OAKLAND — A man was convicted Thursday of killing his ex-fiancée with his fists, before stuffing the woman’s body in the trunk of her car.
An Alameda County jury found Richard Debnan Charles guilty of second-degree murder in the death of Anika Crane, who disappeared for several months in March 2020 before her body was discovered.
Behind dark-rimmed glasses, the 70-year-old defendant sat silently without handcuffs in a black-and-white checkered shirt, as Judge Clifford Blakely walked him through post-conviction proceedings.
His conviction came a day after a jury had begun deliberating whether Charles had murdered Crane, a 32-year-old Oakland resident whose three-month disappearance had led friends and family — some of whom were present in court Thursday — to seek information about her whereabouts on social media.
In addition to cell phone records and DNA evidence, the prosecution’s case relied heavily on surveillance footage that showed the estranged couple driving separately to Charles’ home after he had confronted her at an Oakland liquor store on March 23, 2020, when Crane was last seen.
Their off-and-on relationship had appeared to come to an end not long before that day, though Crane had stayed at Charles’ home — an RV — the night before. Prosecutors alleged that Charles killed Crane that night, enlisting help from an unnamed individual to dispose of the body while spending hours cleaning his home.
Crane was never seen alive after that night, but prosecutors said the surveillance footage shows Charles loading something into the trunk of her 2018 Ford Fiesta before driving the car to an unincorporated area of the county between San Leandro and Hayward.
The vehicle was discovered in June 2020 on a frontage road below Interstate 580. Crane, dead inside, was determined to have been killed from blunt-force trauma.
“The defendant chose to use his fists over and over and over on Anika Crane until she took her last breath,” Deputy District Attorney Colleen Clark said Wednesday during closing arguments. “And then the defendant took very calculated, and very deliberate, steps to attempt to cover up his crime and to deflect blame away from him.”
Charles’ attorney, Miki Tal, unsuccessfully argued there was no motive offered by prosecutors and very little blood found at the crime scene. But the jury returned a guilty verdict within a day of beginning deliberations.
Judge Blakely scheduled Charles’ sentencing hearing for July 22.
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