Veteran deputy DA may have tried his last murder case

Friday, April 30, 1999 | 11:20 a.m.

Retiring Chief Deputy District Attorney Dan Seaton was to ask a District Court judge today to move the date of what would have been his last murder trial to sometime after his July 2 retirement.

Seaton, 61, was set to prosecute Michael Todd Overson, the son of a local fire department captain and brother of a Metro Police officer, who is charged with beating a drug dealer to death with a baseball bat last spring and hiding the body in the desert. Trial was set for June 14.

"I won't miss the paperwork, but I will miss mixing it up with a good defense attorney at trial," Seaton said Thursday after winning a motion to deny Overson a bid for reinstatement of his bail. "I may already have tried my last case."

Seaton, who began working as a law clerk in the district attorney's office in 1969 and became a deputy district attorney a year later, is scheduled to be the prosecutor for two murder trials both set for June 7. But it is not known whether those dates will remain firm.

Seaton and defense attorney Lamond Mills agreed to ask for the Overson trial to be moved to a later date, which was on the court calendar to be discussed and possibly set by District Judge Kathy Hardcastle earlier today.

Overson is charged with murder with a weapon, robbery with a weapon and first-degree kidnapping with a weapon.

Overson, who had been out of jail on house arrest after posting a $250,000 bail bond in March, was free less than two months when a girlfriend called police saying that she was threatened over the phone, Seaton said. After learning that Overson, 28, was on house arrest, police put him back in the Clark County Detention Center.

An attempt Thursday to gain Overson another shot at freedom under the supervision of an aunt was opposed by Seaton, who said Overson could get much better "custodial care" at the nearby jailhouse, to which Hardcastle agreed.

Seaton has made a career out of putting Las Vegas murderers behind bars and on death row.

He has successfully prosecuted, among many others, Kevin Lisle, convicted and sentenced to death in the 1994 freeway shooting of Kip Logan, and Charles Manley, who was convicted and sentenced to death in 1997 for killing his girlfriend.

Other killers Seaton has convicted include double murderer Michael Rippo in 1996, jailhouse killer Patrick McKenna the same year and Clarence Elliot in 1998 for killing his newlywed wife.

At a preliminary hearing for Overson, the state's key witness, a local prostitute with two felony drug convictions, said she witnessed the slaying of Francis Butler in March or April after she, the victim and the defendant had been using drugs for three days.

Butler's remains were found in the desert on Nov. 22.

The woman, who failed to pick Overson's picture from a photo lineup and who told police that the killer had a tattoo on his chest -- Overson does not have a tattoo -- did know Overson's first name, where he lived and what kind of truck he drove.

The case began to unfold last June when, according to court documents, the witness revealed the murder to a cellmate following an arrest on prostitution and drug charges. The cellmate called police.

The prostitute led police to where she thought the body was, but it was not found. Months later a hiker found scattered bones in the area of f U.S. 93 north of Las Vegas. Dental records confirmed that Butler was the dead man.