OAKLAND — An Alameda County jury began deliberating Wednesday whether an Oakland man beat his one-time fiancé to death five years ago, before stuffing her into the trunk of her car and ditching her body along an Interstate 580 frontage road in San Leandro.
Alameda County prosecutors pointed to a voluminous collage of surveillance footage, cell phone records and DNA evidence while making their final arguments to jurors in the case of Richard Charles, who faces second-degree murder in the March 2020 death of 32-year-old Anika Crane. They said it all happened while Crane visited Charles’ home near Mills College, after which Charles allegedly enlisted an unidentified “helper” to dispose of her body.
“The defendant chose to use his fists over and over and over on Anika Crane until she took her last breath,” Deputy District Attorney Colleen Clark said. “And then the defendant took very calculated, and very deliberate, steps to attempt to cover up his crime and to deflect blame away from him.”
To Charles’ attorney, the entire case amounted to a baseless story with little in the way of hard proof – including a definitive crime scene, an exact time of death or a motive.
“That is all that it is here – it’s a theory of what might have happened,” defense attorney Miki Tal said. “But there’s many holes in this. This is like a puzzle with many missing pieces.”
Crane’s disappearance five years ago garnered little in the way of broad media attention or alerts from law enforcement. It took three months before authorities announced an arrest: Her former fiancé and boyfriend of 12 years.
Crane and Charles had a “complicated” relationship and engagement, authorities said. They met when she was 18 and broke up several times over the next several years. During one such split, Charles fathered a child with another woman, authorities said.
Their relationship finally appeared to have ended shortly before she was last seen on March 23, 2020, authorities said. That day, after Crane got off work, she stopped at her grandmother’s house and then visited a liquor store near Bancroft and 77th avenues in East Oakland.
Surveillance footage showed Charles’ Ford F-150 pulling over near the store just as another man got out of Crane’s car. That’s when Charles appeared to get out of the pickup, walk by the man who had been with Crane and surprise her inside the store.
Both Crane and Charles then drove their own vehicles to Charles’ home, an RV where Crane had stayed the previous night.
Crane was never seen alive again. Over the following day, surveillance footage showed Crane’s Ford Fiesta repeatedly leaving and returning to Charles’ house — during which only Charles appeared on surveillance footage around his house. Charles also appeared to repeatedly dial an unnamed “helper” from West Oakland, while allegedly spending hours cleaning his home, prosecutors said.
The day after Crane was last seen alive, prosecutors say surveillance footage showed Charles loading something into the trunk of Crane’s car before driving the sedan to San Leandro and leaving it there. The following day, Charles filed a workplace injury report for a swollen right hand that, prosecutors said, appeared to be fraudulent.
“Those are the actions of a murderer trying to cover up their crime,” Clark said. She lauded Crane’s family for springing to action so quickly when Crane stopped picking up her phone, and for ultimately finding some of the last known video footage of her alive.
Clark specifically honed in on the fact that Charles twice told authorities that he hadn’t spoken with Crane after seeing her at the liquor store, despite surveillance footage suggesting Crane drove to his home afterward. Authorities also found the tip of a blue latex glove between Crane’s shoulder and the inside wall of her car’s trunk, which appeared to contain Charles’ DNA, according to court testimony.
Charles’ attorney spent nearly an hour Wednesday highlighting all that prosecutors didn’t show: A motive, almost any blood at the crime scene or any suggestion of Charles not cooperating with police. He never fled, Tal stressed. Rather, he tried calling Crane 19 times in the four days after she vanished. And, Tal said, he joined Crane’s mother in calling 911 to report her missing on March 25, 2020.
Investigators found almost nothing in the way of Crane’s blood inside his RV, save for a small amount on one of his old “filthy” slippers.
“This is entirely a circumstantial evidence case,” Tal said. “This is not story time, ladies and gentlemen. This is not ‘what could have happened.’ This is the criminal justice system, and it has the highest burden of proof.”
Tal also took issue with prosecutors’ claims that Charles had a “helper” who guided his alleged cleaning of the crime scene. She highlighted how that person was never identified or heard from at trial — framing it as indicative of a half-baked case against her client.
“We have no idea who this person is,” Tal said. “You have no phone content, no conversations — you don’t even have the person’s name. For you to just assume it was a so-called ‘helper’ makes no sense and is not what your job is.”
Moments before the jury left to deliberate, Clark pleaded for jurors to simply follow the evidence and return with a conviction.
“Unanswered questions do not mean the defendant gets away with murdering Anika Crane,” Clark said. “The defendant doesn’t get rewarded for covering up his crime.”