Life and death

When the Nevada Supreme Court overturned John Mazzan’s death sentence, it raised a question: Are there murderers on the loose?

By D. Brian Burghart

Richard Minor Jr. had been stabbed 15 times when his father, Reno Justice of the Peace Richard C. Minor, found him dead.

That much is certain.

What isn’t certain is that the man who was convicted for the murder, John Francis Mazzan—who has spent 20 years behind bars awaiting his own execution—actually wielded the knife.

On Jan. 27, the Nevada Supreme Court unanimously reversed Mazzan’s 1979 first-degree murder conviction, determining that Washoe County prosecutors withheld evidence that they had investigated two drug dealers who may have had reason to kill Minor. The disclosure of the investigation, which is required by law, may have cast doubt on their murder case against Mazzan.

The Supreme Court left open the possibility to retry Mazzan, and as he sits in the Ely State Prison, the Washoe County District Attorney’s Office is considering a new trial for the 20-plus-year-old crime. The district attorney’s office could also decide not to retry the case.

If the office does decide to retry the case, Mazzan’s attorneys say they will argue that it would be impossible for Mazzan to get a fair trial, since some of the witnesses are dead, and the evidence and memories of the surviving witnesses are too old to be reliable.

If the district attorney’s office chooses not to retry Mazzan, he will be set free. That decision could be made in a matter of days—ending the 21-year-long saga for Mazzan.

“We’re in the process of reviewing everything,” said Tom Barb, the chief deputy district attorney who will prosecute Mazzan should the case go back to trial. “We can’t make a knowledgeable decision without knowing what we have still available. All the evidence has been through two trials. Some of the witnesses have been through two trials. Some of the witnesses are still around here; some of them are in other parts of the country. Two or three have died. We just have to put it all back together again to see if we have enough to go forward.”

Many of the players from the original trial are still around. Cal Dunlap, the former district attorney, has a successful private practice in town. The chief deputy district attorney, Mills Lane, went on to become district attorney and a district court judge. He’s now the presiding referee on the television court show, Judge Mills Lane.

Lane disputes whether any information about other suspects was withheld, and, while he said he has not read the Nevada Supreme Court decision which overturned Mazzan’s conviction, he still maintains that Mazzan was guilty.

“The defense had everything that I knew of,” he said. “Let me tell you something else. I was in that apartment. There is no way that a murder occurred—it was only about 5 feet by 8 feet—that he didn’t have something to do with. The Supreme Court did what they did (reversed the conviction), the Monday-morning quarterback deal.”

The former Washoe County District Attorney Cal Dunlap said he would prefer not to comment on the new developments in the case, since it’s technically an open murder investigation. However, he too questions whether any information was withheld. He also points out that, in 1997, a district court judge saw the evidence that Mazzan’s attorneys said was exculpatory, and the judge ruled it did not meet the legal disclosure standards, and that prosecutors had orally informed Mazzan’s defense about the investigation into other suspects.

There are new players as well. On the defense: JoNell Thomas has worked for 3 1/2 years, free of charge, to get Mazzan out of prison.

“I would love nothing more than to take this case to trial and to get an acquittal,” Thomas said. “But that would be my interests and not my client’s interest. I’m sure that Mazzan would love to take this to trial and to prove his innocence. On the other hand, if the DA were to offer to dismiss this tomorrow, we would not turn that down. Vindicating your name is something, but getting your life back after 20 years of having it taken from you is also a very worthy goal. If we don’t end up having a trial in this case, but Jack gets to go home, that’s OK.”

Tim O’Toole, of the U.S. Public Defender’s office, has also put a lot of effort into the case, in anticipation of Mazzan’s appeal moving into the federal courts. For the prosecution, Barb and Washoe County District Attorney Richard Gammick will likely see their roles grow if Mazzan’s case goes back to trial, as they’d re-prosecute Mazzan for the 21-year-old crime.

The cast seems endless, but there are two characters who’ve managed to stay out of the limelight all these years: Harry Douglas Warmbier and Mark Siffin, two suspected Midwest drug dealers who were implicated with possible roles in the murder, according to the recent Nevada Supreme Court decision. But they’ll likely be thrust onstage if John Francis Mazzan, better known as Jack Mazzan, goes back on trial. Because if Jack Mazzan didn’t kill Richard Minor, somebody else did.

Mazzan’s case is a convoluted narrative, full of inconsistencies and contradictions on both sides. Several attempts to interview Mazzan by the RN&R during the last year weren’t successful. But one thing is clear: While the defense maintains Mazzan’s innocence, the prosecution still maintains his guilt. It’s a story that goes back to a few days before Christmas, Dec. 20, 1978.

Murder most foul
Mazzan moved to Reno in April 1978, according to Nevada Supreme Court documents. He was 26, a hairdresser, small-time pot smoker and cocaine user. He bought his cocaine from April Barber, a Mustang Ranch prostitute. He got his pot from Barber’s boyfriend, Richard Minor, say court records.

On the evening of Dec. 20, 1978, he and Minor were taping albums, snorting coke and smoking pot in Minor’s converted-garage home at 906 1/2 Holcomb Ave. Several people saw him at the apartment, including a man, John Sullivan, who bought a quarter-ounce of Hawaiian sensimilla marijuana, “Maui Wowee,” for $65 from Minor. In the hours after midnight, Mazzan tried to leave, but his car wouldn’t start, according to court testimony.

Minor let him crash behind the couch in the tiny living room.

Sometime during the night, Mazzan said, he heard a fight going on in the kitchen. He said he saw his friend covered with blood and fighting with someone.

He said he heard two people run from the house and a car drive away. Mazzan said he stepped outside but didn’t see anyone. He returned in time to watch Minor collapse and die. Minor was 26.

He fled the scene without notifying police of the murder. When he arrived home, he cleaned up.

Minor’s father, a justice of the peace who eventually became a district court judge, found his son’s body the next day.

Two days later, Mazzan flew to Las Vegas to see his wife, who was employed as a dancer. Las Vegas police contacted him there and told him he was a suspect. He returned to Reno on Dec. 26 and went to the Reno police station the following morning. He was questioned for about 12 hours before he was arrested for the murder.

At first he lied, according to court records, saying he hadn’t seen anything— until he was told the police had found blood in his car. He then admitted that he’d been present, but he made other statements that police later proved to be lies. At that time, police also strip-searched him, looking for bruises, since Minor was 6 feet 4 inches tall and weighed around 215 pounds, and the pattern of blood in the house suggested a struggle. No bruises were found on the 6-feet-1-inch Mazzan.

It was barely a week later, while Mazzan was in jail, that a garbage worker found a bloody coat belonging to Mazzan and a purse and bloody clothes that belonged to April Barber in a trash can near Mazzan’s home. According to eyewitnesses at the trial, the items were placed in the trash can after Mazzan was jailed. Barber had been missing for around a month, and speculation arose that she’d been killed in connection with Minor’s murder. Her murder was never solved.

“Some other dude did it”
Court documents and news accounts reveal that during the investigative period before Mazzan’s trial, police looked into other suspects and Minor’s drug dealings.

“Reno police detectives have been criss-crossing the country searching for information about Minor’s alleged drug dealing and have recently been in Bloomington, Ind., speaking with a man identified as Harry Doug Warmbier,” a Feb. 15, 1979, Reno Evening Gazette story said.

It was these investigations that led the Supreme Court to overturn the conviction last month.

While Reno police were searching for drug dealers, Mazzan’s defense attorney hired a Los Angeles psychic, Kathlyn Rhea, to assist in his case. The psychic was supposed to locate April Barber’s body. She was unsuccessful, although Barber’s skeleton was found east of Sparks in November 1979.

Washoe County District Attorney Cal Dunlap called Mazzan’s defense—that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and fled out of fear that he would be implicated in the murder or for illegal drug use—the “SODDI—some other dude did it—defense,” according to newspaper accounts of the trial.

Dunlap stated that Mazzan murdered Minor for money and drugs, saying that Mazzan first stabbed Minor while he slept. He supported his argument with the fact that Mazzan didn’t even anonymously call police to report the murder.

A Nevada State Journal news account, dated Oct. 20, 1979, stated that in closing arguments, “Dunlap called Mazzan’s version of the murder ‘a preposterous story, a pack of fabrications.’ ”

Defense attorney Larry McNabney maintained that Mazzan was being framed for the murder.

He said that Mazzan was a friendly and non-violent person who made good money as a hairdresser. He also said that if Mazzan had killed Minor, there would have been more than a smear of blood in Mazzan’s car.

“McNabney raised the possibility Mazzan was framed by the real killers,” the news story said. “He said Minor was actually murdered over some type of drug deal by some unknown person or persons.”

Curiously, while earlier news accounts had mentioned police investigations into Minor’s drug dealing, court documents suggest that McNabney knew little about the specifics of the investigations, which could have supported Mazzan’s claims. According to court documents, he didn’t even know, until it came up at trial, that Minor’s sister had informed police that Minor had told her not long before his death that he was in danger because of his drug dealings.

In closing argument, court documents say, Dunlap derided the defense’s suggestion that Minor was killed over some drug deal, telling the jury several times that police had uncovered no evidence of such a possibility.

Jack Mazzan was found guilty of first-degree murder, and several days later, he was sentenced to die.

Exculpatory evidence
In 1984, the Nevada Supreme Court reversed Mazzan’s sentence because of ineffective counsel at the penalty-phase of his trial. In the court’s opinion, justices said that McNabney’s defense reduced “the proceeding to a sham, a farce or a pretense. Mazzan’s cause would have been far better served without benefit of his counsel’s representation during the penalty phase.” At a second sentencing, in which he was again represented by McNabney, he again received the death penalty.

It was during a later appeal that documents surfaced that showed that Reno police had conducted extensive investigations before Mazzan’s first trial, far more in depth than had been revealed at trial.

In July 1996, Michael Hodge, senior investigator with the Nevada State Public Defender’s office, while working on an appeal, subpoenaed Mazzan’s file from the Reno Police Department. Contained in the file were documents labeled “confidential,” which showed that two men, Harry Douglas Warmbier and Mark Alford Siffin, were investigated by Reno police, and that they may have been in Reno at the time of the Minor’s murder.

Minor had grown up with Warmbier in the Midwest.

The confidential documents also said that the men were “involved in narcotics trafficking all the way from Ecuador through the Florida area ... and apparently all across the United States into Marin County, California, South Lake Tahoe and El Dorado County, California.”

The documents even showed that Warmbier was involved in an on-going investigation by the Indianapolis Office of the Federal DEA task force.

While Siffin had disappeared about the time of the murder, Reno detectives were able to find Warmbier, whose lawyer provided questionable proof of his alibi, including unsworn statements by his girlfriend and an associate who was linked to Warmbier’s drug activities, according to court documents.

Mazzan’s attorneys petitioned the Supreme Court for a new trial, saying that the district attorney’s office should have turned this evidence over to McNabney, Mazzan’s original defense attorney. The court initially sent the petition back to Washoe County District Court in 1996, where it failed. The district court decision was appealed to the Supreme Court in 1998.

Evidence that could vindicate someone accused of a crime—exculpatory evidence—must be shared between the prosecution and the defense to ensure a fair trial. In other words, it is not the state’s job to convict someone, but to convict the person who committed the crime.

In the Supreme Court’s decision that overturned Mazzan’s conviction last month, the court wrote, “The state’s behavior and arguments in this case have not always been consistent. At times, the state has downplayed the importance of the information at issue and has questioned or even denied Mazzan’s right to receive it; nevertheless, the state now concedes that the information was material but maintains that it was fully handed over.”

The court suggested that both Cal Dunlap and Mills Lane made public statements that contradicted their claims of full disclosure by the prosecution, mentioning a memo in which Lane “rebuked the police captain for providing the press with general information about the investigation because ‘it’s the same as turning [police reports] over to the defense.’ ”

“Dunlap’s closing argument also suggests that prosecutors never fully informed McNabney of the evidence in question,” the court further wrote. “If McNabney had known police investigators posited ‘a direct connection’ between Minor’s murder and his Midwest drug activities, it seems unlikely that Dunlap would have repeatedly asserted in closing argument, without apparent fear of contradiction: ‘There is no evidence [that Minor was killed over some drug deal]. The police were unable to find anything.’”

A new day in court?
From here, it’s up to the Washoe County District Attorney’s Office to decide whether to retry the case. Barb, of the district attorney’s office, says that until he has reviewed all the evidence to figure if there is enough to proceed with a prosecution, he can’t say what will happen.

“We’re reviewing the evidence that we have,” Barb said. “We’re finding witnesses who were around in 1978-79. We’re studying the information that’s available to see if we have a case still. I wouldn’t make a guess until we’re finished with the review of the evidence and finding all the witnesses that we can find. I have no idea when the decision will be made.”

Barb says there are some procedures to be followed before Mazzan, who still resides in the Ely State Prison, can be moved to the Washoe County Detention Facility on Parr Boulevard.

“The remittitur from the Supreme Court, which is the document that follows the court’s opinion, hasn’t been received here,” he said. “Once it’s received here, Mr. Mazzan will, at some point after that, end up in the Washoe County jail. And then we’ll start the trial process again as far as arraignment, plea, setting trial dates and that sort of thing.”

He said he doesn’t know if Mark Siffin or Harry Warmbier will be contacted about the decades-old murder.

“We’re trying to locate every witness who knows anything about the case,” Barb said. “I don’t know that Siffin and Warmbier know anything about the case.”

Thomas, the Las Vegas defense attorney who was successful in getting Mazzan’s conviction overturned, says this was probably the high point of her career.

“It’s definitely a high for a criminal defense attorney getting an innocent guy out of death row; it’s hard for me to imagine what can top it,” she said. “It’s been a lot of work, and it’s been a long time, but it’s been worth every cent and worth every minute.”

She says that until the district attorney’s office says it will not pursue a trial, she’s going to prepare to go to trial.

“My guess is they probably aren’t going to agree to let him go,” she said.

As for her client, Mazzan is understandably happy to have had his original conviction overturned, Thomas said.

“He’s kind of anxious right now, wondering what’s going to happen,” she said. “He’s thrilled with the Nevada Supreme Court’s decision, and he’s really looking forward to going forward with the next part of his life. It’s a wait-and-see time for us.”

Thomas said that there are loose ends to be tied up if the murders of Richard Minor Jr. and April Barber are ever to be solved.

“I would love to know if they will look at Warmbier and Siffin,” the attorney said. “I would hope that they would. There’s also the whole April Barber murder, which I think will have to be explored now, and I don’t think it has been in the past. They’ve got to be related. There’s just way too much going on between the two cases for those not to be related.”

Thomas said that Mazzan has suffered enough, and she hopes that the District Attorney’s office will move quickly to get Mazzan some resolution—to either start the trial or drop it so he can get on with his life.

“At some point this has got to be over for him,” she said. “His dad died last year; his mother is quite elderly. He wants nothing more than to go home and take care of his mom.” Ω