A Virginia Beach jury found Lamont Johnson guilty of murdering his ex-girlfriend, Bellamy Gamboa, this week.
Gamboa went missing in 2018. Despite extensive searching, investigators never found her body.
Johnson' trial is though to the first 'no-body' case in Virginia Beach courts.
Those kinds of cases can be difficult for prosecutors to successfully try. Without a body, there is no way to prove a manner of death -- or that a death happened at all.
Johnson's attorneys attempted to have his case thrown out, saying there was insufficient evidence for a murder charge, according to media partner WTKR.
WHRO’s Paul Bibeau spoke with Laura Killinger of William and Mary’s law school about murder trials where the victim’s body has not been found and what that usually means in trial.
Paul Bibeau: Hi, Professor Killinger, thanks so much for joining us today.
Laura Killinger: Thank you for having me.
PB: The trial of Lamont Johnson is thought to be the first so-called no body murder trial in Virginia Beach. But it's not the first in Virginia. There was a trial in 1980 of Stephen Epperly for the murder of Radford University student Gina Hall. What happened then, and are there similarities to the Johnson case?
LK: Since that time, since that very first case, there have been actually about ten murder trials in Virginia that have not had a body. And there are a lot of similarities in a lot of these cases. Typically, they tend to be the perpetrators are overwhelmingly male. Most frequently there is a murder of somebody who is close to them, often a somebody to have a romantic relationship with or some sort of domestic relationship with. And the reason that that sort of makes sense when you think about it... People know that if it's their girlfriends or their wife who disappears, the first person that the police might look at might be the boyfriend or an ex-boyfriend or a husband. And so they understand that they might have more motivation to dispose of a body and to make sure that that body is never found. So the same thing in this first case that was done in Virginia. The body has never been found, although the police continue to this day - my understanding is to still follow up leads to try to find it. He was convicted. And in the vast majority of these cases without a body that do go to trial... there is a conviction in most of those cases as well.
PB: In many of these no body murder cases, prosecutors gather some of the evidence from statements the accused made to police. How useful is this evidence and how often do defense attorneys challenge it?
LK: So absolutely, these statements tend to be often are at the very center of a prosecution's case because either they're corroborated by external evidence. So, for example, if there's a confession and somebody talks about how they were planning to dispose the body, and if there's corroborating evidence, for instance, that a person immediately before the murder, in the days leading up to it, did computerized searches for how to dispose a body. That's really excellent corroborating evidence that shows that the statements that were made to the police are true and accurate. Now, defense attorneys will always will try to attack these types of statements in many ways, and many of them can be successful. Certainly the question is often what happened with the defendant, with the questioning of the defendant before the police started recording? Did the police engage in some sort of threatening or coercive acts right before the camera was turned on, or did they engage in some kind of trickery? Did the defendant feel tricked in some way to make a statement that was then taken out of context?
PB: Virginia is not the only place where prosecutors will bring murder cases to trial without the victim's body being found. Just last month in Holly Springs, North Carolina, a jury convicted Brian Sluss of murdering his ex-girlfriend without having the victim's body. How do cases like this generally turn out? Are the challenges for prosecutors the same in Virginia as elsewhere?
LK: So in general, you know, laws do vary by every state. We have a federal system, and so we really have 51 separate criminal justice systems, in essence. But this is one area where there is actually a lot of commonality. And the challenge to trying a no body case is pretty consistent throughout most jurisdictions, because you have to prove whether or not the person is dead. And that transcends even the different slight variations on how the penal code in these different states are worded.
PB: Thanks so much for talking to us about this.
LK: You're welcome.
