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New murder charge is filed


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POSTED: Tuesday, April 27, 2010

SANTA ANA, Calif. » An additional murder charge has been filed against a Pearl City man who now faces trial in two cold-case murders.

Orange County prosecutors have amended the complaint against Richard Curtis Morris Jr. to include the murder of Pasadena grocery store owner Vincent Mejia and special circumstances, including murder during a robbery and committing multiple murders, district attorney's spokeswoman Farrah Emami said in a statement Friday.

Prosecutors allege Morris and an unidentified man were robbing the clerks at the small Pasadena grocery store when Mejia tried to intervene and was shot in the chest on May 15, 1987. He died about two weeks later.

Pasadena police arrested Morris after the killing, but he was never charged.

Investigators reopened the case after Morris was arrested in 2008 and charged with one of Orange County's most famous unsolved killings, the execution-style shooting of topless-bar owner Jimmy Casino in his Buena Park home.

Casino, whose real name was James Stockwell, was shot in the head, and a female companion at his home was bound and raped. Prosecutors said DNA from the rape was matched with that of Morris, who had submitted a sample for an unrelated case in Hawaii.

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Morris was arrested in Honolulu. He was not charged with the rape because the statute of limitations had expired.

Casino's death was the first in a series of shootings linked to the lucrative Mustang Topless Theater. One of the club's financial backers was blinded after being shot in the head, and a bouncer was killed execution style in an Irvine parking lot in 1988.

Morris was being held without bail.

In Hawaii, Morris has a criminal record involving habitual drunken driving, a Class C felony. In March 2007, Circuit Judge Richard Pollack sentenced him to a year in jail and five years' probation for the charges. His record also includes criminal contempt of court, a petty misdemeanor.

In August 1990 a relative in Kailua-Kona filed a petition for a temporary restraining order against Morris at Family Court on the Big Island. The order was dissolved a month later, according to court records.