A former Twentynine Palms Marine pleaded guilty Friday to voluntary manslaughter and two counts of assault by means of force likely to produce gross bodily injury in the death of his wife.
Charles Leppan, 46, accepted a plea bargain in which admitted to killing his ex-wife, Jean Leppan, 33, and burying her body in a shallow grave in Wonder Valley in 2004. Leppan remarried another woman about two weeks later.
Prosecutors decided in 2004 they didn’t have enough evidence to charge Leppan with her murder, but cold-case investigators arrested him in Michigan in October 2013 and brought him back to California to face trial.
In November, Judge Rodney Cortez learned that the Sheriff’s Department had been illegally monitoring and recording Leppan’s phone calls to his public defender, but he ruled that while the actions were negligent and incompetent, they were not intentional, and he allowed the case to proceed.
Charles Leppan has been in jail since 2013 on $1 million bail. He will be sentenced July 19.
Charles and Jean Leppan had divorced in June 2003. Investigators believe that Leppan killed his wife in the home they shared in Twentynine Palms on January 26, 2004, although the actual date of her death is unknown, since he never reported her missing. Leppan initially told investigators that she was trying to reconcile with him but he was trying to evict her from his home. A man walking his dog off Ironage Road east of Twentynine Palms found her body about four months later buried in a shallow grave.
Leppan was questioned in his wife’s death, but never charged until cold-case investigators followed up in 2013 and he was arrested and extradited to California.
