Slaying defendant’s case goes to jury
A man accused of strangling his girlfriend, cramming her body into a suitcase and throwing her into San Francisco Bay is a “predator of women” who needs to spend the rest of his days behind bars, a city prosecutor said Monday at the man’s murder trial.
Lee Bell, 55, “preyed on vulnerable women on the margins of society,” and 52-year-old Pearla Louis, whose body washed up along the Embarcadero in May 2010, was no exception, Assistant District Attorney Michael Swart said in his closing argument.
“It wasn’t a matter of ‘if ’ with Lee Bell,” Swart said. “It was a matter of ‘when.’ Sadly, Pearla was the when.”
The case was sent to the jury for deliberations, marking the beginning of the end of a seven-year ordeal for Louis’ adult children, who sat in the front row of the Superior Court gallery for much of the trial. On Monday, one began to cry and another rushed out of the room at the image of their mother’s crumpled corpse in the suitcase.
Louis was last seen alive May 16, 2010, by a desk clerk at the Harcourt Hotel on Larkin Street in the Tenderloin neighborhood. She had told a nurse at a respite center where she was receiving treatment that she was going to go see Bell, her estranged boyfriend, to get money he owed her.
Bell had a long history of domestic violence, dating to 1995, and the abuse allegedly continued after he began a relationship with Louis in 2008. In the last year of her life, Louis was in and out of the hospital for injuries caused by Bell — facial fractures, black eyes, fractured ribs — that were similar to newer injuries that the medical examiner’s office documented during Louis’ autopsy, Swart said.
In March 2010, prosecutors said, Bell had essentially told a social worker he was going to kill Louis, and in the weeks leading up to her death, he began obsessively calling the respite center asking for Louis, so much so that the center’s staff made a note to never allow him into the facility.
The day after Louis was last seen alive, the calls stopped, Swart said, while surveillance video from another residential hotel showed Bell retrieving a suitcase that matched the one that held Louis’ body.
In his closing argument, defense attorney Malcolm Smith questioned whether the suitcases were the same or just similar. He accused investigators of bias, saying they decided Bell was guilty before collecting the evidence.
Smith said once jurors looked beyond Bell’s history of domestic violence, they would find that the charges were built on “suspicion based on prior conduct.” He said the case was “almost entirely speculation.”
Smith said Bell did not have any scratches on his hands even though the medical examiner’s office found that Louis had scratched up the back of her neck in an attempt to stop her attacker from strangling her. Bell was arrested two weeks after Louis’ body was found.
Swart argued that Bell’s history of domestic violence was necessary in understanding his pattern of abuse, saying, “He knew what he was doing.
“We can’t cure the world of all the evil that we find,” Swart told jurors. “But by your verdict, you can cure our little corner of San Francisco of Lee Bell and all the evil he has inflicted.”