Matt Murphy (46:44)
Welcome back to MK True Crime. We'll get to closing arguments, but first we have a question from an anonymous listener. They say hi. First and foremost, the show is amazing. Thank you very much. There was a case out of Newport Beach, California. The defendant, Camden Nicholson, killed his parents and housekeeper. He has suffered from mental illness issues recognized by his own family. He had the defense of insanity at the time. The jury, however, found him guilty of the crimes and then later found him sane. I think this case is so similar to the Reiner case and deserves a read. Deserves a read to lay out what could happen. Thank you Anonymous due to work. Thank you Anonymous due to work. If you're in the court system anywhere in Orange county, you might remember that I was actually the prosecutor on this case. In the vertical system that Orange county utilizes, we also as Homicide prosecutors would go to our own scenes. And I actually went to this crime scene. I charged Camden Nicholson with the murder of both of his parents and the housekeeper as well. You're absolutely right. This is a case where this man had a very well documented history of organic mental illness. And by organic, I mean basically not his fault. He was a young guy, devoutly religious family, who had a series of mental health problems. Family had a ton of money. It was a beautiful home. And he essentially did what they call self medicating, where he took a lot of drugs, which does no good to anybody suffering from mental health issues. And what he did is the family was attempting to commit him or to put him in an involuntary conservatorship. And part of that involved having the housekeeper as a witness, sign an affidavit at one point. So he went in and he murdered his mother and he murdered his father. And then he waited in the house for several hours in ambush, waiting for the poor housekeeper who came in, and he murdered her too. So this was an awful one. And also they had this beautiful fish tank in the backyard. It was like, I don't know, maybe 500 gallons or maybe 1,000 gallons this big. They had this beautiful outdoor patio with these exotic tropical fish. And the fish tank guy, the cleaner guy, showed up at the house and did all of his maintenance while Camden was waiting in the house in ambush for the. For the housekeeper. And for whatever reason, that man either never went inside the house, but he survived that. And it's just terrifying. So that has some real similarities. In fact, it's the closest case I can think of to the Reiner case. Now, where the difference is, I think, is that somebody can do hard drugs and essentially drug themselves into schizophrenia. And it's well recognized it's known as methamphetamine induced psychosis, where they experience all the classic symptoms of psychosis or even schizophrenia. But it's not because they're organically mentally ill. It's because they have made a series of bad life choices, and they've essentially stayed up for four or five days because of their extreme drug use. I think there's a difference from the perspective of prosecutors as well as juries. And the Camden Nicholson case is a really good example of what's known as the McNaughton Rule. The McNaughton Rule stands for the proposition that mental illness and legal insanity are not the same thing. In other words, you can be mentally ill, but you're still responsible for your actions when it comes to killing somebody. And the Example that we use with our juries is if you are mentally ill and a devil pops up on your shoulder and he says, hey, go stab those people or I'm going to turn you into a zebra. If you know that those are people and you go and stab them anyway, and that's the delusion you're suffering from, you are legally sane under the McNaughton Rule. If, however, the devil pops up and says, go stab those bananas over there, and you think you're stabbing bananas, and it means you don't recognize the nature and quality of your actions, in other words, you don't recognize right from wrong in what you're doing. And that is an extremely high bar. It was a very high bar in the Camden Nicholson case. And that jury, a friend of mine, Dave Porter, wound up prosecuting that in trial after I retired from the DA's office. And he did a great job. And the jury did exactly the right thing on that. They said he's mentally ill, but he understood that he was killing his parents because they were trying to commit him. In essence, I think Nick Reiner is looking at a lot of the same problems here. And I also think that Nick Reiner, he's less sympathetic, in my view, because even though there's some diagnoses of schizophrenia, that was after 17 different stints in rehab. And I think that he may come off a lot closer to that spoiled rich kid that just couldn't launch from his parents and had a bad night and decided to kill him. But I think it's pretty clear he knew it was his parents. And if they can establish that, if the prosecution can, or if the defense can't, and it's the defense's burden to prove insanity, then he's got a very tough road ahead of him. So it's interesting. Thank you very much for that question. I hope that answer wasn't too long. But that's one that's near and dear to my heart because I'm so familiar with that case, and it was such a. Such a sad one. But thank you for submitting that. Okay. There's an old adage we've all heard of. It's called don't throw stones when you live in a glass house. Or sometimes you might say, don't attack people unfairly when your husband is kind of a dick. Megyn Kelly received a bunch of criticism about a month ago when she commented correctly that Jeffrey Epstein was not a pedophile. A lot of people who were ignorant of what that term actually means jumped on her and Said she's defending a monster, blah, blah, blah. And I went public then and I explained to people, when you start as a sexual assault prosecutor, when you your first pretty much day in that unit, you learn that there are three kinds of sexual predators when it comes to children. You have pedophiles, which are people that are specifically attracted to prepubescent children. You have what are called hebephiles, which are sexual predators that are attracted to kids who are going through puberty. And then you have what are known as febophiles, which are sexual predators who are attracted to post pubescent children. And arguably those are some of the very worst because they, unlike the other two varieties, can actually impregnate their victims, which has catastrophic lifelong consequences in the real world for their victims. Okay, we are about to see something on the Timothy Busfield case. His lawyers are going to come in and they're going to argue that these other allegations against Tim Busfield should not be admitted in front of a jury in New Mexico because they are too dissimilar from the accusations. And I'm going to tell you, his attorneys are going to be right when they argue that when you're talking about post pubescent females, it is very dissimilar from prepubescent boys. It's a different, different kind of case because one is a pedophile type crime, the other is an ephebophile crime. There there's a distinction drawn both in the dsm, which is what all psychologists and psychiatrists use. There's also very important distinctions made in the law. And the court is going to have to weigh the probative value versus prejudicial effect of that information. And my prediction is, my prediction is the judge is going to agree with the defense on that, that external accusations or prior bad act evidence will be excluded. And this trial is going to roll just on the allegations of those two little boys. And there are some significant problems in this case. Proof wise for the prosecution. The person who is going to be nodding along the hardest when the defense team correctly makes that argument is Melissa Gilbert, who's Timothy Busfield's wife, who was one of the most vicious critics of Megyn Kelly. When Megyn Kelly came out and correctly pointed out that Jeffrey Epstein was not a pedophile, she got attacked by a lot of people who disagreed with her politically. It was unfair. They were wrong. And there were basically two groups or those who were emotionally responding because he didn't understand the distinction between the different varieties of child sex offender. And then there were those that were cynically taking advantage of it. I don't know which one of those categories Melissa Gilbert falls into, but when you're going to attack somebody unfairly, maybe everybody, especially in an overheated political climate, should take a breath and learn what the fuck you're talking about before you accuse somebody else of supporting a sexual predator monster like Jeffrey Epstein. So we're about to see something really interesting in court where I think we're going to cross the line from irony into hypocrisy. And I think it's a it's a learning moment. That's my closing argument for today. Thank you for listening to my rant. This is one that just gets my blood boiling. Thank you. Thank you so much to our guest, Heather McDonald and to my co host, Mark Aragos. And thank you for joining us, everybody. Please have a wonderful weekend.
