Susan Mellen Case: Withheld Evidence, Exoneration, and $12M Settlement

The Susan Mellen case is one of California’s most striking wrongful conviction stories: a Gardena mother of three sent to prison for life in 1998 for the murder of her ex-boyfriend, freed in October 2014 after a nonprofit investigation exposed the real killers and the LAPD detective who hid evidence that the state’s only witness was a known liar. Mellen served 17 years. She later received roughly $597,200 from the state of California and a $12 million settlement from the city of Los Angeles.

The Murder and the Arrest

On July 21, 1997, the body of Richard James Daly, a 30-year-old transient and father of two, was found burned near a dumpster in San Pedro, California.¹ Daly had been beaten to death. He was Susan Mellen’s ex-boyfriend.

Within weeks, tipsters told the Los Angeles Police Department that Daly had been killed by three members of the Lawndale 13 street gang known as “Ghost,” “Wicked,” and “Payaso.” On August 13, 1997, a woman named Ginger Wilborn told Detective Marcella Winn that “Wicked” had confessed to her that he, “Ghost,” and “Payaso” had killed Daly.² Winn obtained arrest warrants for Lester “Wicked” Monllor, Chad “Ghost” Landrum, and Santo “Payaso” Alvarez.³

The investigation then turned. June Patti, a local woman with a long history of contacting police, called Detective Winn and claimed Mellen had confessed to her at a Travelodge motel, saying she, her boyfriend Tom Schenkelberg, and Chad Landrum had killed Daly because he had stolen from Mellen’s mother’s house.⁴ No DNA, no fingerprints, no forensic evidence tied Mellen to the crime. Patti’s word was the case.

The Witness the Jury Never Truly Saw

Between 1988 and 2002, June Patti had more than 800 contacts with law enforcement and was known to exaggerate or lie to advance her interests.⁵ The Torrance Police Department had officially designated her an “unreliable informant” in 1993, five years before Mellen’s trial.⁴ She had prior misdemeanor convictions for forgery and harassment and, days before first contacting Winn about Daly, had pleaded guilty to making a criminal threat against her own sister Laura and Laura’s son.³

Laura Patti was a Torrance police officer. Before the trial, she told Detective Winn that June was “the biggest liar” she had “ever met,” that lying was lifelong for her, and that Laura did not “believe anything [Patti] says.” Laura also reported that her sister had filed more than 20 unsubstantiated complaints against her. June Patti was, at the time, a paid informant for the El Segundo and Redondo Beach police departments.⁴ None of that reached the jury.

Conviction on One Woman’s Word

Mellen’s trial began in May 1998 in a Torrance courtroom. The prosecution’s case rested on Patti’s account of Mellen’s alleged confession. Patti’s testimony shifted between the preliminary hearing and trial, and new details appeared about a sexual motive and the use of superglue to seal the victim’s mouth.⁴ The autopsy found no adhesive and no burns on Daly’s face.³

The jury deliberated less than five hours before finding Mellen guilty of first-degree murder with special circumstances.¹ On June 5, 1998, she was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.⁴

What the Detective Withheld

Lead LAPD Detective Marcella Winn suppressed the evidence that would have unraveled Patti’s credibility. She never documented or disclosed to prosecutors or the defense her conversation with Laura Patti.⁴ The Ninth Circuit later noted that Winn did not even ask Laura why she believed her sister was a liar.⁶ Winn also failed to investigate or disclose Patti’s history as an unreliable informant, her paid informant status, or her record of being discredited by other departments.³

At the preliminary hearing, Patti herself testified that Winn “made up the details of the story” in a written statement and had pressured her to falsely identify a person in jail as a lookout.⁴ Mellen’s later federal lawsuit alleged that Winn ignored the leads pointing to the Lawndale 13 gang members and steered prosecutors toward Mellen alone.⁷ Winn chose not to pursue murder charges against Santo Alvarez because he was assisting the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department in an unrelated murder investigation.³

Mellen’s case was not Winn’s only wrongful conviction. Winn was also the lead detective in the 1994 prosecution of Obie Anthony and Reggie Cole for a killing outside a South Los Angeles brothel. A judge later found that Winn had suppressed evidence about a key eyewitness and knew that her primary witness had “repeatedly lied during the investigation.”⁸ Those convictions were thrown out. Obie Anthony was declared factually innocent after 17 years in prison; the city of Los Angeles paid him $8.3 million.⁷

Who Actually Killed Richard Daly

Daly was killed by the three Lawndale 13 members whom tipsters had named in August 1997: Chad “Ghost” Landrum, Lester “Wicked” Monllor, and Santo “Payaso” Alvarez. Landrum was convicted of first-degree murder in a separate trial and sentenced to life without parole.⁹ Monllor was tried separately and acquitted. Alvarez was never charged.³

In 2014, Alvarez confessed. He told Mellen’s daughter Jessica, and later attorney Deirdre O’Connor, that he, Landrum, and Monllor had killed Daly and that Mellen had nothing to do with it. According to Alvarez, Landrum initiated the attack with a claw hammer; Alvarez and Monllor then wrapped the body in blankets and a shower curtain before transporting and burning it. Landrum, already serving his life sentence, confirmed to investigators that Mellen was not involved.³

How the Case Was Reopened

Mellen’s path to freedom began when her case reached Deirdre O’Connor, an attorney and former public defender who founded the nonprofit Innocence Matters in 2010.¹⁰ In 2013, O’Connor came across Mellen’s case while investigating a separate matter and identified inconsistencies in the original conviction.¹¹

O’Connor arranged polygraph examinations for Mellen and a key contact, Shirley Knocke, both of whom passed. She tracked down Alvarez and secured his confession, interviewed Landrum in prison, and located additional witnesses who corroborated the account. She also uncovered what had been hidden from Mellen’s defense: Torrance PD’s “unreliable informant” designation, Laura Patti’s warnings to Winn, and Patti’s long record of discredited reports, along with the autopsy findings that contradicted Patti’s trial testimony about superglue and facial burns.³

Exoneration and Factual Innocence

In September 2014, O’Connor filed a state petition for a writ of habeas corpus to vacate Mellen’s conviction. On October 10, 2014, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office told the court it would not continue the prosecution because there was no evidence of Mellen’s guilt.³ Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Mark Arnold vacated the conviction and dismissed the charges, declaring that “the justice system failed” in Mellen’s case.¹² Mellen walked out of the Torrance courthouse that day.

On November 21, 2014, Judge Arnold granted Mellen’s motion for a finding of factual innocence under California Penal Code section 1485.55(b), unopposed by the District Attorney’s Office.¹³ In June 2015, California awarded her $597,200.⁶

The Ninth Circuit Ruling and $12 Million Settlement

Mellen and her three children — Julie Carroll, Jessica Curcio, and Donald Besch — filed a federal civil rights lawsuit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 against Detective Winn in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. The suit alleged that Winn had violated Mellen’s due process rights by suppressing material impeachment evidence under Brady v. Maryland and Giglio v. United States. Mellen was represented by Neufeld Scheck & Brustin LLP and by O’Connor through Seamus Law APC.⁴

The district court granted summary judgment for Winn on qualified immunity grounds. Mellen appealed. On August 17, 2018, a three-judge Ninth Circuit panel unanimously reversed. Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw, writing for the panel, held that “the record demonstrates as a matter of law that Detective Winn withheld material impeachment evidence.”⁵ Because Patti’s testimony was the only evidence tying Mellen to the crime, disclosing her documented history of lying would have “put the whole case in such a different light as to undermine confidence in the verdict.”⁴

The court rejected Winn’s argument that the suppressed evidence was merely cumulative, reasoning that statements from Patti’s own sister, herself a police officer, opened “new avenues for impeachment” the jury never heard.⁴ The panel also found a genuine issue of material fact as to whether Winn acted with “deliberate indifference or reckless disregard” for Mellen’s rights, stripping her of qualified immunity and sending the case back for trial.

Winn petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari (case no. 18-645), but the petition was dismissed by joint motion on April 2, 2019.¹⁴ The reason surfaced days earlier: on March 27, 2019, the Los Angeles City Council voted 11-0 to approve a $12 million settlement resolving the lawsuit.¹⁵

Life After 17 Years

Mellen described reentry as “adjusting to life on Mars.” She spent her first year out living on her daughter’s couch, signed up for food stamps, and had to relearn how to use a cell phone, drive a car, and lock a front door. Loud noises sometimes drove her under the bed.¹⁶

Her mother had died six months into her sentence. Her three children grew up raised by their grandmother and other relatives, and Mellen was separated from them for seven years before they began visiting her in prison.¹⁶ Her youngest child, Donald, was so young when she was arrested that he had little memory of her; he wore a tattoo of a broken heart in her honor. Her children never told friends where their mother was.¹⁷

Inside, she said, she coped by writing the word “freedom” on the bottom of her tennis shoes, a reminder that she “knew I was going to walk free one day.”¹⁷

1
Los Angeles Times. Murder Conviction Doubts
2
Innocence Matters. Susan Mellen
3
Exoneration Registry. Susan Mellen
4
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Mellen v. Winn, No. 17-55116
5
Los Angeles Times. Wrongful Conviction Suit Against LAPD
6
Los Angeles Times. Marcella Winn Susan Mellen Settlement
7
Los Angeles Times. Susan Mellen Federal Lawsuit Against LAPD
8
Los Angeles Times. Reggie Cole Investigation
9
Daily Breeze. Innocent Gardena Woman Who Spent 17 Years in Prison for Lawndale Murder to Be Released
10
US Attorneys. Deirdre O’Connor
11
Yahoo News. Susan Mellen: 17 Years in Prison for a Murder She Didn’t Commit
12
ABC7 News. Woman Exonerated in Murder Case After 17 Years
13
U.S. Supreme Court. Mellen Petition for Writ of Certiorari
14
U.S. Supreme Court. Winn v. Mellen, No. 18-645
15
NBC Los Angeles. Grandmother Wrongfully Convicted of Murder Receives $12 Million Payout
16
Exonerated Nation. Susan Mellen
17
Christian Science Monitor. After 17 Years, Why Susan Mellen Dances