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–In August 2006, California Highway Patrol officers found a 1994 Ford Ranger parked on the side of northbound Interstate 5 near Oso Parkway. The drunk and high driver, Salvador Chavo Marquez, was asleep and covered in blood. Earlier, Marquez had loaded Stephen Clark's jewelry, coins, passport, computer equipment, fishing gear and video porn collection into Clark's truck and left Clark's San Clemente residence. When deputies later entered the home, they found Clark's mutilated corpse on a bathroom floor beside a dead dog that had been stabbed 60 times. During questioning, Marquez insisted it had been Clark who'd gone nuts about a dispute over a fishing pole–never mind that it was Clark's blood that covered the walls and whose intestines were found on a door knob. Later, during questioning by homicide detectives, Marquez conceded: “After reviewing all the evidence, yes. I have a strong belief that it's possible it was me. I remember snapping–snapping out of my blackout and seeing him dead on the floor.” Last week, a California Court of Appeal rejected an effort by Marquez to overturn his murder-during-the-commission-of-a-burglary conviction on technicalities.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.