Laguna Beach murder investigation of Damon L. Nicholson continues with more leads and reward
Nicholson, said Laguna Beach Police Lt. Jason Kravetz. According to friends the reward is expected to grow.
Ruano, who was fired last October, was a very good friend of Nicholson, said Andersen, who claimed he was the one who discovered the Ruano alleged embezzlement scheme.
Andersen, also told the media he offered a reward to serve as an investigative catalyst. “Unfortunately, money talks,” said Andersen, who hopes a reward will prove irresistible to someone who has so far hesitated to divulge information about the killer.
Police believe that rewards can be successful lures. “They sure are. Sometimes money can entice people to come forward with information,” said Lt. Jason Kravetz. “On other occasions, people who have critical information feel that coming forward is the right thing to do, regardless of the reward money.”
Andersen’s reward is based upon police receiving information that leads to the identity, prosecution and conviction of the murderer.
Narciso P. Leggs Jr. a Laguna Beach Businessman who owned and operated a limo service was a victim of both a “pickup” murder and the “overkill phenomenon”.
Leggs, a gay man, was tortured and murdered by Gregory Michael Pisarcik. Pisarcik, according to court documents, was looking for a gay man to rob when he met Leggs. Upon capture, Pisarcik confessed the murder to police and asked not to be put in a cell with another man because he hated “fags.”
Gregory Michael Pisarcik
At the time of his murder, Leggs, 53, was retired from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, where he had worked for 22 years. He lived in a converted garage apartment in an unincorporated area between Tustin and Santa Ana. Neighbors often saw Leggs polishing his two prized automobiles — a white Lincoln Town Car and a mauve Rolls-Royce.
Leggs and Pisarcik met at Laguna Beach and went back to Leggs’ apartment, stopping to buy vodka along the way, according to court documents.
According to prosecutors, court records and person’s close to the investigation Pisarcik at Legg’s apartment grabbed an unopened bottle of champagne and started bashing Leggs’ head in. At some point he tied Leggs up. He asked where Leggs kept his money, rummaging the apartment between blows with the champagne bottle.
Pisarcik attempted to strangle Leggs, hog-tied and mutilated his body and wrote “FAGS DIE” on his back in black marker. With a pair of scissors, he cut off both of Leggs’ ears. Pisarcik then stomped on Leggs’ testicles, urinated on him, and shoved a large flashlight deep into Leggs’ rectum. He also cut off Leggs’s penis and stuffed it into the victim mouth. Forensic evidence (including blood on the refrigerator) later showed that Pisarcik stopped to eat Leggs’ food, and also took a shower before he left. Finding less than , Pisarcik took Leggs’ two guns — a .45-caliber and a .357 magnum — and drove off in Leggs’ white Lincoln Town Car. Before leaving, Pisarcik sat on a bed, over Leggs’ corpse, cleaning the guns he would take with him.
While police said they believed robbery was the motive in Leggs’ murder, they also said that Pisarcik had been involved in the robbery of gay men. The convicting jury found the defendant Pisarcik guilty of murder and was sentenced to life in prison and jury determined that his actions was a hate crime.
In custody, Pisarcik told detectives that he hated homosexuals and admitted he’d gone to Legg’s apartment to rob him. While he was being transported to the Orange County Jail, he told a deputy: “Don’t put me in with the homos. I’m not a homo. That’s why I killed him. I’m not a homo.”
Leggs’ body was found on June 29, 2002, when his landlord called the police after not seeing his tenant for two days.
An autopsy later revealed that Leggs died from blunt-force trauma to the head believed similar to Nicholson.
In a Washington DC Blade investigation a few years back looked into the murders of 25 gay men in the D.C. metro area over a five-year period and found, in retrospect, that many of the slayings had similarities to the Shepard case, although none were officially listed as hate crimes.
At the time of the Blade investigation, police made arrests in only seven of the 25 cases. Looking back at subsequent editions of the Blade, no reports could be found to show arrests had been made in the other 18 cases.
Similar to the Shepard case, nearly all of the 25 gay male victims studied in the Blade investigation were believed to have met their attacker at a bar — usually a gay bar. Investigators believe the killers in most of the D.C. area cases tricked their victims into thinking they were interested in having a sexual encounter, with the intent of luring the victim to a place where they could rob or murder him.
There were no gay bars in Laramie when Matthew Shepard was killed. Evidence that surfaced in the Shepard case