In re-trial, jury swiftly convicts 'jilted lover' and rocket hobbyist of fatally bombing ex-girlfriend
The first trial was 10 weeks and ended with a deadlocked jury after eight days of deliberation. This trial was three weeks and ended in guilty verdicts after 90 minutes.
A federal jury in Los Angeles on Wednesday deliberated about 90 minutes before convicting a man of killing his ex-girlfriend in a bombing at her day spa in Orange County five years ago.
The quick verdict came nearly one year after a different jury deadlocked on Stephen William Beal’s four charges for the May 15, 2018, bombing that killed 48-year-old Ildiko Krajnyak and injured a mother and daughter who were at her spa for facials.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Takla began his closing argument Wednesday morning by telling jurors, “He blew her up. Stephen Beal blew her up.”
Beal had sophisticated knowledge of explosives because he built and launched high-powered rockets, and Takla said he felt “betrayed and deceived” because Krajnyak had ended their romantic relationship and was seeing other people.
“There’s no one else that could have done it. It’s him,” Takla said. “The defendant is the killer. He’s the bomber.”
The jury quickly agreed and convicted 64-year-old Beal of use of a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death, malicious destruction of a building resulting in death, use of a destructive device during and in relation to a crime of violence, and possession of an unregistered destructive device. He faces 30 years to life in prison without parole; U.S. District Judge Josephine Staton scheduled sentencing for Nov. 17.
Beal is scheduled to go to trial Nov. 14 in a separate fraud case for failing to report in a bankruptcy proceeding $350,000 he received from the estate of his late wife, who died in 2008 after she reportedly fell down a flight of stairs in their Long Beach home. He’s also accused of trying to fraudulently obtain insurance benefits and Social Security payments.
Beal, who appeared unbothered by the verdict, mentioned his upcoming fraud trial while causally chatting with his lawyers Meghan Blanco and Anthony Solis after the verdict. Two U.S. Marshals cut off the conversation after a couple minutes, with one telling Beal he can “make another appointment” with his counsel if he wishes to continue the conversation.
Beal is currently engaged to a woman he met online shortly before the bombing; she testified in his defense on Monday.
The bombing investigation was a priority with Main Justice in Washington, D.C., and the complexity of the bomb brought in federal agents with decades of experience investigating bombings around the world. Prosecutors also traveled to Vietnam to take the deposition of a manufacturer knowledgable about the specificity of the battery used to power the bomb.
Investigators believe Beal, who had keys to Krajnyak’s spa, placed the boxed bomb inside building himself. Investigators believe it had a mechanism that tripped the explosion upon open, and Beal knew Krajnyak’s schedule and work habits.
Takla said the bomb was the type that can inflict “mass casualties,” but Beal chose to target only Krajnyak. Beal commented in a recorded interview with investigators that the women who were injured at the spa couldn’t have been close to the blast, because they would have been killed if they had been.
Jurors heard testimony from both women, who had received facials from Krajnyak shortly before the explosion. The daughter testified that she’d pulled her mother close and said “We look so cute” before noticing Krajnyak opening a box, then seeing a white light and hearing a loud noise.
“She told you how she was blown to the ground, wondering whether she would survive,” Takla told the jury.
The woman rescued her mother from the rubble, and they escaped the burning building through a blown-out wall.
Takla reminded jurors that the woman said the image of Krajnyak opening the box “is engraved in her brain, because it’s the last thing she saw before her life changed.”
Beal was initially arrested on an explosives possessions charge, but prosecutors soon moved to drop the charge, and he was released. He was arrested again in March 2019 and has been in jail ever since. He was tried in Los Angeles instead of Santa Ana because Judge Staton moved her chambers to L.A. after she was assigned the case.
His second trial was three weeks, while his first trial was 10 weeks and jurors deliberated eight days before Staton declared a mistrial because they couldn’t agree.
Central District of California U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada said the tightened case “was more manageable for the jury to understand.”
“In three weeks, we still presented extensive evidence of Mr. Beal’s involvement in the crime,” Estrada said in a press conference after the verdict. He called Beal “a jilted lover who wanted obliterate his ex-girlfriend.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Annamartine Salick said her team was “more surgical in the evidence that we presented.”
“We presented overwhelming evidence that the defendant had the motive the means, the unique expertise that very few people possess, and most importantly that he had the items that bomb technicians were part of the bomb in his residence,” said Salick. She and Takla did the second trial with Assistant U.S. Attorneys Solomon Kim and Sarah Gerdes.
Salick said Beal was interested and pyrotechnics and “built rockets the size of houses.”
The rockets were “rockets that traveled at the speed of sound, that he needed a team to set off in the desert. He also was an expert in mixing chemicals and explosive compounds for fireworks,” Salick said.
Beal purchased a 9-volt battery in cash from CVS Pharmacy a week before the bombing, which investigators believe was used to power the bomb because remnants of the same 9-volt battery were lodged in the ceiling directly above the blast. Takla said the battery was “a very special, unique 9-volt battery” that had only been on the market for two months.
A day before buying the battery, Beal bought a box from a Staples store that matched the box that one of the victims said Krajnyak was opening when the bomb exploded. He also had a huge amount of bomb-making materials at his Long Beach home when investigators searched it. A federal agent testified that the 130 pounds of explosives “was the largest quantity of explosive precursors I have seen at any search I have been a part of.”
Beal and Krajnyak had known each other for about two years after meeting on Match.com. They traveled to Mexico and Portugal together, and Beal helped her financially as she went through bankruptcy and a home foreclosure. But Krajnyak eventually told Beal she wanted space, and she was seeing other people.
In his closing, Takla highlighted the fact that Beal had photos of text messages between Krajnyak and another man that he’d taken while snooping through her phone while they were in Mexico. Takla also highlighted text messages Beal sent Krajnyak in which he asked to visit her and stated his love, including one that said, “I love you more than anyone I’ve ever known” and “I want you. I want you to want me.”
“You also saw his obsessive checking of her Facebook page,” Takla said, displaying a long list for jurors.
The explosion ripped apart Krajnyak’s spa, Magyar Kozmetica, located in a suite at 11 Mareblu in Aliso Viejo, about 1:05 p.m. on May 15, 2018. Police found human remains in the parking lot when they arrived. Investigators reenacted the bombing with a mannequin, and Takla said the results were “eerie”: The mannequin was blown apart in way that matched Krajnyak’s injuries.
Takla highlighted Beal’s actions shortly after news broke of the bombing. He repeatedly searched the Internet about it, but he also looked up a Las Vegas steakhouse, browsed the Wayfair.com shopping site and played a castle-themed computer game. He texted Krajnyak about 15 minutes after the news broke, asking in his first message, “Ildiko?!!!” then mentioning the explosion in the second. He didn’t try to contact her again.
Beal also called the Orange County Sheriff’s Department shortly after the explosion and identified himself as the co-signer for Krajnyak’s spa lease. When investigators asked if he could come in for an interview, he told them he had “poured myself a nice stiff vodka,” so they went to him instead.
Later, in a recorded call, Beal said that Krajnyak had been “not just lying” but building complicated stories. He said, “Don’t ever date anyone of Hungarian descent” because “That would eliminate the dating of this rather lying and deceitful person.”
Krajnyak was a native of Hungary who still had family there and had visited the country shortly before she died. She and her husband, Ronilo Vestil, had separated but were still close and gone to Las Vegas for a concert and to see their son perform with the University of Washington marching band a few weeks before she was murdered. Vestil testified, and he was in court for the verdict. He hugged a friend after the verdict as well as the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s victims rights coordinator
In the defense case, Blanco and Solis worked to portray Beal as the victim of a rush to judgment by investigators who assume he murdered Krajnyak because he knew her and also had rocketry materials in his home.
“Mr. Beal is not unique in being a hobbyist,” Blanco said. “Is it a very common hobby? No. Does it make Mr. Beal a bomber? No.”
Blanco took a near-shouting tone in her closing argument, telling the jury that investigators made “a snap judgment” because “years and decades earlier, Mr. Beal was a hobbyist.”
Blanco reminded jurors that Beal had been doing electrical work at Krajnyak’s spa before the bombing, which she implied explains why wires from his home could be at the blast site. Her argument drew several objections from Takla for misstating the evidence, including one that Judge Staton sustained. The judge reminded the jurors several times that they were to determine the facts based on their recollection of the evidence, and that they had been instructed regarding the law.
Blanco displayed a chart throughout her closing that depicted different levels of doubt, which Takla in his rebuttal said had nothing to do with the law or jury instructions regarding reasonable doubt. Takla highlighted an instruction that defines reasonable doubt as “based on reason and logic, not speculation.”
Blanco and Solis called as witnesses a married woman who feuded with Krajnyak after discovering her husband was having an affair with her.
The couple also is from Hungary, and the husband started secretly seeing Krajnyak after she’d befriended them both. When the wife learned of the affair in March 2015, she had T-Mobile activate a tracker on her husband’s phone. It soon revealed he was at an address that she realized was Krajnyak’s spa, so the wife drove there with her teenage daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend to confront them.
The wife testified Monday that she looked through a window and saw her husband and Krajnyak together, so she pounded on the door and Krajnyak eventually answered and the women physically fought. The wife testifying that Krajnyak scratched her face and mocked her calling her daughter derogatory names and mocking her inability to speak Hungarian.
The wife testified that her decision to confront her husband and Krajnyak is “the biggest mistake of my life.”
After the wife and husband eventually reconciled, the wife sent Krajnyak a photo of she and her husband engaged in a sex act with a taunting message, which she testified was her husband’s idea. She testified that they agreed he would have no contact with Krajnyak, but Krajnyak messaged him again on his birthday and also once messaged her a photo of a violin as a mocking gesture. The wife also had a folder on her computer titled “Ildiko” that contained information about her husband’s affairs and Krajnyak’s activities.
But the wife also testified she would never kill Krajnyak, and she described how she voluntarily talked with investigators and allowed them to search her home.
“I have nothing to hide,” she testified Monday. The FBI enlisted a contract Hungarian translator to translate Facebook messages related to the affair.
The woman said in cross-examination that “no human being deserved what [Krajnyak] got.”
“She was somebody’s daughter. She was somebody’s wife. And she had a son. Nobody deserve that,” the woman said. The woman cried in front of FBI agents after learning of Krajnyak’s death, as did her husband.
“I told them, ‘I’m so sorry for what happened,’ and, actually, I was crying,” the woman testified.
Takla reminded jurors that neither the couple nor a Hungarian handyman who’d been texting Krajnyak had any bomb-making capabilities, while Beal did and also had a house full of explosives material.
Blanco described the woman’s ongoing anger toward Krajnyak in her closing but also said, “I’m not suggesting she did this at all.”
“I certainly am not suggesting that any of these people did anything,” Blanco said.
Takla reminded the jury in his rebtutal that the other people Blanco mentioned had emotional reactions to Krajnyak’s murder.
“Defendant didn’t shed a tear. Instead, he took a shot of vodka,” Takla said. Takla’s final words to the jury were, “There’s only one person that could have done this. It’s him” as he turned his head and looked at Beal.
Trial notes:
As I stated in the above message from Wednesday night, I expected Beal to be swiftly convicted. I didn’t expect it to happen as fast as it did, but the fact that it did was hardly surprising. Still, I was lucky: I was about to leave for the day when I saw the defense go into the courtroom. Prosecutors arrived a few moments later. I initially thought it was a note, but then I got this text.
As I said, the guilty verdicts are unsurprising because Beal is guilty. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The evidence against him is overwhelming. But I learned in the first trial how complex this investigation was, and it’s hard to forget Beal was released from jail and out for nearly a year following his initial arrest. I know someone who saw him at a grocery store.
Lastly, as you noticed, I did not name the woman who testified Monday about the affair her husband had with Krajnyak. She of course testified under her true name, but she also is a private citizen and her testimony was a bit personal. If the jury had acquitted Beal then announced in a press conference that they think the woman did it, I might reconsider. But obviously that didn’t happen. Beal is guilty.
Blanco has an oral motion for mistrial pending that’s based on Takla telling the jury they’re the only one’s who can hold Beal accountable. Judge Staton has it under submission, but it’s safe to say there’s zero chance she’ll grant it. Beal is guilty.
Here’s the March 2019 complaint.
Here’s prosecutors’ May 2022 trial memorandum.
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