped Ortega clean a cut on his finger and burn his clothes after it was carried out, has no reason to lie because she's immune from prosecution. Bercher has tried to prove throughout the case that Bivens is a habitual liar who will say anything in the interest of self-preservation and that her immunity agreement makes her all the more worthy of scrutiny.

Fernandez also continued to punch holes in Ortega's explanations for the various evidence against him in the case. In response to Ortega's testimony that he had a nosebleed the night before the attack near the alley where it took place, she argued that the blood found by crime scene investigators after the attack was fresh. In response to his testimony that he and Shores merely fantasized about killing Rick Sharpski for the purposes of including it in a book they were working on, she asked, "Where's the book?" She also wondered aloud to the jury why Ortega, as he testified, would ask Bivens to dispose of his drug stash when he was under arrest for attempted murder. Finally, she dismissed Bercher's theory about the so-called Johns as irrelevant because, she said, all of the evidence points to Ortega, also asking why Canvin wasn't presented as a witness or brought in as a suspect.

Fernandez also focused more intently than at any other point in the trial on cementing the involvement of Shores and Mary Sharpski. She argued that Shores had encouraged Ortega to carry out the attack by offering him $5,000 and that he helped him carry out the attack by providing him with a key to the apartment complex and by giving him information about Rick Sharpski's schedule and route. She also outlined what she sees as Shores' ultimate motive—his desire to rescue Mary Sharpski and her children from Rick Sharpski.

"Mr. Shores is essentially a man who tried to steal another man's family," Fernandez said. "He wanted this family."

In arguing for Mary Sharpski's conviction, Fernandez focused on what she called Sharpski's "jailhouse admissions" to Bree Pendley, who testified that Mary Sharpski had told her about hiring a hit man to kill her husband while the two were awaiting arraignment in a holding cell at the West Justice Center in Westminster. Fernandez reminded the jury that Pendley was offered no deal in her own cases.

Fernandez also argued that, while Mary Sharpski might claim she never wanted to kill her husband, she certainly wanted him to die, and that, in addition to the note she allegedly provided to Ortega, she also shared Shores' motive of wanting to start a new life in Wyoming living with her husband's brother, an unlikely scenario if she'd left Rick Sharpski for another man.

"It's only realistic if she's a poor widow who just lost her husband, trying to put her life back together," Fernandez said.

In her closing arguments, Shores' attorney, Deputy Public Defender Lisa Eyanson, tried to paint Bivens and Ashley Sharpski as potential accomplices in the attack, portraying her own client as someone guilty only of "emotional infidelity" with Mary Sharpski, whose only crime was knowing both Ortega and Sharpski.

"It's obvious here that Mr. Shores is the common link," she said. "But in this country, we don't prosecute people on guilt by association."

Mary Sharpski's attorney Joel Garson, as he has throughout the trial, focused his closing arguments on the continuous cycle of abuse Mary and the children faced at the hands of Rick Sharpski, telling the jury that the stories of that abuse were meant to give context to Mary Sharpski's statements about wanting her husband dead. He admitted that his client had a clear motive in the attack but that she never agreed to carry one out. He also disputed the weight of the note found in Ortega's car, purported to be in Mary Sharpski's handwriting, that described in detail Rick Sharpski's daily FedEx route. He reminded the jury that Shores had once worked for Rick Sharpski in late 2008 and that Mary could have written the note for him in that capacity.

Bercher's closing followed a similar tack to the evidence he's laid out throughout the trial, focusing on the argument that Fountain Valley police singled out Ortega as the attacker and would stop at nothing to make the results their investigation fit their theory of the crime.

"This case was infected early by a theory that resulted in a rush to judgment," Bercher said. "I love the police. That doesn't have anything to do with the job they did in this investigation. Nice people can do a bad job."

Bercher also continued to attack the credibility of Bivens, whom he called a "chronic meth addict and habitual liar. He called Bivens' testimony "the witness role for the acting student," calling her story of the attack "not true, not corroborated and nonsensical." He also encouraged them to see Bivens as she was in 2009, as opposed to the changed person she appeared to be on the witness stand.

"The April Bivens of 2011 ain't the witness in this case," he said. "The witness in this case is the April Bivens of 3/3/09, [using drugs] eight times a day and drawing sad faces in her journal when she dropped them."

Bercher also questioned the validity of the DNA evidence against Ortega, arguing that tests don't show when or how DNA appeared in a particular place, and that the chain of custody was so flawed that forensic scientist Jennifer Jarrett had to call Fountain Valley police investigators before analyzing Rick Sharpski's DNA sample to ask what it was.

With regard to his client's own testimony, he said that Ortega's situation was one of "damned if you do, and damned if you don't," adding that Orgtega couldn't possibly explain everything because he wasn't involved. Bercher argued that Ortega is the only witness in the case whose testimony never changes and that he had no reason to risk his life in the attack because he is a well-adjusted person with a job who could leave the Sharpski home and go back to his own life, while Shores and Mary Sharpski were subjected to a "dysfunctional family circus" 24 hours a day.

Fernandez will present her rebuttal arguments Tuesday morning, with jury instructions to follow.