Murderpedia has thousands of hours of work behind it. To keep creating
new content, we kindly appreciate any donation you can give to help
the Murderpedia project stay alive. We have many
plans and enthusiasm
to keep expanding and making Murderpedia a better site, but we really
need your help for this. Thank you very much in advance.
Catherine
THOMPSON
Date of murder:
June 14, 1990
Victim profile:
Melvin Thompson, 49 (her husband)
Method of murder:
Shooting
Location: Westwood,
Los Angeles County, California, USA
Status:
Sentenced to death on June 10, 1993
Los Angeles Times
June 11, 1993
A judge on Thursday sentenced a Westwood auto
shop owner's widow to death for contracting her husband's murder
so that she could collect on a $400,000 life insurance policy.
Catherine Thompson showed no reaction as
Superior Court Judge George Trammell told her he could think of no
good reason to reconsider a jury's recommendation of death. Melvin
Thompson was gunned down in 1990 in the bathroom of Kayser's
Service, the auto shop he had owned for 20 years on Santa Monica
Boulevard near Greenfield Avenue.
Last September, a jury recommended that
Thompson die for masterminding the murder. After months of legal
maneuverings to persuade the judge to overturn the sentence,
Thompson was ordered to Death Row.
"He loved her. He trusted her," said Deputy
Dist. Atty. Katherine Mader. "He never had a clue that she wanted
him dead.
By Ashley Dunn - Los Angeles Times
August 30, 1990
The wife of a transmission shop owner who was
originally believed to have been killed by a Rolex watch robber
was arrested Wednesday, along with three members of a Sylmar
family, in an alleged scheme to murder the shop owner for his
$400,000 life insurance policy.
Catherine Thompson, whose husband, Melvin, was
gunned down in June, was picked up at her West San Fernando Valley
apartment Wednesday on a charge of conspiracy to commit murder.
Prosecutors added to the charge a so-called "special circumstance"
of murder for financial gain, a circumstance that can carry the
death penalty upon conviction.
Police also arrested the suspected hit man,
Phillip Conrad Sanders, along with his wife, Carolyn, and her son,
Robert Lewis Jones, on the same charges.
In an unrelated development, a fourth member of
the Sanders family, Phillip Sanders' mother, Isabelle, was
arrested Wednesday on charges of theft by false pretenses in a
$98,000 fraudulent real estate deal, said district attorney's
office spokesperson Sandi Gibbons.
"It was not good day for the Sanders family,"
Gibbons said.
Melvin Thompson, 49, was gunned down just
before 7 p.m. on June 14 as he was about to close his auto
transmission service shop on Santa Monica Boulevard.
Investigators said at the time that a gunman
had entered the shop, stole an undetermined amount of cash and the
Rolex watch on Thompson's wrist. Thompson, who was alone, was shot
several times.
Catherine, Thompson's wife of 10 years, told
investigators that she had just arrived at the shop to pick up her
husband when she heard shooting.
"I heard what I thought was backfire," she said
at the time. Someone told her that a gunman was inside and she
fled, calling 911 from a pay phone.
At first, police believed the shooting was
connected with the series of Rolex watch robberies then taking
place in Los Angeles. The same week that Thompson was killed, a
42-year-old man was shot in his newly purchased Beverly Hills home
by a gunman who struggled with him over the expensive Swiss
timepiece.
But police soon began suspecting that Catherine
Thompson was involved in the crime.
The day after the shooting, through a tip from
a witness who wrote down the license plate number of the getaway
car, police had arrested Phillip Conrad Sanders.
Police then discovered that Sanders and
Catherine Thompson had both taken part in an alleged shady real
estate deal several months earlier. Catherine Thompson was
questioned by police but later released.
Her attorney at the time, Alex Kessel, denied
she was involved in her husband's death. "This ordeal is simply
devastating to Catherine," Kessel said in June. "She had
absolutely nothing to do with his death . . . they'll never make a
case against her
Deputy Dist. Atty. Katherine Mader, who is
prosecuting the case, said Carolyn Sanders was involved in
planning the murder, and her son, Robert Lewis Jones, drove the
getaway car.
Mader said the arrests came in part after a
recent police search of the Thompson home found the supposedly
stolen Rolex there.