WOODLAND — From the very beginning, law enforcement agencies faced an uphill battle with the April 14, 2013, murders of Davis couple Oliver “Chip” Northup and Claudia Maupin.
It was the type of investigation police fear the most — “a double homicide with no suspect whatsoever,” said Lt. Glenn Glasgow, the Davis Police Department’s investigations commander at the time. “We were basically starting from the ground floor.”
Eventually, detectives would find a suspect in Daniel Marsh, a 16-year-old Davis High School student who confessed that he fatally stabbed the victims to satisfy years of homicidal urges. A Yolo County jury convicted him last fall of two counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances, resulting in a prison sentence of 52 years to life.
Now 18, Marsh was transferred last week from a juvenile detention facility to the California Institution for Men in Chino, where he’ll undergo a series of assessments to determine which state prison he’ll be assigned to, said Bill Sessa, spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
The Marsh case was the featured subject Thursday at the Yolo County District Attorney’s Citizens Academy, an eight-week course designed to educate community members about the inner workings of the criminal justice system.
Throughout the 2 1/2-hour class, police and prosecutors provided insight into the challenges that accompany high-profile crimes, as well as the collaboration involved in solving a case and taking it to trial.
For Davis police, that collaboration began early on as they called upon neighboring law-enforcement agencies — including the FBI and the California Department of Justice — to help process the grisly crime scene and aid an investigation that pulled them in multiple directions.
With no evidence of a motive — such as a burglary or robbery — at the scene, police set their sights on other possible suspects, ranging from family members to people the slain couple may have encountered through their work. Northup, 87, a longtime attorney, was still active in criminal appellate cases, while Maupin, 76, counseled participants in Alcoholics Anonymous.
Within two months, Davis police detectives had logged some 2,500 investigative hours — traveling as far as Nevada to scope out possible leads — written and served 35 search warrants and generated 218 police reports, Glasgow said. Their FBI partners consulted the National Center for Analysis of Violent Crime in Quantico, Va., in the search for a possible suspect.
The break that solved the case, however, came out of nowhere — a phone call, anonymous at first, from a friend of Marsh’s with intimate knowledge of the crime.
“He’s revealing information that was never released to the public,” such as the method of entry into the couple’s Cowell Boulevard home and details of the crime scene, Glasgow said. A second friend corroborated the information, and a plan was formed to bring Marsh to the police station.
His June 16, 2013, arrest culminated a five-hour interview led by FBI Special Agent Chris Campion, whose agency had profiled the murder suspect as an 18- to 25-year-old who likely had a criminal history. Someone like Marsh was nowhere on their radar, he said.
Campion ultimately elicited a confession from Marsh, who described the murders and his reaction to them in calm, chilling detail.
“I was nervous, but excited and exhilarated. …It was almost like an out-of-body experience,” Marsh told Campion in an excerpt of the video-recorded interview played for the academy class. “I’m not gonna lie — it felt amazing. It was pure happiness and adrenaline and dopamine just rushing over me.”
As Marsh spoke, police were descending upon his mother’s South Davis home, where they recovered the murder weapon as well as a bloodstained jacket that ultimately tested positive for both Northup and Maupin’s DNA.
Marsh, meanwhile, told investigators he had taken steps to ensure that he left no evidence behind at the murder scene, even wrapping his boot soles in duct tape to avoid leaving telltale shoeprints.
“Really, there was nothing to associate him with this crime — not a hair, not a fingerprint,” said Deputy District Attorney Amanda Zambor, one of two prosecutors assigned to the case.
The work was just beginning at the Yolo County District Attorney’s Office as investigators pored over virtually every aspect of Marsh’s life going back to early childhood — including the relatives, friends, teachers and others who had encountered him on a regular basis, and the violent, gory content of his social media accounts, Zambor said.
State law mandated that Marsh be tried as an adult, though his young age at the time of the murders — a month shy of 16 — made him ineligible for either the death penalty or life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Building the criminal case involved not only the evidence and information yielded during the police investigation, but also anticipating the possible defenses that could be raised by Marsh’s attorneys, who challenged the admissibility of Marsh’s confession and sought repeated trial delays.
Two weeks before the trial was scheduled to start, Marsh changed his plea to not guilty by reason of insanity, claiming the antidepressants and mood stabilizers he’d taken over the years triggered his homicidal thoughts and thrust him into a dissociative state on the night of the murders.
That intensified the investigation as prosecutors subpoenaed years of medical and psychological records for Marsh and his family, some of which dated back to the 1930s, Zambor said. Each side brought in an expert witness who offered vastly different opinions regarding Marsh’s sanity.
Ultimately, prosecutors relied upon Marsh’s own words to prove both his guilt and his sanity, noting Marsh’s extensive planning of the murders, his detailed recollections of the crime and his efforts to conceal his role.
The insanity defense failed, with jurors ruling that Marsh understood the nature of his acts, and knew they were legally and morally wrong.
“He wanted to do more,” Campion said, noting Marsh’s admission that he tried twice more to kill in the weeks after Northup and Maupin’s murders. “This was a serial killer in the making.”
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene