Mrs. Shephard was pronounced dead on arrival at Community Hospital in South Laguna Beach.
Police say that the murder weapon has been recovered and believe the motive for the break-in was rape.
The Shephards are four-year residents of the city. Earlier this year they had their first child, a son.
Shephard turned the page, relieved to find a full-page shot of fifty-four debutantes coming out at a Surfside-sponsored party. He studied their faces, trying to forget the story from the page before. Their cheery faces seemed to belong to a different world.
But two pages later he was plunged back into the murder of his mother, front page:
Laguna Beach Police yesterday arrested their prime suspect in Wednesday’s murder of Colleen Shephard.
Azul Mercante, 25, also of Laguna, was arrested in his Temple Hills Terrace home after a brief struggle, police reported.
LBPD Captain Lonny Wilcox said that a loaded shotgun was found in the suspect’s home.
Mercante was identified by the victim’s husband, Wade Shephard, as the man he found accosting his wife in their Arch Bay Heights home Wednesday around noon.
In a press conference held yesterday, LBPD Chief Donald Pantzar stated that Shephard, a LBPD officer, had attempted to subdue the man when a struggle ensued. According to Pantzar, Shephard lost his gun to the intruder, who then turned it on Colleen.
Shephard attempted to revive his dying wife while Mercante allegedly fled on foot.
The suspect barricaded himself in his home and held police at bay for an hour with a shotgun, Pantzar said. He surrendered at 2:30 P.M. and no shots were fired.
The District Attorney says no charges will be filed until the preliminary investigation is completed.
There was a dim photograph of the family’s Arch Bay Heights home beside the article, with the crude but informative caption: “Colleen Shephard, 22, was shot to death in this house Wednesday.” Shephard’s stomach had knotted, and sweat soaked his shirt. He stood up, set the volume on the director’s chair, and stared through the blinds to the green bay surging below him.
The news of Mercante’s arraignment was covered in a short article on the next page of the scrapbook. Assistant District Attorney Jim Peters was pictured beside the piece, as was the suspect, covering his face in his hands. Shephard knew that with formal charges brought a mere two days after the arrest, Peters must have considered his case a good one. An eyewitness was enough to make any D.A. drool. Peters was a middle-aged man with a thick, combative face and a nose like a heavyweight’s. Mercante retained a public defender by the name of Eugene Weingarten.
Another article on the same page told of Mercante’s outlandish behavior at the jail. After refusing food for two days, he gashed his head on the bars of his cell in a “sudden fury, while screaming his innocence.” The day after his arraignment, Mercante was removed to the criminal ward of the county hospital for “further examination and for his own protection.”
With the coming of fall, the Surfside quieted. The big event of October was an annual yacht race that originated at the club and terminated in Ensenada, Mexico. The local press failed to recognize the serious side of the event and referred to the annual beer-drenched race as “The Booze Cruise.” Surfside dockmaster Dick Evans was featured in a newsletter interview, trying to restore some sense of maritime drama to the race. “We like to think of it as a race for both the serious and the recreational yachtsman,” he said. Another newsletter photograph showed the foundations of the new wing of suites, which were framed against a Surfside sunset and looked like ruins more than beginnings.
A trial date for Azul Mercante was set. The opening day would be Monday, October 14, and the presiding Superior Court Judge would be Francis Rubio. The article noted that Rubio, at the age of fifty, was the youngest judge on the Superior bench.
Then came the September 26 article Shephard had seen in Hope Creeley’s collection, the brief account of Burton’s tragic drowning in the Newport Channel. The whole Surfsiders newsletter was devoted to the memory of the co-owner. The title-page masthead, usually done in a light-hearted sea green, was a somber black. Creeley’s portrait took up nearly a quarter of the first page, and beside it was a touching obituary written by none other than Helene Lang. She called him a “visionary” and a man “to whom the future was always a place of happiness and hope, a man whose loss dims the hopes and happiness of the futures of us all.” Joe Datilla wrote a guest column on his personal friendship with Burton, the long days and worried months that constituted the birth of the club. “Somewhere inside myself,” he wrote, “even during those times when it seemed our project might fail miserably, I always retained a solid foundation of optimism. Looking back on those times it is easy for me now to see that it was the endless faith of Burton that shored me up. He was a man who proceeded utterly without doubt and utterly without malice to anyone. He was the best of what a man, and a businessman, can be.”
Shephard was struck by a third-page photograph, taken only a month earlier, of Burton and Hope Creeley side by side on the Surfside tennis courts. Her smile was reluctant and elusive as always, but her husband seemed to be brimming with vigor. They couldn’t have been much over thirty years old.
A bad summer for the Surfside, he thought. As Creeley had written in her diary, bad luck seemed to hang over the club as over the pyramids at El Giza. He glanced up at the Mayan deity on the wall, which from his angle seemed to be doing a death dance on the silent chest of Helene.
He lit a cigarette and used a potted plant for an ashtray. He could hear the wind outside mounting for another attack, and when it hit, the glass behind him rattled with a vengeance. He shifted in his chair, the smell of his sweat rising around him, mixing with the dry aroma of smoke.
Helene had also clipped the Register article on the alleged sighting of Creeley in Laguna Beach the night he died. Shephard thought back to her account of the bungled murder, the hoods from Los Angeles unable to tell the Newport Channel from Diver’s Cove. And friends to bring the errant body back north to Newport Beach. But the cops had scoffed at the idea of the body drifting north, and when Shephard considered the logistics of such a drift, he couldn’t help but scoff too. What if Helene had told the truth about the drowning? Even if she were as sick as Datilla and Wade had said, might she have still sprinkled her fantasies with bits of truth? Which bits, he wondered, and whose truth? But the newspaper’s heated call to reopen the investigation dwindled into disinterest, and the next page of the scrapbook contained only a small article stating that Azul Mercante’s trial for murder had been postponed three weeks and a large photograph of a Surfside Halloween gala in which the celebrants dressed up as ghosts.
On the next page of the Surfside scrapbook, the trial began. Weingarten immediately made headlines by requesting not a jury trial but a trial whose outcome would rest solely in the hands of the Honorable Francis Rubio. From his own experience in court, Shephard knew that the request was extremely rare and inevitably was made by defendants who believed that their chances with a jury were nil. Nevertheless, the Academy cliché that an innocent man will demand a trial by judge was sometimes true. Judges were less susceptible to pressure from the press, less impressed with the gyrations of prosecutors, and — perhaps from human reluctance to single-handedly pass judgment — often more attentive to the details of justice than a tired and underpaid jury might be. They were harder to fool. He also knew that judges tended to consider the evidence rather than the man, and could better differentiate between the act and the actor.