It was Day One of a trial alleging the murder of Hanna Montessori, a 15-year-old prostitute and great-great-granddaughter of education pioneer Maria Montessori, when veteran prosecutor Cameron Talley stood, faced the jury and began his opening statement. He didn’t bother with pleasantries.

“I don’t want to fuck you,” Talley began, speaking slowly and clearly. “I just want to kill you!”

It was difficult to gauge how the words landed on the ears of jurors, but over at the defendant’s table they clearly startled 22-year-old Jonathan Phong Khanh Tran. He had come to court looking composed, dressed in a black suit with polka-dot tie, carrying a pencil to take notes, looking much less like a murder and rape defendant than perhaps a conscientious honor student. But Talley’s jarring statement claimed Tran’s attention. He stared at Talley, leaned forward, and opened his mouth slightly.

Up on the bench, Superior Court Judge William Froeberg—a balding, perpetually frowning man who talks in a clipped, John Wayne cadence—looked like he was going to groan, but instead just frowned harder.

Talley gazed down the two rows of the most youthful Orange County jury I’ve ever seen and let his statements sink in. Then he apologized, and explained that these weren’t really his words at all. They belonged to Tran, he said, charging that in January of 2004 Tran had uttered that statement when he forced a teenage prostitute to strip at gunpoint inside his silver Nissan pickup truck, then raped her doggie-style.

“This isn’t Pretty Woman. This isn’t Julia Roberts . . . Things aren’t going to be sugar-coated here,” said Talley, a deputy district attorney. “This is a case about murder, rape and prostitution.”

Talley pointed his finger at Tran and added, “This is a case about a man who hates women, a predator, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Those words were nearly as shocking as the opening statements—and essential to Talley’s hopes of gaining a conviction. Tran’s appearance does not fit the stereotype of a killer. At a glance, the Nissan car salesman looks almost fragile and, well, innocent.

It’s not that he couldn’t have raped, robbed and murdered local teenage prostitutes working Santa Ana’s Harbor Boulevard from 2003 to 2005. But Tran—who soon regained his calm and scribbled notes with a tiny pencil as Talley spoke—projected the energetic demeanor of a sweet high school kid. A native of Vietnam who came to the United States when he was 2, Tran has nearly perfect skin, alert brown eyes and a gregarious smile on a 5-foot, 11-inch and 135-pound frame. At least two women adore him: his attractive fiancée and a mother who says her son has always showered her with respect and love. In fact, he bought her a new Nissan Altima before his arrest. Tran might be the last person you’d ever guess could be a lethal sexual psychopath.

“He’s a very nice, kind young kid who had a good life,” said Richard Wynn, his lawyer. “He made good money. He was a father figure to his younger brother. He took care of his mother and his fiancée. Why would he need to do these [crimes]?”






A few minutes from Disneyland, along a stretch of Harbor Boulevard—located near, ironically, Hazard Avenue—is an area dominated by used car lots, cheap motels, a trailer park, fast food restaurants, auto repair businesses, low-end apartment complexes and sex shops.

Santa Ana Police detective Dean Fulcher says that for as long as he can remember, scantily clad prostitutes of all races have made the area their office.

It was here—in front of a Jack in the Box, actually—that 15-year-old Hanna Montessori, often found male customers.

Harbor Boulevard was a long way from Montessori’s comfortable childhood in Georgia and Maine, and seemingly farther, still, from her heritage.

But Hanna had come to Harbor Boulevard after running away from a Marietta, Georgia, youth detention center. The second of three children, she became addicted to alcohol and drugs after her parents divorced in 1999. There were reports of sexual and physical abuse in her early teen years. On March 6, Cheryl Ramirez, the victim’s mother, testified that Hanna had been “unruly, uncontrollable, not minding” before she was placed in a group home. She ran away and by late 2003 she’d made her way to California. She quickly gave herself an alias—“Ginger”—and learned how to survive working the streets.

For example, when Montessori entered her customers’ cars, she’d reach over and fondle the man’s groin through his pants. It was a test. Like many girls working the street, Montessori held the laughable notion that an undercover vice cop wouldn’t permit the touching.

Then came price negotiations. Depending on how much she thought the John might be willing to pay, Montessori charged between $100 and $150 for intercourse and from $40 to $80 for blow jobs. If they reached an agreement, she directed the men to drive to nearby, sparsely lit residential streets, where she’d perform inside the vehicles. Some nights were profitable: $800 or more.

Not that Montessori kept the money. Enter “Pepper,” the green Lexus-driving pimp who—imagine this—fancied custom rims for his ride. According to court records, Pepper—a large twentysomething African-American who wore baggy jeans and T-shirts accentuated with a baseball cap worn backwards—ordered his prostitutes to give him nearly 100 percent of the take.

The trade-off? According to another prostitute named “Joanna,” a 17-year-old black runaway, Pepper provided a place to live, food and took them shopping at local malls twice a week. Joanna called Montessori her “home girl.”

“We lived together,” Joanna recalled. “We did everything together.”

Other than the killer, Joanna may have been the last person to see Montessori alive.





It’s not surprising that Harbor Boulevard prostitutes say they routinely endure sexual assaults. Some men assume the girls are afraid of the police, refuse to pay them, and rape them. Joanna has a strong personality, but she got tearful as she recounted that she was sexually assaulted more than 20 times in a two-year-period.

“It happens all the time,” she said. “It’s part of the game. You put yourself out there and you get what’s coming to you, you know what I mean? It’s like, ‘Oh, well,’ and you shake it off your shoulders.”

In December 2003, according to her testimony, Joanna was standing out on Harbor Boulevard when a silver Nissan truck pulled over. She said she felt safe because Tran was in the driver’s seat and he was smiling. When they drove off, he allegedly pointed a black, semi-automatic handgun at her head, ordered her to strip and then to get on her hands and knees.

“Do it now or I’ll kill you,” Joanna claims Tran said before sticking his penis in her. “After he came, I grabbed my clothes and ran.”

A 19-year-old woman was also working Harbor Boulevard in 2004, court records show. On January 15, a young, skinny Asian male driving a pickup truck solicited her. This prostitute got in and the man she’d later identify as Tran drove in the direction of Disneyland. Along the way, Tran allegedly asked, “Hey, has anybody ever hurt you?”

“Yeah, somebody did,” she replied. “You’re not going to, are you?”

There was laughter punctuated by Tran allegedly saying, “Oh no, I was just wondering.” Minutes later, they pulled into a cul-de-sac where a handgun was stuck in her face. “I lied to you!” he said as he cocked the weapon.

“I don’t want to fuck you,” he said to the trembling girl during 10 or 15 minutes of intercourse that ended with him ejaculating inside of her. “I just want to kill you!”

The rapist rummaged through her purse and stole $120. It was dark. He threatened to shoot her if she looked at him again.

She didn’t report the incident. But two days later, the girl claims she saw Tran trolling again for women on Harbor Boulevard. Their eyes met. He flipped her off. She returned the favor and recorded his license number in her cell phone. Much later that license plate proved critical to police; it was traced back to Tran’s family.

On Jan. 19, 2004—four days after the 19-year-old was raped—Montessori and Joanna worked Harbor Boulevard together for the last time.

“It was a typical night on Harbor,” Joanna recalled, when a silver Nissan pickup truck pulled into the Jack in the Box parking lot. She approached, saw it was Tran but did not scream or flee. The man in the truck shook his head.

“No,” he said. “I want the white girl.”





Something about the last scene might not add up. But perhaps if prostitutes were rational they wouldn’t be selling their bodies to strangers.

Having come face to face with the man she insists had held a gun at her head, raped her and robbed her, she didn’t confront him or call police. Her story is that Tran saw her but didn’t panic either. She was apparently willing to offer her services, even after what he’d done.

“I was a prostitute,” explains Joanna, who now works for a major clothing store. “You gotta get yo’ money.”

For five minutes, while Tran allegedly waited for Montessori to get in his truck, Joanna says she tried to convince her friend that the man was dangerous.

“I was, like, don’t get in the truck because that dude raped me,” she explained.

But Montessori showed no fear. Joanna didn’t try to physically stop her. The 15-year-old got in the truck saying, “I really need the money.”

A little known fact: The prostitutes on Harbor Boulevard were addicted to Nextel “chirp” phones, the ones with the walkie-talkie feature. It’s how they kept in touch with each other while they worked. Joanna claims that Montessori “chirped” her after she’d driven off with Tran. There was garbled talk and then screaming.

“The last thing I heard her say was, ‘He’s taking my chirp!” recalled Joanna. “I knew she was fighting. She was frightened, scared.”

Within minutes, Montessori’s bloody, near-lifeless body was found on North Morse Drive—a short, dead-end, residential street. Cuts and bruises covered her body. The back of her skull was cracked and her lower jaw was horrifically dislodged, autopsy photos show. The resident who found her heard a loud thump on the pavement in front of his house and watched a Nissan pickup truck flip a U-turn and speed past a body.

“I seen a truck drive by and heard a door open and then a loud thud,” the resident testified. “At first I thought it was a bag of cement or trash. But it was a body. It wasn’t moving.”

The death received international media attention.




Tran’s defense—lead by Wynn (a Vietnamese American with an Anglo spelling for his last name) and Mark Cantrell—has its strong points too. They called Montessori’s death “heinous,” but didn’t argue that their client couldn’t have committed the murder or the rapes because he’d never used prostitutes.

“This was a horrible set of crimes,” said Cantrell. “But can the prosecutor prove that Mr. Tran is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt? Their evidence is deficient.”

For example, the defense noted that one prostitute who was raped by a young Asian driving a silver Nissan pickup truck just four days before Montessori’s death told police that her assailant’s penis had been circumcised. Tran’s is not, his lawyers say.

“Even the police will tell you it’s common for prostitutes to make false allegations,” said Cantrell, who also highlighted other discrepancies in the prostitute’s descriptions of the pickup truck (Was it silver or blue? Did it have an extended cab or not?) and the assailant (Was he Asian or Mexican? Did he have a strong foreign accent or not?).

But perhaps the most compelling asset for the defense is Joanna, the prosecution’s star witness. She couldn’t positively identify Tran from a police photographic lineup. And though she talked about her close relationship to Montessori, she oddly waited three months to provide Santa Ana police detectives with her observations about the night of the killing and her assertion that she’d been raped by the same man.

Why remain silent when you claim Tran murdered your best friend and assaulted you at gunpoint?

“I was still with Pepper,” said testified. “I couldn’t, like, just go to the police station and say, ‘Hey, my friend died.’ She was a minor. I was a minor. And people on the street thought that Pepper had killed her.”

You wouldn’t lie in court to protect Pepper? asked Cantrell.

“No,” said Joanna.

In a day that didn’t always look promising for the defense, they might have scored on that point. A majority of jurors recorded the colloquy in their notebooks. When the jury left the courtroom, Tran shook hands with Wynn and smiled warmly at his mother who’d been watching the proceedings. A deputy placed him in handcuffs and escorted him back to jail where he lives thanks to a $1 million bail. If convicted, he faces a prison term of 55 years to life.



rscottmoxley@ocweekly.com

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