A state appeals court panel on March 1 upheld the convictions of three men for a deadly 2008 attack on a woman in a Century City parking garage – a crime that was masterminded by her estranged husband, who co-owned a gold trading company and is now on death row.
The three-justice panel from California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal rejected the defense’s contention that there were errors in the Los Angeles Superior Court trial of Jose Luis Moya, Gabriel Jay Marquez and Marquez’s nephew, Steven Vicente Simmons, who were convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder.
The three are serving life prison terms without the possibility of parole for the July 28, 2008, killing of Pamela Fayed, who was stabbed 13 times as she approached her SUV in a parking garage at Watt Tower in Century City.
The woman’s husband, James M. Fayed, was tried separately and convicted of her murder, with jurors finding true the special circumstance allegations of murder for financial gain and murder while lying in wait. He was sentenced in November 2011 to death, and his automatic appeal to the California Supreme Court is pending.
In a 79-page ruling in the case of Moya, Marquez and Simmons, the appellate court panel rejected the defense’s contention that jurors should not have heard Fayed’s recorded statements to a jailhouse informant about the murder-for-hire plan.
The appellate court justices found that there was evidence that cell phones belonging to Moya, Marquez and Simmons were in the vicinity at the time of the crime and that those phones subsequently returned to Moorpark after the crime.
Superior Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy, who presided over the trial in downtown Los Angeles for Moya, Marquez and Simmons, called it a “most disturbing case because of its planning and sophistication – even though it was not carried out in a sophisticated manner.” In sentencing the victim’s estranged husband to death, the judge called the killing a “cold-blooded, vicious and brutal murder.”
She noted that Fayed was nearby as his wife was being “brutally and brazenly murdered,” and that others reacted to the woman’s blood-curdling screams while surveillance video showed him outside the parking garage “totally immune to the screams of his wife, the mother of his child.”
The Fayeds were in the midst of a bitter divorce. The killing occurred just after the two met with their attorneys in connection with a federal investigation into the couple’s gold-trading business.
The prosecution contended that Fayed contracted the hit on his estranged wife because he believed the mother of two would cooperate with federal investigators and because she could have ended up with half of the couple’s marital assets in a divorce.
