13 years on death row, now new trial

Michael Mordenti was convicted on the testimony of his ex-wife and denied evidence challenging her.

TAMPA - The used-car dealer spoke coarsely and smoked fat, foul-smelling cigars. He carried a sheathed knife and kept a gun in his briefcase.

During his murder trial, one of the jurors who sent him to death row found his dark eyes terrifying as they burned across the courtroom.

Michael Mordenti seemed ready-made for the role in which prosecutors cast him - the contract killer who left a 54-year-old woman slashed and bullet-riddled in the dirt of her Odessa horse barn.

But no physical evidence connected the St. Petersburg man to the murder of Thelma Royston on June 7, 1989. Prosecutors could produce no one who saw him fire the gun, no one who saw him wield the knife. To convict, they instead relied on the word of Gail Mordenti Milligan, his ex-wife, who had confessed to orchestrating the murder plot.

In exchange for implicating him, prosecutors let her to walk away without a day in jail. For 13 years, while waiting to be executed, Michael Mordenti has insisted that deception by his ex-wife, defense ineptitude and a prosecutor who hid evidence all combined to torpedo him at his 1991 trial.

At Union Correctional on Thursday morning, Michael Mordenti got word: The Florida Supreme Court had granted him a new trial. The court concluded that Hillsborough prosecutors withheld crucial evidence that cast doubt on his ex-wife's credibility.

Mordenti, now 63, received the news with sobs of relief. The defense lawyer championing his case, Martin McClain, was at the prison visiting another client and saw Mordenti across the room. The lawyer gave him a thumbs-up.

"He was jubilant," McClain said.

Larry Royston was shopping for a killer.

He told confidants that his wife of 19 years, Thelma, was threatening to bleed him dry in a divorce. She also threatened to reveal they had been hiding the profits of their air-conditioning business from the IRS. He told one mistress that he would pay off her truck if she helped get rid of his wife.

His overtures went nowhere until he met Gail Mordenti Milligan, a cash-strapped car dealer and divorcee impressed by his thoroughbreds and classic Mercedes. She agreed to orchestrate the hit.

On June 7, 1989, a stranger arrived at the Roystons' 10-acre ranch, lured Thelma Royston out to her horse barn and attacked her so savagely detectives would call her murder "an overkill situation."

The investigation led, nine months later, to the door of Gail Mordenti Milligan's home in Largo. Promised that her words could not be used against her, she said that at Royston's behest she contacted three people - two of their names she couldn't remember - before getting her ex-husband, Michael Mordenti, to carry out the hit for $17,000.

Charged with plotting to kill his wife, Larry Royston killed himself before his trial in March 1991.

For his own murder trial four months later, Michael Mordenti hired a cheap and inexperienced defense attorney, John Atti, who had never handled a murder case.

Prosecutor Karen Cox easily outmaneuvered him. She ridiculed the memory of witnesses who swore Mordenti had been at a car auction, 90 miles away, around the time of the attack.

Among the evidence that doomed him: a suspicious 13-minute cell-phone call between him and Larry Royston on the day of the murder.

Jurors found him guilty and recommended he die by an 11-1 vote.

The prosecutor possessed a crucial piece of evidence, however, that she never showed to the defense team, never shared with jurors. It was Gail Mordenti Milligan's datebook. She testified that she met with Larry Royston in late February or early March 1989 to hatch the murder plot over lunch. But in her datebook, she noted her lunch with Royston occurred on April 11, 1989.

By then, Mordenti's appellate lawyer argued, she was already living with the man who would be her next husband, Michael Milligan.

To the defense, that makes Milligan a more likely triggerman than Michael Mordenti. The defense argues it is implausible that she would turn to four other people to do the killing, including an ex-husband, but not to Milligan.

The Supreme Court said the defense should have been given Gail Mordenti's datebook, which exposed multiple inconsistencies in her testimony.

"There is absolutely no question that the withheld date book would have assisted Mordenti in the impeachment of Gail, the state's critical witness," the court ruled. "Ultimately, the entire case against Mordenti rose and fell on Gail's testimony."

After her lunch with Royston, Gail Mordenti Milligan testified, the first person she approached about the murder was Jack Gartley, an acquaintance. But on April 12, Gartley was a suspect in an unrelated unrelated theft case, and she told police he was an "albatross" around her neck.

"If the true date of the lunch, April 11, had been disclosed to the defense and revealed to the jury, then Gail's testimony that Gartley was the first person she attempted to recruit after her lunch date with Royston would have been far less believable," the court wrote. "Had Gail not commenced making plans for the murder until after the April 11 lunch, it is difficult to believe that she first would have approached the man she referred to as an "albatross' around her neck."

And there was more.

After Larry Royston committed suicide, his lawyer, John Trevena, told prosecutors that Royston gave an explanation for his cell-phone conversation with Michael Mordenti on the day of the murder: They were talking about the purchase of a boat.

The high court wrote that Trevena's conversation with Royston "establishes that the thirteen-minute cellular phone call between Royston and Mordenti on the day of the murder was possibly innocent in nature."

Also, the court expressed concern over prosecutors' failure to disclose its interview with Michael Milligan, in which he placed himself in New Mexico soon after the murder, because Gail Mordenti Milligan said the car used in the murder was left on the Mexican border. That would have helped the defense argue that Milligan was the killer, the court wrote.

Lawyers for the Hillsborough state attorney said they had not read the ruling Thursday. Mordenti remains in custody. It is unclear whether he will be tried again.

McClain said he is ready to defend him, but thinks his client's ex-wife is the one who should face charges. The deal she struck with prosecutors forbade them from using her own statements, he said, but other witnesses implicate her. "She's trying to pass off her own guilt to an ex-husband with whom she had a bitter divorce," he said. "I don't know why this woman who arranged this hit-murder has not been charged with murder."

To read a St. Petersburg Times story recounting this case from March 2004, go to www.sptimes.com/links Christopher Goffard can be reached at goffard@sptimes.com or 813 226-3337.

THELMA ROYSTON: Raised paint horses on a farm in northwest Hillsborough. Found shot and stabbed to death in a barn in 1989.

LARRY ROYSTON: Thelma's husband. Lived with her, but they both wanted out of the marriage. Charged in her murder, he killed himself the night before his trial.

GAIL MORDENTI MILLIGAN: Told investigators Royston hired her ex-husband, Michael Mordenti, to kill his wife for $17,000. MICHAEL MORDENTI: A St. Petersburg used car dealer convicted of being the hit man. He has been on death row 13 years.

KAREN COX: The prosecutor, never told the defense about Mrs. Mordenti's datebook, which cast doubt on her story.

JOHN L. ATTI: The defense lawyer, had three years' experience, none with murder trials. Two years after he lost the case, he resigned his law license amid allegations that he misappropriated client funds.

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