Crime & Safety

Parole Denied for Killer of Ex-Mayor's Son

But Lawrence Rayburn Cowell, 62, is eligible again in five years.

Parole was denied Tuesday for the murderer of the son of former two-term mayor Collene Campbell.

Campbell and her husband, Gary, traveled to Blythe on Tuesday along with a prosecutor to attend a parole board hearing for Lawrence Rayburn Cowell, 62. In 1982, Cowell and his co-conspirator, Donald P. DiMascio, killed Scott Campbell while aboard a private airplane and tossed his body into the ocean near Catalina island.

"They denied him parole for five more years," Deputy District Attorney Matt Murphy told City News Service in response to questions about the day's parole board hearing. "In five years we'll oppose his release again."

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This was Cowell's third chance at parole. He was sentenced Jan. 26, 1990, to two terms of 25 years to life for the murder of 27-year-old Scott Campbell and for conspiracy to commit murder and robbery.

"Our position was this is the second person he's killed—he killed one by crashing his car and the other by murder," Murphy told City News Service, referring to a July 1980 drunken-driving crash that killed Cowell's passenger, Robert Leon Ferguson.

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Cowell, who had a blood-alcohol level of .23 percent—more than twice the legal limit—at the time of the crash, was out on bail awaiting trial for vehicular manslaughter when he killed Campbell.

He was convicted of the manslaughter count in August 1982 and sentenced to 180 days in jail and probation.

"They're both horrible for different reasons," Murphy said of the two deaths. "But [Campbell's] murder was incredibly callous, calculated and cold-blooded. They talked about mutilating his body in the hopes the sharks would eat him.'' Authorities never recovered Campbell's body.

Murphy said it might have been the first time Orange County prosecutors won a murder conviction without a body.

City News Service contributed to this report.


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