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Star witness again names ex-husband

For his third trial in an Odessa woman's 1989 murder, Michael Mordenti's ex-wife says he did the job.

By CANDACE RONDEAUX
Published August 10, 2005

TAMPA - Gail Milligan knew plenty of shady guys she could ask to help her make the hit.

First, she asked her old business partner, a mobbed up former boxing promoter turned car salesman. Next, she asked her beefy friend, who always traveled with an armed bodyguard. Then she asked a guy named Bill who, rumor had it, knew people who could break someone's legs.

They all turned her down.

In the end, it was Michael Mordenti who agreed to kill Thelma Royston for $10,000, she claims.

"He said, "Hell, for that amount of money, I'll do it myself."'

Billed as the prosecution's star witness in Mordenti's murder trial, Milligan spent 21/2 hours Tuesday recounting her version of the events surrounding Royston's death 16 years ago.

"He told me he shot her in the head with a .22," she said.

It wasn't the first time Milligan, 56, named her ex-husband as the triggerman in a murder-for-hire plot she helped set up. It wasn't even the second time. She's been singing the same song ever since detectives questioned her several months after Royston's bullet-riddled body was found in her Odessa horse barn in 1989.

Prosecutors granted her immunity for spilling the beans, so she did no time for her role. But she says she still has a few regrets.

"I wish it hadn't happened. I think about it every day. I'm responsible for her dying," Milligan told the jury.

Milligan told jurors that she and Royston's husband, Larry Royston, hatched the murder plot in April 1989 over lunch at her house. He told her his wife was a lesbian. They were getting divorced and she was taking him to the cleaners. He wanted Milligan to find someone who would get rid of his wife. It was worth a lot of money to him. That's how Milligan characterized the conversation.

Broke, divorced and out of work, Milligan said she'd try to help her friend out.

"I told him I didn't know those kind of people, but in the business there are a lot of shady people," Milligan said.

Soon afterward, she said, she entered into a new kind of partnership with her ex-husband and former business associate. After Mordenti, 64, agreed to make the hit the two drove to Royston's 10-acre ranch and cased the place, she said. But on a second trip to the house Mordenti, a former St. Petersburg used car salesman, got nervous about getting past dogs on the property and backed out of the deal.

"He said it was impossible," Milligan said.

A few weeks later, on June 7, 1989, the impossible happened. Thelma Royston, 54, was killed. In 1991, prosecutors successfully used Milligan's testimony to convince a jury that Mordenti did it. He was sentenced to death then, but the Florida Supreme Court ordered a new trial in December after it was revealed that prosecutors withheld crucial evidence. A new jury deadlocked during Mordenti's second trial in May. This time around in the third trial, prosecutors have decided not to pursue the death penalty.

On Tuesday, the victim's daughter, Sherri Loeffelholz, spent roughly an hour recalling in chilling detail the night her mother was killed. Loeffelholz was at home in her nightgown when a Hillsborough County sheriff's deputy came knocking at her door. A few minutes later, she was at her mother and stepfather's ranch, stunned by what she saw.

"It was like something out of a movie. There was a helicopter with a searchlight hovering up above and TV cameras everywhere," Loeffelholz said.

Told that Thelma Royston had been murdered, the daughter collapsed with grief and accused her stepfather.

"I stood up and pointed to him and said, "Did you do this?!" Loeffelholz said. "Somehow I felt that I knew."

In time, others would come to think the same.

Months after Larry Royston was charged with hiring his wife's murderer, he told his attorney, John Trevena, how it all came down. Trevena testified in an earlier trial - without the jury present - that Larry Royston claimed he'd had an affair with Milligan, that she wanted to free him up to marry her, and that Mordenti had nothing to do with the murder. Larry Royston committed suicide the day before his 1991 trial was to begin.

That testimony has not been heard, however, because Hillsborough Circuit Judge Barbara Fleischer has consistently ruled that Trevena's testimony can't be admitted, citing attorney-client privilege protections.

Mordenti's attorneys are expected to begin their cross-examination of Milligan today.

Candace Rondeaux can be reached at 813 226-3337 or rondeaux@sptimes.com

[Last modified August 10, 2005, 00:36:13]