Can a confession convict him?

Sam Skolnik

Monday, Feb. 26, 2007 | 7:13 a.m.

Over seven months last year, police pressed William Sites about the disappearance of his wife, Jan, several times.

His story wobbled and shook, and each version seemed to make him more culpable. Police began to believe they could solve the missing persons case and charge Sites with murder.

Sites first claimed his wife left him to move back to California. Then he said she may have left him to run away with another man.

After he was confronted with evidence of blood stains in their apartment, Sites conceded in a third interview that his wife was in fact dead. She had threatened him with a knife, he told them, and he had reacted by pushing her, causing her to hit her head on a statue and bleed to death.

Finally, Sites admitted to police in August that he killed her by striking her in the head with a hammer, possibly more than once.

Sites was arrested on Nov. 8 and charged with murder, but the body of Janita Gay "Jan" Sites has never been found - and almost certainly never will be. Sites told police that after he killed her in October 2005, he sawed her body into pieces, double-bagged the remains and threw the bags into the trash.

At a court hearing Tuesday before District Judge Valorie Vega, Sites' attorney will argue that because there is no body, prosecutors need to present a stronger case to keep Sites in jail. That despite his confessions, he should be released.

"The prosecution has gone through great pains to establish that Sites covered up the death of his wife and that it was unusual for her to be missing," Norman Reed, deputy public defender, said in court papers filed last month. "What the state cannot show is any evidence of a homicide."

Jan and William Sites had been married about 18 years before she went missing. They moved from Southern California to Las Vegas in 2004.

Jan Sites, who was 60 when relatives reported her missing, worked as a Bank of America executive for many years before retiring on disability because of a botched hip surgery and subsequent, debilitating injuries to her back and legs. In her last several years, she spent most of her waking hours in a wheelchair in the couple's apartment on West Vegas Drive near U.S. 95.

William Sites, 69, worked for the Las Vegas Review-Journal and Las Vegas Sun as a circulation department "complaint runner" for at least the last 18 months, according to two people who worked with him. Runners rush papers out to subscribers who have called to report their papers missing. Sites worked as an independent contractor for the papers. He had no criminal history before his arrest in this case.

"He was a very good worker, on time, always made his deliveries," said Jose Catala, recruitment manager for the R-J's circulation department.

"A lot of us were completely shocked" when he was arrested, Catala said. "We never saw this coming."

According to Sites, the couple's home life had been rocky for some time, including fights over money and other issues.

But Jan Sites was close with many family members - including her newfound biological daughter, who had been given up for adoption as a baby - and those suddenly stopped connections were part of what confirmed for police that this was no ordinary missing persons case.

Police were first alerted that Jan Sites was missing by Michelle Perkins, an investment company worker from just outside Lexington, K y. Perkins discovered in 2004 that Jan Sites was her biological mother.

Perkins first contacted Sites by sending her a card for her 60th birthday in November of that year. After that, they kept in regular contact with each other through letters and phone calls.

Perkins said she last spoke with Jan Sites in September 2005. Two months later she sent her mother a birthday card, to which she never replied. After conferring with a cousin of Jan Sites who also had lost all contact with her after October, they decided in early 2006 to call Las Vegas police.

When police conducted a "welfare check" on the Sites' apartment late on Feb. 21, 2006, William Sites answered the door and told a Metro officer that his wife had left for California. The officer left without setting foot inside the apartment.

Perkins, convinced something was badly wrong, filed a missing persons report.

It's clear that William Sites was the prime suspect in his wife's disappearance from the beginning.

Early in his handling of the case, Metro Detective Kevin Morgenstern suggested to Perkins that she call her mother's husband and tell him, falsely, that they had found the remains. But Sites may have been waiting for the ruse.

"The first thing he said was, 'Where'd they find the body?' " Perkins said Sites asked her.

Before Perkins made the call, police placed a global positioning satellite tracking device on Sites' car, in the hopes that he unknowingly would lead them to the body.

He never did, but Morgenstern, with Perkins' prodding, never gave up. From February through August, he interviewed Sites four times. And each time, Sites implicated himself more .

Police were aided during this time by what they found while conducting a search of the apartment: several blood stains, and many of Jan Sites' personal effects, including her driver's license - things she never would have left behind if she had taken a trip, as Sites initially suggested.

Morgenstern, like his four counterparts in Metro's missing persons detail, said he handles an average of 2,000 cases year. Few result in murder charges.

"But this one had some details to it that led me to believe something happened to her," he said. "Sometimes, when people are involved in relationships, things can go sideways pretty quick. There can be pent-up anger that's built up over the years."

Perkins said that she, and friends and family of Jan Sites, owe Morgenstern their gratitude: "He really is my hero, because he didn't give up."

In December 2005, soon after Jan Sites' disappearance, William Sites met a Las Vegas woman named Julia Eli through the dating Web site Match.com.

Eli told police that on July 30 - the same day Perkins called Sites to tell him that police had discovered her mother's remains - Sites told her that he had killed Jan. He told Eli that Jan Sites had attacked him with a knife, according to prosecutors.

Yet Eli kept her secret for two months and only talked to police after two of her daughters contacted authorities.

Eli said the couple dated for a while but decided friendship was the better course. Maybe, she said in an interview, "it was my better angels talking to me then."

Eli, who declined to talk about what Sites might have told her about the incident, said she believed that the killing was a crime of passion. "I think Bill's a good guy, even today," she said. "I think he made some bad choices. He let a bad situation get out of hand."

Although she had taken four calls from him in prison, Eli said she has since cut off communication with Sites, at the urging of her daughters.

Prosecuting an alleged murderer without a body to point to, Clark County prosecutors concede, can be tricky.

And it's relatively rare. According to Assistant District Attorney Christopher Lalli, there are four ongoing murder prosecutions in which no body exists, out of more than 100 pending murder cases.

But they have built a strong case nonetheless, court records suggest. A long list of witnesses paraded before a Clark County grand jury during three days of hearings before the indictment warrant was issued.

Defense attorney Reed in court papers said that prosecutors must contend with the corpus delicti rule, which requires that confessions from a defendant are inadmissible unless the state can demonstrate probable cause that a death actually occurred - and that the death was criminal and not accidental.

Reed also said the grand jury should have been instructed on Sites' claim of self-defense, and that because Jan Sites was killed likely in the "heat of passion," Sites should only have been charged with manslaughter and not murder.

Ultimately, Reed says, that's where the defense will go, should the case progress to trial: that Sites acted in defense.

Deputy District Attorney Tim Fattig responded in court papers that each of Reed's claims are without merit. He points to the blood found splattered and pooled around the chair in which Jan Sites died, and the fact that she left behind pets, her driver's license, cell phone and other personal items.

What's more, the government is allowed to use circumstantial evidence in determining whether a crime had caused Sites' death - and there are "volumes" of it in this case, Fattig wrote, including the fact that she suddenly ceased all communications with loved ones, and that she missed vital doctor's appointments without scheduling new ones.

William Sites - who has been charged with murder with a deadly weapon, destroying evidence and theft - faces life in prison if convicted.

His case was brought before the district attorney's death penalty assessment committee, Fattig said, but a death penalty prosecution was rejected. That was in part, he said, because only one so-called aggravating factor - special circumstances that state law says must exist for prosecutors to file a death-penalty notice - was in play: that "torture or mutilation" was employed during the course of the crime.

Despite the warm communications after the two discovered each other, Perkins and her family never got to meet Jan Sites in person.

Perkins won tickets through a radio station promotion to have Jan and William Sites flown from Las Vegas to Kentucky during Christmastime 2004, but at the last minute, her mother backed out.

Perkins said she was hurt by that, but that she eventually understood Jan Sites' reasoning: She told her daughter that she had important surgeries coming up to help fix her back and legs, and wanted to wait until she was well, and more mobile, before she made the trip.

Jan Sites said as much after one of her granddaughters, Jade, then 6, wrote her in March 2005, asking her to visit so they could play together. Her reply:

"I was so happy to get your letter today. I would love to visit you, Tori, Tyler & your Mom and Dad, and also be able to play with you

"After Grandma gets well, she would love to come and see you and play with you. I love you very much."

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