The case
Omaima Nelson was born in Egypt and was living in Southern California when, in October 1991, she met William “Bill” Nelson over a game of pool at a bar in Huntington Beach. She was 23, and he was 56. They married within weeks and set up home in an apartment in Costa Mesa.
Over Thanksgiving weekend in 1991, Omaima killed Bill in the apartment. She hit him with a lamp and a clothes iron and stabbed him with scissors. She then dismembered his body and tried to destroy parts of it. Driving his Corvette around Orange County, she asked acquaintances and former boyfriends to help her dispose of the remains. On December 1, one of them, José Esquivel, turned her down and alerted authorities. Police found remains in the apartment and in the car.
At trial, Omaima said she had acted in self-defense after Bill assaulted her, and her lawyer described years of abuse she had suffered since childhood. Jurors convicted her of second-degree murder in 1993, and she was sentenced to 27 years to life. California’s parole board denied her release in 2006 and again on October 5, 2011, when it put off her next hearing for 15 years. In 2020 a federal appeals court refused to let her file a new habeas petition.
Case photographs
Where it happened
Costa Mesa, where Bill Nelson was killed in 1991