A Swindler With a Grudge Kills a Teen
(‘Oily in the Morning,’ Forensic Files)
Aside from great hair, Ralph Albert Marcus didn’t have a whole lot going for him.
He made a living through scams. And he spent more than two decades fixated on a woman named Patty Howard who made it clear she had zero romantic interest in him.
At age 42, Ralph set in motion what he probably thought would be his greatest coup: collecting $850,000 from life insurance on Patty’s son, Nick, and getting revenge by taking him away from her forever.
As a comment on YouTube said, “Marcus is not a POS. He’s the whole thing.”
For this post, I looked into Ralph Marcus’ criminal history and searched for an explanation as to why in the world Nick Howard — a teenager with no dependents — had such an expensive life insurance policy.
Fender unbenders. So let’s get going on the recap of “Oily in the Morning,” the Forensic Files episode about Nick Howard’s murder, along with extra information culled from the internet.
Nicholas Andrew Howard was born on March 9, 1978 to Daniel and Lillian “Patty” Howard. The Howards, who lived outside of Sacramento, California and ran an auto body shop, were a close bunch. Nick’s sister, Jaime, told Forensic Files that Nick was her best friend. After Nick, 18, got his diploma, he continued to live at home, and worked in the family business.
At the end of a night out on Feb. 5, 1997, Nick went to Tony’s Place, a restaurant in Walnut Grove, to pick up a forgotten driver’s license. He left a phone message to tell his family that he had some car trouble but was heading home.
Nick never arrived.
Patty called the sheriff’s department the next morning. Her husband went out to search for Nick, driving up and down River Road, the route Nick would have taken from the restaurant.
Car discovered. River Road had no shortage of perilous stretches. It runs parallel to the Sacramento River, with a 30-foot drop from the road to the water, and no guardrails. (Just a few days ago a driver crashed into the river and died.)
Ralph Marcus, who joined the search effort along with his friend Jake Stanton, flagged down a police car to tell officers he’d found tire tracks leading from the road to the riverbank.
California Highway Patrol and Yolo County officers converged at the scene and called in divers. Two days after Nick’s disappearance, they found his empty Mazda 626 at the bottom of the river. The engine had been running when the vehicle hit the water.
Not ready to give up. Investigators discovered Nick’s neatly crumpled glasses inside the car but no other sign of Nick.
The interior of the vehicle had stains from motor oil, probably from an empty bottle of Valvoline found in the car.
Meanwhile, Patty Howard still hoped what everyone hopes when a loved one goes missing after an accident — that he’s a John Doe, confused but still alive, at a hospital.
Police suspected that Nick had staged the accident and then gone into hiding.
Slumber through an accident? But on Feb. 25, 1997, a male body surfaced near Clarksburg downstream from the track marks. Investigators had to use dental records to identify it as belonging to Nick Howard; his corpse had started to decompose. An examination suggested that someone had beaten and strangled Nick and thrown him into the river while he was still breathing. He died of drowning.
Authorities classified the death as a murder.
One of the investigators noted on Forensic Files that if Nick fell asleep along the road, he would have probably been jolted awake by the rocky descent toward the water.
Lively interview. Besides, the car had gone off the road at a 45-degree angle, too sharp a path for a vehicle whose driver had fallen asleep.
The case got all the more fishy when investigators discovered Nick had a $500,000 life insurance policy that offered $850,000 if his death happened by way of an accident.
Homicide Detective Larry Cecchettini, one of the more vigorous speakers on this particular Forensic Files episode, noted the oddity of a young person having this much insurance coverage.
Suspicious paperwork. It turned out that Nick had taken out the policy on himself after lying to the agent — he said that he planned to get married and take over his parents’ business, according to court papers from 2001. He paid the premiums, which cost him about one fourth of his monthly income, Cecchettini told The New Detectives on the “Betrayed” episode.
The Howards discovered that the policy listed not them but rather Ralph Marcus as the beneficiary. (According to The New Detectives and court papers from 2001, the change never officially went through because Nick neglected to supply some required information — but Ralph probably didn’t know that until after Nick died.)
Ralph had a long history with the Howard family, particularly with Patty.
Unrequited feelings. In 1973, Ralph, then 17, met Patty, 14. He immediately started hitting on her and made some unwanted advances after pinning her down — he claimed he just wanted to show her some wrestling holds. The incident sounded like borderline, or maybe full-fledged, sexual assault.
Patty friend-zoned him, but he continued to hover around her.
Even after she married Dan Howard, Ralph’s preoccupation with Patty persisted. In an October 1986 letter to Patty’s sister, Ralph said that the emptiness he felt without Patty “would be like for you if your children were taken away forever,” according to court papers.
Connection with son. Ralph continued to hang around Patty and her family until 1993 — when he made a bizarre request to have a baby with Patty.
She finally told him to get lost forever.
But Nick stayed in touch with Ralph, who lived in Orangevale. Starting when Nick was 16, Ralph would sometimes hire him to work on landscaping jobs, according to 2001 court papers.
Bad-news guy. Ralph acted like Nick’s godfather, according to Forensic Files. He whisked Nick away on adventures in Reno and Tahoe. They stayed in hotels and went to casinos. What teenage boy could resist those enticements?
Many YouTube commenters criticized Patty for allowing Ralph to have any contact with her or her family after experiencing his aggression in high school. But remember, that was in 1973, before anyone talked about date rape or acquaintance rape or forcible kissing. Back then, behavior like Ralph’s was often filed in the “he can be a jerk sometimes” bin.
If there was a loser bin, he definitely belonged in that one, too. Although Ralph liked flashy things, he could never hold a job for long. He told people he made a living as a gambler. He resided rent free with his mother and stepfather for years and did sporadic contracting work. But he needed money for a new home — the bank was set to take ownership of his mother’s house because of a reverse mortgage.
Litany of offenses. A background check on Ralph revealed bankruptcy, drug running, and insurance fraud. In one case in the 1970s, Ralph allegedly set his own house on fire and stayed in the burning structure until he almost died.
Court papers would note Ralph’s “past success, working with one or more confederates, in obtaining cash from insurance companies by means of contrived fires, faked auto theft, faked burglary, and property damage from faked auto accidents.”
He acted surprised to hear that Nick had named him as insurance beneficiary. Ralph said he knew nothing about any fraud scheme. But some of Ralph’s acquaintances who later came forward told police that Ralph knew about the beneficiary switch and offered varying reasons for the change. He told one associate that Nick didn’t trust his own parents and wanted Ralph to administer the money to his family in a prudent way.
Far-fetched scheme. After Nick’s death, Ralph said that he would turn over any insurance money to the Howard family, but he later backpedaled.
Meanwhile, an unidentified associate of Nick’s told police he heard Nick brag about a plan to fake his death for $1 million in insurance money, and Ralph Marcus would collect the payout so Ralph and Nick could use it for high living.
In addition to various statements from people who knew Ralph or Nick, the forensic evidence was growing.
Mouthing off. Tests on the Mazda showed that a Valvoline oil bottle cap was holding the throttle open. It was used so the vehicle could be operated without a driver, investigators believed. A Valvoline oil bottle found in Ralph Marcus’s garage bore the same lot number as the one in the sunken car.
Experiments with a Styrofoam model of Nick’s head suggested that the accident wouldn’t cause the severe crushing of glasses. (The glasses shown on Forensic Files looked neatly crushed rather than mangled.)
It came out later that Ralph told friend Gayle Schlenker that Nick’s car was going around 85 miles an hour when it hit the water. How would he know?
Big-talking teen. Jake Stanton would later tell police that, at the crash site, Ralph found a stray glove that matched the one found on Nick’s body — and put it back in the water rather than turning it over to police. Ralph later claimed that the glove was tangled in fishing line and slipped from his hands.
Investigators theorized that Nick and Ralph transpired to commit insurance fraud, then run away together and live the glamorous life on the payout. Nick had told his sister and his buddy Jason Smalling that he was “worth more dead than alive” and that Ralph could take his insurance money and multiply it. Jaime and Jason both expressed skepticism, but it didn’t discourage Nick — and they probably thought he would never really do such a thing anyway.
Furthermore, Nick told his friend Susan Von Niessen about a plan to fake his own death, hide in Mexico, and then return to the U.S. to collect on his life insurance. But Susan told him that insurance companies don’t pay off until the policy holder has been missing for seven years. That information rattled Nick, according to court papers from November 2001.
Not so cocky now. On July 11, 1997, detectives from the Yolo County sheriff’s office arrested Ralph and charged him with murder with the special circumstance of committing the homicide for financial gain, which could bring the death penalty.
Ralph pleaded not guilty. His court appearance was a far cry from the image of bravado to which he aspired: Ralph “sat silently, attached by each wrist to other inmates in a line of prisoners wearing identical blue jail pajamas,” the Sacramento Bee reported on July 25, 1997. “He fidgeted and cast brief, nervous glances toward the row of spectators — the family and friends of his alleged victim.”
Public defender James Eger represented Ralph early on, and later J. Toney took over as part of a contractual relationship with the county.
Tall tale. The trial kicked off on Oct. 5, 1999.
Investigators theorized that Ralph clung to Nick because the rest of the Howards didn’t want him hanging around.
Ralph plotted the insurance caper from the beginning, they conjectured. Nick was probably acting on Ralph’s suggestion when he took out the insurance policy.
Brutal assault. It came out that, possibly as part of an effort to stage the accident, Nick had called his buddy Samuel Tyler to say that he was driving home along River Road and was tired after staying awake about 32 hours — and that he had some trouble with the car’s distributor cap but had fixed it.
On the night of Feb. 5, he and Ralph met at a dock on the Sacramento River to create the accident scene, prosecutors believed, but Nick tried to back out of the plan, so Ralph killed him — or maybe Ralph had planned the murder from the beginning either out of greed or for revenge against Patty, the prosecution believed. He beat and strangled Nick until he passed out, threw him in the water, crunched the glasses, and put them in the car and accidentally spilled the Valvoline oil while taking the cap off. Then he used the bottle cap in the carburetor so he could send the unoccupied Mazda into the Sacramento River, prosecutors alleged.
Later, Ralph informed police that he “discovered” the tire tracks where the car ran off the road — he wanted the authorities to find the vehicle and the body so he could collect on the insurance.
At the trial, two of Ralph’s former associates who received immunity testified about scams Ralph had taken part in.
Pickup game. Harold Thompson said that in the 1970s, Ralph had shown up at his door with singed hair, saying that his house had burned down because of an electrical fire and that he had secretly removed expensive items from his house and claimed that the blaze destroyed them.
Jeff Cantrell testified that Ralph had helped him out by destroying Jeff’s ski boat so Jeff could collect on insurance. Ralph also defrauded his own insurance company by claiming someone stole his Toyota pickup truck, Jeff said.
Glen Harms, an inmate from Yolo County Jail, testified that Ralph told him that Nick was his adopted son and that Ralph himself had paid for the insurance policy.
Dubious claims. After his court appearance, Harms claimed that Ralph looked at him and mouthed, “You’re dead.”
Another witness testified that Ralph had lured Nick Howard into a credit card fraud scheme.
And Farmers Insurance representative Jim Dyer said he suspected that a 1996 claim from Ralph — that someone burglarized a shed outside his home — was phony. But Ralph went to the Insurance Commission to complain, so Farmers reluctantly paid Ralph $58,000 on his claim.
Defense’s turn. Ralph’s lawyer, J. Toney, was undeterred and hit the prosecution back hard.
The defense presented three forensic pathologists who denied the strangulation evidence and said Nick had simply drowned and that his facial injuries came from the crash. Tony argued that Nick was fatigued the night of his disappearance and could have easily drifted off behind the wheel.
And Ralph was an honest citizen who made his living as a gambler, the defense contended.
Brother speaks up. Next up, Ralph Marcus himself took the stand. He claimed to have witnessed Nick put a bottle cap in his vehicle’s carburetor on an occasion before the accident.
Ralph also said he was shocked to find out Nick had made him the beneficiary of his life insurance policy, but he kept it as a secret from the Howards as not to upset them. Oh, and he never mentioned the insurance to police because he didn’t think the change was valid.
His brother, Ron Marcus, would later testify that Ralph said that Nick named him beneficiary because he was mad at his parents.
Right where he belongs. Ralph denied past acts of fraud. He also said that he quit working to care for his mother.
The jury was unmoved. On Jan. 13, 2000, Ralph was convicted of first-degree murder and given life without the possibility of parole. He lost a 2011 appeal attempt.
Today, Ralph Albert Marcus, 67, is in Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, California, where he’s better known as #P66056, and still has no chance of parole, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
“Marcus got his wish,” wrote YouTube commenter Lowhandlagum. “He doesn’t have to work anymore.”
That’s all for this week. If you enjoyed this post, please share on social media. Until next time, cheers – RR
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