Jury to Get Case of Slain Striptease Client

Charles George was looking for sex when he agreed to pay a dancer from Ambrosia Escorts $150 if she performed at his San Clemente apartment.

What he bought into, Orange County prosecutors say, was a scam in which women pretended to be prostitutes but instead stole the clients’ money -- a scheme that cost the 54-year-old engineer his life in January 2001.

Jurors will start deliberating Monday whether Ambrosia owner Daniel Louis Parra, 37, of Cerritos murdered George when he used a metal flashlight to fatally beat him after the dancer, Elizabeth Nava, took George’s money, then signaled that he was upset about not getting sex. Nava, 30, of Irvine, is also charged with murder.

“They were selling sex, but they had no intention of delivering it,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Murray said in his closing argument Thursday. “If a client complains, in comes the cavalry -- the cavalry wielding a Mag-Lite flashlight.”

Attorneys for the defendants said in their closing arguments that Parra was protecting Nava after George tried to rape her.

“Mr. Parra defended Miss Nava, and then he defended himself,” said Deputy Alternate Defender George Douveas, Parra’s lawyer.

“What if Mr. Parra wasn’t there that night? It could have been a case involving Miss Nava as the victim.”

Parra and Nava were arrested in Northern California nearly two weeks after George’s death on Jan. 30, a day after the beating. The couple had fled in Parra’s car, prosecutors say, first putting dealer plates from Chino on the car and flipping the license plate frame to hide the words “Huntington Beach Hyundai.”

Left behind in George’s apartment were a black ski mask carrying Parra’s DNA and an orange tank top Nava had taken off while dancing, Murray said.The defendants are also charged with robbery, assault and burglary related to an incident that happened three months before George died. Another client, Bert Madison, testified during the monthlong trial that Parra beat him and stole his laptop after Nava refused to have sex with him.

If convicted of all counts, each could face life in prison without parole.

Despite its suggestive ads, Ambrosia never promised sex to its customers, the defendants’ lawyers said. Without guaranteeing sex, they added, there could be no deception of the clients and thus no theft.

Ambrosia, like many other companies, uses sexual appeal in its ads to attract customers and shouldn’t be accused of misleading them, said Nava’s lawyer, Christian Jensen.

“If you use sex to sell beer, you’re probably going to use it to sell strippers,” Jensen told jurors.

If the Lakewood business’ customers expected sex rather than a striptease, it was their misinterpretation of the ads, Douveas said. “These are grown men living in a modern society,” he said. “They know it’s illegal to pay for sex.”

But Ambrosia’s dancers did everything but explicitly promise sex to keep the money coming, prosecutor Murray countered. Customers were told that if they tipped more, then they would be “satisfied,” he said.

Men who didn’t receive sex in return -- such as George and Madison -- were rightfully disappointed, but because of the nature of what they were trying to buy, rarely did the men report the crime to police, Murray said.

“Once you call up and solicit sex, you’re an easy target,” the prosecutor said.

Hurting clients who protested too much was a “cost of doing business,” Murray said, much like the pepper spray that Parra “restocked like paper clips.”

Greed drove Parra and Nava to steal and assault their clients, he said, before displaying a photo of George’s bludgeoned face, the words “out of greed” stamped across it in red block letters.

“The defendants are professional manipulators,” Murray told the jurors. “They tried to do everything they can ... to avoid responsibility. Don’t allow the defendants to manipulate you.”