An adult son is accused of killing his parents and their longtime housekeeper in a series of slayings at the family’s home in a gated Newport Beach community that began hours after the son was released against doctors recommendations from a multi-day mental-health hold, jurors were told on Monday, Oct. 6.
Camden Nicholson, now 34, has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to the special-circumstances murders of Kim and Richard Nicholson and Maria Morse, whose bodies were discovered on Feb. 14, 2019, in the home at 36 Palazzo within the Bonita Canyon community.
During opening statements on Monday in a Santa Ana courtroom, Senior Deputy District Attorney David Porter told an Orange County Superior Court jury that Nicholson, then 27, used a variety of knives and other blunt instruments to bludgeon and stab his mother and father to death, to do the same to Morse the next day. A day later he turned himself in, the prosecutor said, and claimed he carried out the killings in self-defense.
Nicholson’s attorney, Richard Cheung, told jurors that his client had a history of depression, paranoia and psychosis that led to him getting hospitalized over the years.
His mental-health issues surfaced seven years earlier when Nicholson was taking part in missionary service as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, his attorney said, prompting him to leave the mission. Nicholson ultimately dropped out of college and moved back in with his parents, the defense attorney added, and at one point stopped taking his medication, believing it was poisoning him.
In December 2018, Nicholson disappeared from his parents’ home and began sending people he knew a barrage of uncharacteristically vulgar text messages. Hoping to force Nicholson to get mental-health help, his parents cut off the credit cards Nicholson was using to live in hotel rooms, the defense attorney said.
On Feb. 5 in 2019, Nicholson went to Hoag Hospital, where he was placed on a mental-health hold from Feb. 6 until Feb. 11, the defense attorney said. At one point, the lawyer added, while speaking to hospital staff, Nicholson said, “My parent will try to find me, classify me as insane and take control. They are satanic.”
During his stay at the hospital, doctors diagnosed Nicholson with schizoaffective disorder, according to the defense. The hospital’s doctors were worried about discharging Nicholson on Feb 11, 2019 — feeling he wasn’t fully stable and concerned he wouldn’t allow them to contact his parents to confirm he was going to be staying at their home; the staff urged him to get outpatient treatment, according to the defense.
“This is someone who was unfortunately unstable,” Cheung said.
Nicholson walked to his parents home. When his father arrived, Nicholson attacked him and then placed his body in a small bathroom, using a towel to try to prevent blood from seeping from beneath the door.
“He stabbed him over and over and over again,” Porter told jurors.
Hours later, when his mother arrived home, the prosecutor said, Nicholson fatally attacked her in the garage as well.
The next morning, when Morse — the family’s longtime maid who the prosecutor described as Nicholson’s “second mother” — arrived at the home for work, Nicholson attacked her in the kitchen, stabbing her multiple times and slicing her throat, the prosecutor added.
Nicholson went on several errands in his parents’ and the maid’s vehicles — buying marijuana from a dispensary, purchasing sex toys and lube from a sex shop and buying ribs and other food from a Gelson’s market, according to the prosecution.
Then, on Feb. 13, 2019, he drove to a Kaiser facility in Irvine, where he admitted to killing his parents and the housekeeper, according to audio of his conversation with an Irvine police officer.
Nicholson urged the officer to send police to his parent’s home, telling him, “There is a triple homicide there, mother(expletive).”
Asked about his parents and the maid, Nicholson told the officer, “They are dead, man,” later adding that his parents “make up stories that I have issues I don’t have.”
The hospital staff and the officer at times had difficulty deciphering what Nicholson was saying. The defense attorney played for jurors a recording of Nicholson, while at the hospital, making what sounded like moaning noises followed by unintelligible and mumbled words.
Because Nicholson is pursuing an insanity defense, the trial will include two phases: The first will focus on Nicholson’s possible guilt, while the second phase will focus on his mental state at the time of the killings.
If jurors decide Nicholson is guilty and was sane at the time of the killings, he faces up to life in prison without the possibility of parole. If they find he was guilty but insane, he would likely be sent to a state hospital for mental-health treatment rather than to state prison.