“My wife and I were both working,” Sean reported. “We didn’t have money to burn at the time. Basically, we were living paycheck to paycheck. It was difficult to save at that time.”
Sean and his first wife would take money they had earned, he testified, and transfer $300 a month into Joy’s bank account, and then $600 so she could buy groceries for the family.
Joy, it seemed, was living off the hard work of the rest of the family. The $300 stipend wasn’t enough for her, he said. Each month, she would put $200 more on her credit card, straining the family’s finances when she wasn’t even working.
Greco would later hone in on this to impugn the truthfulness of the rest of Sean’s testimony.
Joy became increasingly unhappy, he testified, until it reached a boiling point when she wanted to go to Los Angeles to attend beauty school—which would cost around $10,000—and live in an apartment there while she attended, which would cost more money.
But he hadn’t assembled a “murder kit,” he maintained. Instead, he had good reasons to buy all the things he had acquired a week before he killed Joy.
It seemed that the house at Kensington had California Pepper trees, which made the soil acidic in the backyard, so Sean had determined that, even though he had hired someone to mow the lawn each week, he would take it upon himself to uproot a tangled mess of trees and clear the yard of their stumps.
The backyard was “jungle-like,” he testified.
“I was going to remove the soil from six to twelve inches down, get rid of all the roots, replace the soil,” he said. “I was also going to trim a lot of the trees. There were a couple of trees I was going to cut down.”
He bought the shovel to dig the dirt, he testified. The pickaxe, as well, was for digging up the soil to get rid of its acidity so grass would grow. The rope was for tying trees to two points so when he cut them down, they wouldn’t fall in unpredictable locations. The logging chain was to pull stumps out of the ground. The padlocks were to put on the logging chains, because “it is easier sometimes to just padlock them.”
“Because you didn’t trust them to hold?” Arena asked.
“Yeah,” Sean replied. “I mean, the hooks generally hold, but I have seen occasions when they don’t.”
The chisel and sledgehammer, he said, were for splitting logs. The axe was for the same purpose. The hacksaw was for cutting a pipe that was sticking up in the front yard. The contractor’s sheeting? It was to put down over the house’s wood floors so paint wouldn’t get on them when the family was repainting the interior of the rental. The duct tape was to hold the sheeting in place. The buckets would be used to hold dirt and paint. The stepladder was to reach the ceiling during painting. The gloves were purchased for all that hard work.
“To spare myself some blisters during the digging.”
The cooler, he testified, was to hold snacks for his first wife’s trip to Santa Barbara with the children.
But the biggest claim Sean made was about the knife. It wasn’t even him who picked it out, he testified. That was Joy. She wanted the knife and a good cutting board to use with it. Joy, he said, was with him throughout the shopping trip, both to the hardware store and the big box store.
Then, a week later, Sean planned to take Joy out to the most expensive restaurant he could think of, on Coronado Island, to rekindle their romance—or to tell her to ship out, depending on how the night went—and then go out dancing afterward. His first wife would be in Santa Barbara with the kids so Sean and Joy could have time together alone.
The truck, he testified, was rented to impress Joy.
“Joy really liked SUVs and she was always talking about Escalades,” he said. “But I didn’t think I could rent one, so I got this other truck for the weekend. What I intended to do was to do everything I could to show her that it was possible to have a good life in this situation, if we so chose to work things out, that we could do fun things like that on occasion and still take care of our family and do the right things that were necessary. If we couldn’t work things out, I was going to ask her to leave.”
It was Joy’s last chance, a chance given because Sean was such a good person, he testified.
“I felt for the kids’ sake that I needed to do everything that was possible in order to try and make the relationship work, by my own conscience,” he said. “That’s how I felt about it.”
On Coronado Island, Sean and Joy actually arrived before the restaurant opened, so they sat in the bar where Sean ordered a scotch and Joy had some other kind of drink that he couldn’t recall, he testified. When the restaurant opened, Joy ordered Kobe beef, while Sean ordered the rib-eye. They stayed at the restaurant for “a couple of hours,” talking and having a good time.
“We just talked about, you know, the restaurant,” he said. “It was great. It was a nice experience. We didn’t really get into much of a personal nature until probably the end of the dinner.”
But that personal conversation quickly became contentious, he said.
“Joy was planning on going to a makeup school in Burbank,” he said. “We were talking about how much that would cost and when she wanted to do it and how our finances were in relation to that, and also what impact it might have on her sign language pursuit. I told her...it would be better to stick with her studies at the college until she got her degree and perhaps then pursue the makeup school.”
After the discussion, the couple went on a walk on the beach and then headed back to the Kensington home to change into less dressy clothes to go out dancing. Sean was wearing a black suit and Joy was wearing a black mini dress, and they wanted to be wearing something more comfortable for dancing.
On the trip home, however, the makeup school issue wouldn’t go away, he testified. Joy wanted to stay in Burbank while attending school.
“She wanted me to do a corporate rental, maybe get her a condo in the area; maybe Burbank, L.A., somewhere in that area that she could commute to the school from,” he said. “It was only going to be like a month or three months or something. My position was that a corporate rental wasn’t a good idea because it was going to be very expensive and the makeup school itself was very expensive.”
After they arrived home, the discussion continued, he said.
“She was pretty adamant about the corporate rental,” he said. “I was explaining to her, ‘Do you realize that renting a condo for three months in that area may cost us $6,000? And you are talking about a school that will be between $3,000 and $10,000.’ I told her that wasn’t feasible. She was adamant that that was her plan and that’s what she wanted to do.”
Sean went to his first wife’s bedroom, which was at one end of the house and had two closets, one of which held his clothing. There he changed into more comfortable clothes while Joy went to her bedroom, which was on the other end of the house. When she came out of her bedroom, she was wearing shorts and a t-shirt, he testified, which meant to him that the plans to go out dancing had changed.
“‘We need to discuss this whole thing,’” he said she told him. “‘Let me make some margaritas and we’ll talk.’”
At that point, he said, he told her his plans.
“I said, ‘If you want to talk about it, I’m not really for you going to makeup school,’” he testified. The reasons were multiple: it would cost too much money, it would interrupt her studies for a sign language degree and it would force her to be away from her children for between one and three months. But he wasn’t done.
“‘Listen, if you want to go to the basic makeup school, perhaps we can pay for that,’” he said he told her. “‘But I’m not paying for a corporate rental and I’m not going to pay $10,000 for extended school. I just can’t.’”
Joy, Sean said, became very upset, so to avoid the argument getting more heated, he stated that he left the house for a walk down the street so things could cool off. He walked toward a coffee shop that he frequented. Between three and five blocks from the house, he said, his phone rang. It was Joy.
Her cell phone records showed a call indeed happened, but they did not show where the respective phones were when the call was made.
“She said, ‘Listen, it is all right,’” he said. “‘Come back. We will talk. We just need to get through this. We need to figure it out so we need to settle our differences.’”
The call, he said, lasted less than a minute and he returned to the house to calmly discuss the issues. But he was, he said, 90 percent convinced he would ask her to leave by that point.
Sean said he went to Joy’s bedroom to take his shoes off, a routine he followed each night, whether he was staying in Joy’s bedroom or not. After he took his shoes off, he left the bedroom and walked into the kitchen.
Joy, who was pouring herself a margarita, began talking about makeup school again, he said.
“I was surprised,” he said, “because I thought when she called that maybe we could make some concessions and, at least theoretically meet in the middle somewhere.”
That’s when he told Joy he didn’t think the marriage was working out.
“‘In fact, I didn’t want to pay for makeup school,’” he said he told Joy. “So we started arguing back and forth at that point. It just seemed to me that she was making statements that were irrational. She was very upset.”
Sean said he then reiterated that the marriage wasn’t working and they would need to figure out how to proceed with that understanding.
“She mentioned the kids,” he said. “She said, ‘well, you are not going to take the kids away from me.’”
And that’s when Sean said Joy wouldn’t have to worry about custody, since he had a picture of bruises on her younger son.
“‘That’s all there is to it,’” he testified that he told Joy. “And I backed out of the room...” and slammed the door. Afterward, he grabbed the photograph and went to Joy’s bedroom to retrieve his shoes and leave.
“I go in there and I toss the picture down on the bed and I hear her coming up the hall,” he said. “We have wood floors and it is a raised foundation and she walks heavy.”
He said he turned around and there Joy was, standing in the doorway holding a knife. Joy yelled and swung the knife, he testified.
“She said...she said, ‘you son of a bitch, I will kill you.’”
Sean said he punched Joy twice in an attempt to fend her off.
But Joy, according to the man who had now confessed to killing her, was determined. She shook off the punches and kept coming at him, and for the first time, he said, he was afraid of his young wife.
“I was frightened. I thought, ‘she is serious.’”
Sean said he then grabbed Joy’s hand, the one that was holding the knife, and a struggle for control of the blade ensued.
“I got it turned around toward her, and we were still fighting over the knife,” he said. “And I pushed the knife into her. At some point, I took the knife away and I stabbed her again.”
Arena asked Sean where he had stabbed Joy with that second blow. Sean indicated that it had been somewhere near Joy’s left shoulder.
“What happened then?” Arena asked.
“She kind of, um, at that point, she kind of went limp.”
The story was compelling. It was a brutal struggle for life, not a vicious, cold-blooded killing, he had testified. But as engrossing as the story might be, it was at odds with the evidence. Joy had been stabbed at least a dozen times, not the two that Sean testified he was guilty of inflicting. And the stab wounds had been so violent that they had severed her chest bone and broken several ribs. But Sean wasn’t done with his performance yet.
After Joy “went limp,” Sean said he was two completely opposite things: panicked and in shock. Realizing what had just happened, he said, he leaned over her prone body and tried to resuscitate her by performing CPR.
“I pulled out the knife,” he testified. “A lot of blood came out with it. And I checked her breathing and her pulse, and she didn’t have either at that time.”
And that’s when Sean started crying on the stand, leaning his head down, wiping his eyes and even grabbing a tissue. It was wrenching. Except for one small detail. There were no tears. Not even one.
He hadn’t called the police, he testified, sobbing tearlessly, because Joy was a woman, and Sean was a man, and the police would never have believed that he had killed her in self-defense, he thought. He didn’t see the sense in his sons losing both of their parents in one night.
“I thought about, ‘This is my sons’ mother,’ and they were going to have to live without her,” he said. “I felt like that they were probably going to live without me too.”
And that’s when he decided, he said, that he had some terrible tasks in front of him if he was going to try to cover up the death of his sons’ mother. It was fortuitous that he had taken that hardware shopping trip six days earlier, he realized. The gear he had bought was purchased so he could work on the house that weekend, not clean up a murder, but since he already had the stuff around...
“I thought about what to do next,” he said. “I thought for a minute I had to take Joy somewhere. I thought about covering up her identity.”
Using multiple towels from the bathroom, he covered the bloody corpse up, he said.
“I knew I had to remove her fingertips.”
Using a small meat cleaver from the kitchen, he said, he placed her fingers between towels and cut them off.
“I felt horrified,” he said through more dry tears. “I felt frightened. I felt sickened.”
Arena wanted to know what he did after removing the fingertips.
“I thought for a few moments, wondering if there was anything else I should do,” he said. “I decided in order to cover up her identity, I would have to remove her teeth as well.”
Using an unidentified saw that never made its way into evidence—not the hacksaw from the “murder kit” shopping spree, he maintained—he started the gruesome work of removing the jaw and hacking the teeth from the skull of the woman he had loved so much that he had to marry her even though he was already married.
“I couldn’t look at them,” he said. “I arranged the towels where I wouldn’t see anything except what I was cutting.”
Sean said after her fingertips and teeth were gone, he calmly walked to the garage, emptied a large plastic container’s contents into two other containers and returned to the bathroom, where he placed the container on its side beside Joy, shoving her body into it and then turning the container upright, because he couldn’t lift the body without using that leverage.
He tried to lift the container to remove it, he said, but it was too heavy. Instead, he placed the edge of the container on an area rug and used the rug to drag the container out to the garage.
Then he returned to the bathroom to clean up the blood and put all the towels and other soiled materials into the trash receptacles outside the house.
“At that point, I was kind of just stunned about everything,” he said. “And probably for awhile, I just sat and did nothing. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t function. I just sat there for a long time.”
But eventually, he was able to get going again and backed the SUV into the garage, close to Joy’s body, which had been crammed into a plastic container.
But the body was too heavy.
“I couldn’t get it in there,” he said. “There was some firewood in the garage. There was a rather large piece that I set up on end at the rear of the truck. I pushed one end of the container up on that and then I swiveled the rest of the container onto the bed of the SUV.”
Stunned and disoriented, he said, he went back into the house and wandered around in a daze until morning, when he went out to the garage and drove the SUV into the desert.
Once he was in Arizona, a random exit sign caught his attention and he turned off onto the Agua Caliente Road.
“I was going to put the body somewhere,” he said.
Several miles from the Interstate, he sat in the SUV, staring off into
space.
“I decided to put the body underneath a tree,” he said. “I saw that there were a lot of these rocks. From there, if you look the other direction, you can see some little rock formations that probably hikers or somebody made, and that gave me an idea to use those rocks.”
Gathering the rocks from around the tree quickly turned into quite an effort, and he soon overheated, he said.
“It got so hot I couldn’t continue,” he said. “I got back into the car. I turned on the air conditioner and I waited until the sun started going down [and] I just continued, basically picking up rocks and carrying them, placing them there.”
While her body was laying under the tree, surrounded by lava rocks, Sean decided his mutilation of her body wasn’t thorough enough yet.
“I needed to do something to cover up who she was, including her facial features,” he said. “I picked up one of those rocks and I hit her face with it.”
Arena immediately brought up that earlier testimony had indicated the marks left on Joy’s skull were consistent with the sledgehammer he had bought on the “murder kit” shopping spree, not with a lava rock.
“Did you use this sledgehammer?” Arena asked.
“No,” Sean responded. He stated that he had used a rock, not the sledgehammer.
If the testimony was starting to sound a bit like the old board game Clue—lava rock in the desert, not sledgehammer in the kitchen—it was about to wrap up. Sean testified that Joy’s body was in the fetal position when he started placing rocks on top of it to cover it.
“I made a little tower that was similar to what I had seen there,” he testified. “After everything I had done, it was like the only way I could show some respect for her body.”
In one fell swoop, Sean had touched on every bit of evidence the prosecution had raised in the first part of the trial. He hadn’t bought a “murder kit;” he had simply assembled the implements for house projects that had long needed doing. He had hoped to keep Joy in the family but, ultimately, it was Joy who had made the decision to stick to her guns against the best interests of everyone else. After their argument, Sean had tried to walk away but Joy had called him back. And it was Joy, not Sean, who had gotten violent, who had pulled the knife, who had swung it in a threatening manner.
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