DNA Match Leads to Sentence

The afternoon he met his killer, Ronald Jay Murphy was in a generous mood. Flush from payday in the oil fields, the 22-year-old Santa Maria man celebrated at the Main Street bar in Laguna Beach, springing for rounds with a fat wad of 50s and 100s.

There on Dec. 10, 1983, authorities say, a freckled, gap-toothed drifter who wore a straw cowboy hat and called himself “Joe” insinuated his way into Murphy’s trust. When Murphy’s body was discovered in his hotel room the next day, his skull crushed by a toilet lid and his wallet gone, police had no clue as to “Joe’s” real name or whereabouts.

It would take DNA traces left on a beer bottle, and more than 20 years, for police to identify him as James Paul Snider, a Michigan drifter and parolee. On Friday, two months after a jury convicted him of second-degree murder in Murphy’s death, an Orange County Superior Court judge sentenced Snider to 15 years to life.

“He was my best friend and my hero,” the victim’s sister, Charlotte Murphy, wrote in a letter to Judge Patrick H. Donahue. “To have him taken from us in such a brutal way was and still is unimaginable.”

Murphy grew up in Placentia, played the accordion and was valedictorian of El Camino Real Continuation High School. By 1983, he was working with his father drilling for oil in the fields of Santa Maria. After a big paycheck, authorities say, he was visiting friends in Laguna Beach for the weekend when he met Snider, who noticed his cash at the bar.

Assistant Dist. Atty. Sonia Balleste, who prosecuted the case, described Murphy as “a very nice -- maybe a little too nice -- young man,” and said Snider immediately saw a mark. “He was going to take his money,” she said. “He made up a name, and he went to put him at ease.”

Murphy took Snider and some friends back to his room at the Inn at Laguna, authorities said, and Snider decided to stay there when Murphy took the friends to dinner at Las Brisas, a landmark Laguna Beach restaurant.

The next afternoon, hotel staff found Murphy bludgeoned to death, surrounded by shards from the shattered porcelain toilet lid from the bathroom. Laguna Beach detectives came to call it “the toilet top murder.”

In 2003, Snider had just finished a 12-year prison term for a bank robbery in Holland, Mich., when investigators matched his DNA to traces found at Murphy’s murder. The Laguna Beach detective spearheading the investigation, Paul Litchenberg, helped seal the case by winning a confession.

During the interview, Snider at first denied knowledge of Murphy’s death and that he had been in California, but when confronted with DNA evidence his shoulders slumped and he admitted to the killing, said Balleste.

Snider’s explanation was that he believed Murphy had sexually assaulted him while he slept, an account the prosecutor disputes. Snider’s attorney could not be reached for comment.