Trial set in murder connected to du Ponts

Bill Gang

Friday, Jan. 22, 1999 | 11:23 a.m.

The only defendant in the state's case in a murder-for-hire plot connected to the wealthy du Pont family has pleaded not guilty to murder and conspiracy charges.

District Judge John McGroarty on Thursday set a March 15 trial date for Joseph Balignasa, months before the Oct. 18 federal court trial set for three other defendants on murder-for-hire charges that could result in the death penalty if they are convicted.

Testimony at Balignasa's preliminary hearing indicated he at one point confessed to his involvement in the crime.

Metro Police homicide detective David Mesinar testified in December that Balignasa admitted he went with two friends and the victim, Patricia Margello, on Aug. 2 to a downtown motel that shows adult videos.

Balignasa said that after he and the others inhaled and smoked methamphetamine, and after Margello had made two telephone calls, the victim was suddenly attacked by 37-year-old Richard Murillo, according to the detective.

As the woman fought, Balignasa told police, 40-year-old Diana Hironaga joined in and tried to smother the woman with a pillow.

Still she fought, and Murillo asked Balignasa for help. Balignasa surrendered his Calvin Klein belt for Murillo to use to strangle the woman, Mesinar said, explaining that the existence of the belt with the "CK" logo on the buckle had not been revealed to the media.

The belt was still around Margello's neck when her body was found tightly wrapped in garbage bags bound with tape and stuffed in an air-conditioning vent in the Del Mar Motel room at 1141 Las Vegas Blvd. South. The body wasn't found for more than two days, when new guests in the room complained of an odor.

Court documents indicated the room had been rented in Hironaga's name, and during Margello's telephone call to her boyfriend, du Pont heir Dean MacGuigan, she had named the people she was with.

After Murillo, Hironaga and Balignasa were apprehended, 58-year-old Christopher Moseley also was charged in federal court. Moseley, a former gardener at the du Pont family estate in Delaware, is the husband of Lisa Dean Moseley, a direct descendent of the founder of the DuPont Company.

MacGuigan had come to Las Vegas with Margello apparently to get a divorce from his estranged wife.

Moseley is alleged to have called Hironaga in July and asked her to kill Margello, according to a complaint filed in a Delaware federal court.