Bride Dr.ank Wine On Mediterranean Honeymoon — Lawyer Husband Tossed Her Off BALCONY For $1 Million
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Someone who expected the body to sink, someone who expected no one would ever know the difference between murder and a tragic accident at sea.
But the body floated because she was dead before she hit the water.
And that single miscalculation, that one failure to account for the physics of a dead body versus a drowning body, is the reason a former California attorney named Loni Lauren Kontes is now serving a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
This is the story of how a lawyer tried to commit the perfect crime.
How he spent months positioning every piece on the board.
How he selected the ship, the stateateroom, the route, and the moment.
how he manipulated the legal and financial infrastructure around his victim with the precision of someone drafting a contract.
And how one biological fact, one detail he should have known, one thing that any halfway competent planner should have accounted for brought the entire operation crashing down.
To understand what happened aboard the island escape in May of 2006, you have to go back decades.
You have to go back to a different boat, a different ocean, and a different chapter in Mickey Kosaki’s life entirely.
In 1960, when Mickey was just 5 or 6 years old, her family left Japan.
Her father had been working as a coal miner, and he made the decision to immigrate to take his wife and his children across the Pacific Ocean to start a new life in the United States.
Family sailed from Japan to America, arriving eventually in Central Valley, California.
Mickey’s older brother, Toshi Kanasaki, was about 8 years old at the time.
He would later recall that when you are that young, arriving in a strange country feels exciting, almost like an adventure.
You do not fully understand the enormity of the change your parents are making.
You just know you are somewhere new.
The Kosaki family built a life in California.
Mickey grew up, earned an education, and in 1992, she graduated with honors from a parallegal program.
She was smart, she was funny, she had a warmth about her that the people who worked alongside her would remember for years after she was gone.
Her coworker, Susan White, would describe her as smart, beautiful, with a great sense of humor.
Mickey went to work as a parallegal at a large law firm in Los Angeles and that is where she met the man who would eventually kill her.
Loni Loren Kantes was an attorney at the same firm.
He was described by people who knew him as charming as a hard worker as someone who could command a room.
His best friend, a retired police officer turned private investigator named Bill Price, would later tell investigators that nothing mattered more to cooneies than money and sex.
But in the early days, Mickey did not see that.
She saw a confident, driven man who shared her professional world.
A romance developed, and in 1995, Mickey Kanosaki and Lonie Kcontes got married.
They bought a house together in Lera Ranch, a planned community in Orange County, California.
On the surface, it looked like two successful legal professionals building a stable life together.
But underneath, the marriage was corroding almost from the start.
Mickey confided in co-workers that Lonnie was controlling, especially when it came to money.
He wanted to manage the finances.
He wanted the final say over how money was spent, where it went, how it was allocated.
Mickey, who had always been independent, who had built a career on her own merit, chafed under that control.
And Lonnie Coontes had a past that Mickey may not have fully understood when she married him.
Nebraska prison records show that Kantes had been convicted of three felonies in the 1970s and early 1980s, including drug trafficking and burglary in 1976 and another drug trafficking charge in 1981.
He had served time in a Nebraska state prison.
He had later reinvented himself, obtained a law degree, passed the California bar, and built a career in Los Angeles.
It was a remarkable transformation if you were inclined to be charitable or it was the behavior of a man who understood how to operate within systems, how to exploit structures and how to present a carefully constructed version of himself to the world.
By 1999, there was litigation threatened against contestess based on alleged sexual conduct involving a minor.
The couple divorced in 2001 or 2002 depending on the source.
But the divorce was not quite what it appeared to be.
According to prosecutors, the divorce was obtained primarily to protect their assets from potential civil litigation arising from those allegations against Kokans.
They separated on paper.
They divided their finances on paper.
But in practice, they continued to live together in the Lera Ranch home.
They continued to maintain joint bank accounts.
They continued to function to the outside world as a couple even though they were legally no longer married.
This is the first piece on the board.
The divorce was a financial maneuver, not an emotional one.
The assets were restructured.
The legal exposure was managed, but the two of them stayed in the same house, lived under the same roof, and their financial lives remained deeply entangled.
And that entanglement, that web of shared accounts and shared property and shared wills is exactly what would give Lonnie Coontes his motive.
Because by 2002, Lonnie Coontes had found someone else.
He met a woman named Amy Nuen through an online dating website.
She was a Vietnamese immigrant who had come to the United States in 1998 and was working as a middle school teacher.
She was younger than Mickey.
She was small in stature, described in some accounts as about 4’11 and 99 lb, and she was the woman Kontes told himself he was in love with.
The affair began while Coontes was still living with Mickey in the Lera ranch house.
Mickey had no idea.
She did not know her ex-husband was seeing another woman.
She did not know that the man she was still sharing a home with, still sharing finances with, still apparently planning a future with, was building a parallel life with someone else entirely.
Mickey had developed severe arthritis by this point.
She could no longer work as a parallegal.
She had turned to investing instead, managing the money she had earned and saved over her career.
She had paid off the mortgage on the Lera Ranch house.
That house was, in her view, hers.
She had earned it.
She had paid for it.
Whatever the legal technicalities of the divorce settlement might say, Mickey believed that home belonged to her and that is the second piece on the board.
The house, the Lera Ranch property, paid off, valuable, and disputed.
In July of 2005, Lonnie Contes did something extraordinary.
While still living with Mickey Kasaki in the Lera Ranch home while still maintaining the appearance of a reconciled couple, he flew to Las Vegas with Amy Nuin and married her.
He married his girlfriend in secret in a Las Vegas ceremony while his ex-wife was at home in Orange County, completely unaware.
After the Vegas wedding, Kocantes and Nuen moved in together in a home in the city of Orange.
But the arrangement did not last long.
In September 2005, Kocantes filed a motion in court to force Mickey Kanasaki to sell the Lera Ranch home.
He wanted the house sold.
He wanted the proceeds split.
He wanted his share of the money so he could move on with his new life, with his new wife, with the financial freedom he believed he was owed.
Mickey refused.
She fought the motion.
She did not want to sell the house.
She did not want to move.
She had lived there for years.
She had paid off the mortgage.
In her mind, the house was hers and no court filing by her ex-husband was going to change that.
This is the third piece, the court battle.
Kons wanted the money from the house.
Mickey would not cooperate.
A dispute that in any normal divorce might be resolved through mediation or litigation or simply the passage of time.
But Lonnie Coontes was not interested in normal resolution.
Lonnie Coontes was thinking about a different kind of solution entirely.
At some point, Coontest dropped the court action to force the sale.
He left Amy win.
He moved back in with Mickey at the Lerea Ranch house.
And he told Noin that he still loved her, that he did not want to leave her, that this was temporary, that they would be together again.
To Mickey, this looked like reconciliation.
Her ex-husband had come back.
He was living with her again.
He seemed to be recommitting to their relationship.
Perhaps this was a fresh start.
Perhaps the difficulties of the past few years could be put behind them.
But Contez was not reconciling.
co-contest was repositioning because after he moved back in with Mickey, he did something that prosecutors would later describe as one of the most incriminating acts in the entire timeline.
He had new wills drawn up, not just for himself, for both of them.
New wills in which he and Mickey named each other as the beneficiary of their respective estates.
And critically, Lolly Coontes was named as the executive of Mickey Cany’s estate.
That is the fourth piece on the board, the wills.
If Mickey died, Cocontes would inherit.
He would receive the proceeds from the sale of the Leroa Ranch home.
He would receive the money in their joint bank accounts.
He would receive, by the estimates prosecutors would later present at trial, more than $1 million in combined assets.
And he would be the executive, the person legally authorized to manage and distribute those assets.
He would have total control.
So, let us pause and look at the board as it now stands.
Kants has an ex-wife he no longer loves.
He has a girlfriend he wants to be with.
He has a house he cannot sell because his ex-wife refuses to cooperate.
He has new wills that make him the sole financial beneficiary of her death.
He has more than a million dollars in shared assets that he cannot access as long as she is alive.
Now, the cruise.
In early 2006, Lonnie Kakontes began making plans for a trip, a Mediterranean cruise for him and for Mickey.
This was by itself deeply unusual behavior for Kakontes, and the people who knew him recognized it immediately.
Kakontes was famously cheap.
His best friend, Bill Price, described him as someone who did not take vacations frequently and who was well known for his thriftiness.
Loniico Contes was not the kind of man who booked romantic Mediterranean cruises.
He was not the kind of man who spent money on travel when that money could be saved, invested, or hoarded.
But in 2006, he booked a cruise.
And not just any cruise.
He booked passage on a ship called the Island Escape.
The Island Escape was not a luxury liner.
It was not a Royal Caribbean flagship or a Carnival mega ship with thousands of passengers and state-of-the-art facilities.
The Island Escape was a converted car ferry.
It had been built in 1982 as the MS Scandinavia, a cruise ferry designed for transatlantic passenger and vehicle transport.
In 1991, it had been converted into a full-time cruise ship at a shipyard in San Diego with the car deck turned into a passenger deck.
By 2006, it was operating under the Island Cruises brand, a subsidiary jointly owned by Royal Caribbean and First Choice Travel, running budget friendly routes in the Mediterranean.
The travel agent who booked the trip was concerned.
She told prosecutors she had warned Kokontes that he might not like this particular cruise.
It was a no frrills experience, a converted ferry, not a copper cruise liner.
The route was unusual for American travelers, requiring flights from California to Minnesota, then to London before finally boarding the ship in Morca, Spain for a voyage that would take them through the Mediterranean to Italy.
This was not the kind of vacation an American tourist would typically choose.
It was convoluted.
It was budget.
It was obscure.
Lonnie Coantes chose it anyway.
He chose it deliberately and prosecutors would later argue they understood exactly why.
The island escape because of its origins as a converted ferry had minimal security infrastructure.
The surveillance cameras that you would find on a major cruise line.
The comprehensive CCTV systems that modern cruise ships used to monitor corridors, public areas, and deck spaces were largely absent on the island escape.
There were effectively no security cameras monitoring the areas where a person might go overboard.
The ship was from the perspective of someone planning to throw a body into the ocean.
Nearly ideal.
It was a blind spot floating on the Mediterranean Sea and Coontes had done his homework.
Before the cruise, he had asked his best friend, Bill Price, about the security systems on cruise ships.
Price was not just a friend.
He was a retired police officer who had become a private investigator.
He was exactly the kind of person who would know about surveillance infrastructure on commercial vessels.
Co-Contest asked him specifically about surveillance cameras, where they were, how they worked, whether they covered exterior decks and balcony areas.
This is the fifth piece on the board, the reconnaissance.
Coantes did not stumble onto the island escape by accident.
He selected a ship with virtually no security cameras.
He confirmed this by asking a retired cop about cruise ship surveillance systems.
He chose a route that no American traveler would normally take, a route that put him on a budget converted ferry in the middle of the Mediterranean, thousands of miles from any jurisdiction that might easily investigate a suspicious death.
And then there is the stateoom.
When Kakontes booked the cabin, he specifically requested a balcony room.
Not an interior cabin, not an exterior cabin with a window, a balcony room, a room with a private balcony that opened directly onto the open ocean.
According to the prosecutor, senior deputy district attorney Susan Price, this was very important to him.
It was very important that the room he shared with Mickey Kanosaki had a private outdoor space with a railing and a direct drop to the water below.
The Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer would later put it this way.
He said that Coontes picked the cruise ship because every room had a direct drop to the water.
He picked a ship where the balcony led straight to the ocean.
No intermediate decks, no obstructions, no witnesses.
That is the sixth piece, the balcony.
A private exit, a silent disposal method, a door from the cabin to the Mediterranean Sea with nothing in between but a railing and the fall.
Now look at the board again.
Coantes has wills naming him sole beneficiary.
He has over a million dollars in motive.
He has a secret wife waiting for him back in California.
He has a ship with no security cameras.
He has a cabin with a balcony that drops directly into the water.
He has done his research on surveillance systems.
He has chosen a route so unusual that the investigation will cross multiple international jurisdictions, complicating any prosecution for years.
He had also, according to prosecutors, initially planned to bring accompllices.
He had booked a second cabin on the cruise for his friends Bill Price and Susan McQueen.
Price was his private investigator friend, and McQueen was Price’s girlfriend, also a private investigator.
The original plan, as Amy Nenwin would later testify, was far more elaborate.
According to Nuin, Kakontes told her that Bill Price would find someone to kill Mickey on the cruise and that Price and his girlfriend would serve as witnesses, providing Kantes with an alibi.
Nuen testified to the specifics of what Kantes had told her.
She said Kantontes had told her that Bill’s people would throw Mickey in the water and that Bill and his girlfriend would be his witnesses.
But at the last minute, Price and McQueen cancelled.
They did not go on the cruise.
And according to Newan’s testimony, Kakontes told her that because Bill and his girlfriend had decided not to go on the cruise, he would have to take matters into his own hands.
That phrase would echo through the courtroom 14 years later, he would have to take matters into his own hands.
On May 21st, 2006, Lonnie Coontes and Mickey Kalasaki flew from California to Spain.
They boarded the island escape in Morca.
For Mickey, this was a romantic trip, a chance to rebuild the relationship with the man she had once married, the man she still loved, the man who had come back to her after his time away.
Her niece, Julie Sarinita, would later say that Mickey had been so happy about the cruise, she couldn’t wait to go.
Mickey thought this was a fresh start.
She thought they were going to rekindle their romance on the Mediterranean Sea.
She had no idea that her ex-husband had married another woman in Las Vegas the year before.
She had no idea about Amy Wen.
She had no idea about the new wills, what they really meant, or why Kantes had been so insistent about having them drafted.
She had no idea that the man sitting across from her at dinner on that cruise ship had asked a retired cop about surveillance cameras on cruise ships.
She had no idea about the balcony request.
She had no idea about any of it.
On May 25th, 2006, the island escape was in waters off southern Italy.
Kocantes and Mickey spent the day on an excursion touring the town of Msina in Sicily.
They walked through the streets.
They took in the sights.
They did what tourists do in a Sicilian port town.
Then they returned to the ship.
That evening, by Kantes’s own account and by the prosecution’s reconstruction, the couple had dinner on the ship.
They shared a bottle of wine.
They went to the casino.
They saw a show.
They returned to their cabin.
It was, by all appearances, an ordinary night aboard a cruise ship.
A married couple, or in this case, a formerly married couple, trying to find their way back to each other, enjoying an evening in the Mediterranean.
Mickey Kasaki was last seen alive at approximately 11 pm on May 25th, 2006.
What happened next in the hours between 11 pm on May 25th and the early morning of May 26th occurred behind the closed door of a balcony cabin on a converted ferry in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.
There were no cameras.
There were no witnesses.
There was only Lonnie Coontes and Mickey Kalasaki alone in a room with a balcony that opened onto the dark ocean.
According to the prosecution’s case built over years of investigation and testimony, Lonnie Coontest strangled Mickey Kasaki to death in that cabin.
He put his hands around her neck and he squeezed.
The autopsy showed severe hemorrhaging around the neck consistent with sustained strangulation.
It showed a violent action that was continued for a period of time.
It was not a quick act.
It was prolonged, deliberate.
The bruising patterns, the hemorrhaging, the trauma to the neck, all of it pointed to a sustained forceful assault that lasted long enough to extinguish the life of the 52-year-old woman.
And then he threw her body overboard from the balcony into the Mediterranean Sea into the dark water between Sicily and Naples in the middle of the night on a ship with no cameras and no witnesses.
He threw her over the railing and he let her fall into the ocean.
He expected her to sink.
He expected the current to carry her away.
He expected the sea to do what seas do with bodies, to pull them under, to hide them, to dissolve the evidence in salt water and time and depth.
He expected that Mickey Kosaki would simply disappear.
A missing person on a cruise ship, a woman who perhaps drank too much wine and fell over a railing.
A tragic accident, impossible to prove otherwise because there would be no body, no autopsy, no evidence of anything other than a terrible, terrible accident.
But he strangled her first.
And because he strangled her first, she was dead when she entered the water.
And because she was dead when she entered the water, she never inhaled the sea.
And because she never inhaled the sea, her lungs were full of air.
And because her lungs were full of air, her body did not sink.
A body floated.
It floated on the surface of the Mediterranean for approximately 36 hours.
It floated until a scientific research vessel, conducting unrelated work in those waters, spotted it and retrieved it.
His entire plan, every piece meticulously placed on the board, was undone by one fact of human physiology.
Dead bodies with air filled lungs float.
Dr.owning victims with water-filled lungs sink.
If he had thrown her overboard alive, if she had drowned in the water, her lungs would have filled and she would have gone under and the ocean would have swallowed her and there would have been nothing to find, nothing to autopsy, nothing to prove she had been murdered.
If he had thrown her overboard alive, he might truly have gotten away with it, bae.
But he could not throw her overboard alive because she would have screamed, she would have fought, she would have thrashed in the water and attracted attention.
Someone on that ship might have heard the splash, heard the scream, seen something from another balcony.
He needed her silent.
He needed her still.
He needed her dead before she hit the water.
And that need, that requirement for silence and control is what killed his perfect crime.
He strangled her because he had to.
And by strangling her, he ensured she would float.
And by floating, she was found.
And by being found, she was autopsied.
And by being autopsied, she was proven to have been murdered.
The very thing that made the plan safe, killing her first, was the same thing that made it fail.
Now, let us go to the aftermath because this is where the chess game continues.
This is where Kontes, who was trained as a lawyer who understood evidence and procedure and legal strategy, attempted to play the next phase of the game.
At approximately 6:00 am on May 26th, 2006, Kocantes reported Mickey missing to the ship’s crew.
He told them he had woken up early and she was gone.
His story was simple.
They had drunk wine the previous evening.
He had taken an ambient sleeping pill and gone to sleep.
Mickey had left the cabin, possibly to get herbal tea.
When he woke up at around 4:30 in the morning, she was not there.
He assumed she might have gotten nauseous from the wine and somehow fallen overboard.
The crew searched the ship.
They searched every deck, every public area, every corridor.
There was no sign of Mickey Kanasiki anywhere aboard the island escape.
The Italian Coast Guard was notified.
A search of the surrounding waters was initiated.
They found nothing, at least not immediately.
The ship continued to Naples.
When it docked, Coontes packed his suitcase.
He also packed Mickey’s belongings and then he disembarked.
He did not wait for the search to conclude.
He did not stay in Italy to coordinate with authorities.
He did not remain at the port in case there was news.
He packed his bags and left.
The ship’s crew had arranged for him to stay at a hotel in Naples.
He stayed one night and then he flew home.
He flew back to the United States, but he did not fly to his home in Leera Ranch.
He did not fly to the house he had shared with Mickey.
The house where her belongings still sat.
The house where her life was still arranged in drawers and closets as if she were coming back.
He changed his flight itinerary.
He had originally planned to fly from Italy to Tampa, Florida.
Instead, he redirected to California.
And when he landed, he drove straight to Amy Wen’s house.
He went to his secret wife, the woman Mickey had never known about, and he resumed his intimate relationship with her.
Mickey’s body had not yet been found.
She was still floating somewhere in the Mediterranean, undiscovered, wearing her watch and her ring, her lungs full of the last breath she had taken before Kakontis’s hands closed around her throat.
And her ex-husband was in Amy Wen’s bed in Orange, California, less than 48 hours after he had thrown her body into the sea.
One of the first calls Cocontes made after Mickey went missing was to his friend Bill Price.
Price and his girlfriend Susan McQueen were private investigators and they had been close with Coontes for years.
Price received the call and was shocked.
Mickey had gone missing off the boat.
That is where it started.
McQueen would later recall.
Price tried to remain optimistic, telling Coontess that Mickey had to be somewhere on the ship, that there had to be another explanation.
But as the days passed and as the body was recovered and as the autopsy results began to emerge from Italy, the picture changed dramatically.
On the afternoon of May 27th, 2006, the same day Kantes flew back to the United States, a research vessel recovered Mickey Kasaki’s body from the Mediterranean Sea.
She was found floating off the coast of Paola in the Calabria region of southern Italy.
Her body was taken to the Italian authorities and an autopsy was scheduled.
The autopsy was conducted on June 16th, 2006 in Vibo Valencia, Italy.
Dr. Petrantonio Richi performed the examination.
What he found shattered any possibility that Mickey’s death was an accident.
No water in the lungs.
No water in the stomach.
Severe hemorrhaging around the neck.
Extensive bruising on the body.
Trauma to the back of the head.
A skull fracture or cerebral hemorrhaging.
Bruising on the inner thighs suggestive of sexual assault.
And a cause of death asphyxiation due to strangulation.
Dr. Richie concluded unequivocally that Mickey Kosaki had been murdered.
She had been strangled.
She had been dead before she entered the water.
and she had been thrown overboard.
Because the victim was an American citizen who had been killed overseas, the case fell under the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
FBI special agent Rick Simpson was assigned to investigate.
And from the very beginning, the investigation pointed in one direction.
Lonnie Loren Kontes, the last known person to have seen Mickey alive, the man who had shared the cabin with her, the man who had reported her missing and then immediately left the country.
The FBI began building a case.
They interviewed Kakontis, who repeated his story, the wine, the ambient, the herbal tea, the nausea, the fall.
They interviewed friends, family, colleagues, and they asked Mickey’s niece, Julie Sarinita, to help.
Sarinita agreed to cooperate with the FBI.
She allowed agents to set up recording equipment on her phone, and she made a series of calls to Kantes, trying to draw out information, trying to get him to say something incriminating.
In one of those recorded conversations, Sarinita confronted Kantes with the autopsy results.
She told him what the Italian pathologist had found.
She asked him directly if he had anything to do with her aunt’s death.
Cocontes became angry.
He became defensive, but he did not confess.
He did not give Sarinita the kind of admission the FBI was hoping for.
The recorded conversations were played at trial years later, but at the time they were not enough.
Meanwhile, Bill Price and Susan McQueen were doing their own investigating.
Initially they were trying to help Kontes.
They were his friends.
They believed him.
But Price, who was a trained investigator who understood how cases were built and how evidence worked, was beginning to have doubts.
Small things were not adding up.
Kante’s behavior was not consistent with a man grieving the loss of the woman he loved.
His immediate departure from Italy, his flight to Amy Nuen instead of to Leera Ranch.
The cruise itself so out of character for a man who never spent money on vacations.
The questions about surveillance cameras, the balcony request, and then came Amy Wyn.
Price and McQueen eventually made contact with Newan.
And what Newan told them changed everything.
According to what Newan communicated and what she would later testify to in court, Kontes had told her about a plan to have Mickey killed on the cruise.
He had told her that Bill Price’s people would throw Mickey into the water and that Price and his girlfriend would serve as his alibi.
When that plan fell through because Price and McQueen cancelled, Kantes had told Nuan he would have to take matters into his own hands.
Nun also told them that Kantes had said after the killing that he had paid his friend Price to kill Kanasaki and hurl her overboard.
This allegation that Price had been involved in the murder was not true.
According to Price, who vehemently denied any involvement, prosecutors agreed that Price had not participated in the killing and did not go on the cruise.
But the allegation showed something important.
Kantes was a liar.
He lied to New Price’s involvement.
Perhaps to make himself seem less culpable.
Perhaps to have a fall backstory.
Perhaps simply because lying was as natural to him as breathing.
McQueen managed to get Nuen talking and she recorded part of their conversation.
In that recording, Nuen described what Kantes had told her about the murder.
She recounted his statements about the plan.
She recounted his cold, calculated approach to eliminating the woman who stood between him and over a million dollars.
Price delivered the recording to the FBI.
7 years after the murder, the former friend and private investigator walked into the FBI office and handed over the evidence that would eventually bring co-contest to justice.
Price also recalled details from before the cruise that he now understood in a very different light.
The questions about surveillance cameras.
The unusual choice of ship.
Coantes’s inquiries about countries without extradition treaties to the United States which Kantes had apparently raised after the FBI began looking into Mickey’s death.
But the initial investigation stalled and the reason it stalled was Amy Newan.
In December of 2006, Newan was called before a federal grand jury.
The grand jury was investigating Mickey Kamasaki’s death, and Newin was a key witness.
She knew about the plan.
She knew about the threats.
She knew about the motive.
She had been told by the killer himself what he intended to do and why.
But when Amy Wen sat before that federal grand jury, she lied.
She told the grand jury she knew nothing about Mickey Kanosiki’s death.
She told them she had no information about any plan.
She provided testimony that was directly contradicted by what she had told others and what she would later tell authorities.
Why did she lie? According to prosecutors, Kantes pressured her into it.
He threatened her.
He told her he would kill her and make it look like an accident.
the same technique, the same playbook, the same cold, methodical approach to controlling the people around him.
He had killed Mickey by making her death look like an accident on a cruise ship, and he threatened Nuen with the same kind of death if she told the truth.
Coontes also arranged for Nuen to be paid.
At a meeting in Westminster, California, Bill Price handed Nuen money from Coontes.
money that prosecutors said was intended to ensure she testified consistently with her December 2006 grand jury testimony.
In other words, co-contest paid her to maintain her lies.
And he went further.
At some point, co-contest convinced Nuin to go to his law office in Irvine and remove a hard drive from one of his computers.
He wanted the hard drive taken out of the building, away from investigators, destroyed or hidden.
Nune complied.
The hard drive was removed and by the time investigators came looking for it, it was gone.
Co- Contest later told Bill Price not to worry about the hard drive because he had destroyed it.
With Newan’s false testimony before the grand jury, the federal investigation lost its most critical witness.
Without her corroboration of the plan, without her testimony about what Kantes had told her, the case lacked the evidentiary foundation needed for a murder charge.
The investigation went cold.
Not dead exactly, but dormant.
The FBI continued to monitor Kakontes.
Agent Simpson continued to gather information, but without a cooperative witness who could testify to the planning and motive, the case could not move forward.
In 2008, 2 years after the murder, Kontes made another move on the board.
He attempted to transfer approximately $1.
5 million between various bank accounts that he held jointly with his ex-wife and with his current wife at the time.
The FBI noticed the transfers.
The United States Attorney’s Office moved to seize the money, filing a civil asset forfeite case in federal court.
The money was frozen.
This financial activity drew renewed scrutiny.
Investigators began to pull at the threads again, but the case still lacked its central piece.
a cooperating witness who could testify to premeditation and motive.
Coz meanwhile had fled California.
He moved to Safety Harbor, Florida, a small city on the Gulf Coast near Tampa.
He bought a home there.
He married again a woman named Catherine Kern.
He attempted to practice law in Florida, but he was never admitted to the Florida Bar.
when he tried to obtain a pardon for his Nebraska felony convictions so that he could qualify for the Florida Bar.
The Nebraska State Pardon Board denied his application.
They weighed his entire history, the felony convictions, the pattern of behavior, the allegations, and they denied him.
But Kantes was in Florida.
He was living freely.
He had been out of California for years.
He had money tucked away in various accounts.
He had a new wife.
He had a new life.
And the investigation into the murder of Mickey Kasaki appeared to have stalled permanently.
It might have ended there.
It might have remained an unsolved case forever.
A murder at sea that everyone suspected, but no one could prove.
Mickey Kenosaki might have become just another name in the long grim ledger of victims whose killers were never held accountable.
But Amy Nuin changed her mind.
Over the years following the federal grand jury, as she lived with the knowledge of what she had done and what she had helped cover up, Amy Wen began meeting with local law enforcement officers.
She began talking to investigators from the Orange County District Attorney’s Office and she began telling the truth.
She told them about the plan.
She told them about the threats.
She told them about the surveillance camera questions.
She told them about the hard drive.
She told them about the phone calls and the pressure and the payment.
She told them everything she had hidden from the federal grand jury in 2006.
And she told them the most damning detail of all.
She told them about a conversation she had with Kakontes before the cruise.
A conversation in which Kantes told her there was only one way to get rid of Kesaki.
When Nuen asked how, Kontes replied to make her silent forever.
With Newan’s revised testimony, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office had what the federal investigation had lacked.
They had a witness who could speak directly to premeditation.
They had a witness who could testify that Kakontes had planned the murder in advance, had discussed it with her, had told her his intentions in explicit terms.
They had the missing piece.
On February 13th, 2013, the Orange County DA’s office filed murder charges against Lonni Luren Kakontes.
The charge was first-degree murder with a special circumstance enhancement of murder for financial gain.
2 days later on February 15th, 2013, investigators from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, the United States Marshalss Florida Regional Fugitive Task Force, and the Panelis County Sheriff’s Department arrested Kakontes at his home in Safety Harbor, Florida.
Nearly 7 years after Mickey Kanasaki’s body was pulled from the Mediterranean Sea, the man accused of killing her was finally in handcuffs.
In June 2013, the Orange County Grand Jury formally indicted Coontes for murder, but the legal proceedings were far from straightforward.
The case presented a jurisdictional challenge that had rarely been tested in California courts.
The murder had occurred on the high seas in the Mediterranean off the coast of Italy aboard a ship registered in the Bahamas.
Could the Orange County District Attorney’s Office prosecute a murder committed in international waters? An Orange County Superior Court judge initially dismissed the case for lack of jurisdiction, ruling that the murder had occurred outside the court’s territorial authority, but the charges were refiled.
The DA’s office argued that sufficient preparatory acts had been committed in Orange County, that the planning, the will changes, the financial arrangements, the cruise booking, the surveillance research, all of these acts of preparation occurred within the jurisdiction of Orange County, California.
The court eventually agreed, allowing the prosecution to move forward under the legal theory that the crime was planned in Orange County, even though it was executed in international waters.
The case was delayed further by various pre-trial motions, legal disputes, and procedural challenges.
Kante’s defense team fought aggressively, contesting evidence, challenging jurisdiction, and disputing virtually every aspect of the prosecution’s case.
His defense attorney, Denise Gra, told jurors at trial that there were very few things in this case that were not contested.
And then, while sitting in the Orange County Jail awaiting trial, Lonie Coontes made his next move.
and it was arguably the most audacious and most revealing move of the entire case.
According to prosecutors, between February and July of 2014 while in custody at the Orange County Jail, Coantes attempted to hire two fellow inmates to kill Amy Nuin, his fourth ex-wife, the woman who had changed her testimony.
The woman whose revised statements had led directly to his arrest and indictment.
The woman who, if she took the stand at his trial, would bury him.
The plan, as prosecutors laid it out, was methodical.
It was lawyerly.
It had the fingerprints of a man who approached murder the way he approached litigation with planning, documentation, and contingencies.
Coz allegedly drafted a document for Nuen to sign, a letter stating that her 2006 testimony to the federal grand jury, the false testimony, had been truthful and that her 2013 statements to Orange County investigators, the true testimony, had been coerced by law enforcement threats.
He wanted the inmates to find Nuan, force her to sign the letter, and then kill her.
He planned murders the way he practiced law, methodically, with paperwork, with contingency plans, with the assumption that every eventuality could be controlled if you just prepared thoroughly enough, but a former inmate reported the plan to authorities.
The plot was exposed before it could be carried out.
In May 2015, Kantes was indicted on two additional counts.
solicitation to commit murder and solicitation to bribe a witness.
He had tried to kill the woman who could testify against him.
He had tried to eliminate the witness the way he had eliminated his ex-wife permanently, calculatingly, and with a cover story prepared in advance, the same pattern, the same mind, the same cold transactional approach to human life.
Even from behind bars, the chess game continued.
The murder trial finally began on February 6th, 2020, more than 13 years after Mickey Kanessie’s death.
It was held in Santa Ana, California in the Orange County Superior Court, presided over by Judge Richard King.
Senior Deputy District Attorney Susan Price delivered the prosecution’s opening statement.
She laid out the case with the precision of someone who had spent years constructing it.
She told the jury about Mickey Kalasaki, the woman who had come from Japan as a child, who had built a career in the American legal system, who had been murdered by the man she thought loved her.
She told them about the financial motive.
She told them about the wills.
She told them about the affair with Amy Wen.
She told them about the secret Las Vegas marriage.
She told them about the court filing to force the sale of the Leera Ranch home.
She told them about the surveillance camera questions.
She told them about the converted ferry with no security systems.
She told them about the balcony request.
And she told them about the autopsy, the lungs completely free of water, the hemorrhaging around the neck, the strangulation.
She told them that had they not found her body, they would never have known she was strangled and was dead before she ever hit the water.
The prosecution called witnesses.
Amy Wen took the stand.
She told the jury about the plan.
She told them about Kantontes’s statements before the cruise.
She told them he had said there was only one way to get rid of Kenosaki.
She told them he had said he would have to take matters into his own hands after Price and McQueen cancelled.
She told them he had threatened to kill her if she told the truth to the grand jury.
She told them about the hard drive Bill Price testified.
He told the jury about Coontes’s character, about how nothing mattered more to him than money and sex.
He told them about the surveillance camera questions.
He told them about Coontes’s unusual behavior before the cruise.
The thrifty man suddenly booking a Mediterranean vacation.
He told them about the recording of Nuen.
He told them about his decision to go to the FBI with the evidence.
Dr. Petrantonio Richie testified either in person or via video.
He told the jury about the autopsy findings.
No water in the lungs.
No water in the stomach.
strangulation, skull fracture, extensive bruising.
He told the jury he absolutely believed Mickey Kanosaki had been murdered.
Julie Sarinita, Mickey’s niece, testified.
She told the jury about her aunt, about the woman who had been so happy about the cruise, who couldn’t wait to go, who believed she was getting a second chance at love with the man she had married in 1995.
She played the recorded phone conversations she had made at the FBI’s request.
She told the jury what it was like to confront her aunt’s killer and hear him deflect, deny, and grow angry.
The defense argued that Mickey’s injuries were consistent with a fall from a cruise ship.
They argued that the prosecution’s witnesses were unreliable.
They argued that Nuen had changed her story multiple times and could not be trusted.
They pointed to the contradictions in her various statements from the 2006 grand jury testimony to her later cooperation with Orange County investigators.
They argued that the case was built on the word of a proven liar.
But the prosecution had more than Newan’s word.
They had the autopsy.
They had the physical evidence.
They had the motive.
They had the pattern of behavior.
They had the surveillance camera questions.
They had the ship selection.
They had the balcony request.
They had the wills.
They had the secret marriage.
They had the flight to Nuin instead of Tadera Ranch.
They had Coontes’s behavior in the days, weeks, months, and years after the killing.
And they had the jailhouse murder plot.
The attempt to hire inmates to kill the witness against him, which the jury was allowed to hear about as evidence of consciousness of guilt.
The trial was delayed by the arrival of the CO 19 pandemic.
Proceedings were suspended as courouses across the country shut down.
When the trial resumed, it had been months.
The jury had lived with the evidence through a global crisis.
They had carried the facts of Mickey Kosaki’s death through quarantine and lockdown, and a world turned upside down.
On June 15th, 2020, the jury returned its verdict.
Lonnie Loren Coontes was found guilty of first-degree murder with a special circumstance enhancement of murder for financial gain.
He was 62 years old.
Sentencing was scheduled for September 18th, 2020.
On that day, before the judge pronounced the sentence, the courtroom heard from the people who had loved Mickey Kesaki, the people who had lost her, the people who had waited 14 years for this moment.
Toshi Kanasaki, Mickey’s older brother, the boy who had sailed with her from Japan to America in 1960, stood in the courtroom and addressed the man who had murdered his sister.
His words were direct.
They were raw.
They were the words of a man who had carried grief and rage for more than a decade.
“You, Lonnie, executed my younger sister on that Mediterranean cruise ship.
” Toshi said, “You strangled Mickey.
Then you threw her body overboard like trash.
You are a vicious criminal, evil person, a cold-blooded killer, a sociopath.
He told Kantes that his little sister had gotten the last revenge.
Her body was found 36 hours later.
You deserve life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Toshi said, “You are rotten to the core.
I never want to see you again.
” When Kantes attempted to respond, he did not apologize.
He did not express remorse.
Instead, he accused Toshi Kanosaki of abandoning his sister.
He tried to deflect blame onto the victim’s own family.
Superior Court Judge Richard King cut him off immediately, telling Kocontes that there was no relevancy to his comments about the victim’s relationship with her brother.
The judge ordered him to stop attacking the man who was speaking for his murdered sister.
Julie Sarinita, Mickey’s niece, also spoke.
She described Kakontes as a man devoid of what makes us human.
Judge King sentenced Loni Lauren Kcontes to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The special circumstance finding of murder for financial gain mandated that sentence.
There would be no appeal that could change it.
There would be no parole hearing.
There would be no second chance.
The prosecution pursued restitution of nearly $1 million from Kantes, the same approximate sum he had expected to gain from Mickey’s death.
The same million dollars that had motivated every move on the board, from the wills to the cruise to the balcony to the strangulation in the dark cabin on the Mediterranean Sea.
The solicitation charges, the two counts of solicitation to commit murder and the count of solicitation to bribe a witness relating to the jailhouse plot against Amy Newan were ultimately dismissed by the judge in light of the life sentence.
He was never going to leave prison regardless.
There was no practical need for additional convictions.
Kants appealed.
His appellet attorneys challenged numerous procedural and evidentiary rulings from the trial.
In 2022, the California Court of Appeal issued its ruling.
The court found that the trial court had committed some evidentiary errors that certain evidence had been admitted that perhaps should not have been, but the court also found that those errors were harmless.
They did not prejudice the outcome.
The damning evidence, the court wrote, was overwhelming.
It was Kakontes’s greed.
It was his incriminating statements to Newan.
It was his selection of a converted car ferry with non-existent security systems and most importantly it was Kosaki’s extensive injuries to her head and neck.
The conviction was affirmed.
The sentence stood life without parole and the jurisdictional question whether Orange County could prosecute a murder committed in the Mediterranean Sea was settled.
California case law, the court ruled, supported jurisdiction over a murder committed off the coast of Italy.
So long as minimal preparatory acts were committed within the county.
Co-contest did not dispute that sufficient evidence of those preparatory acts existed.
The booking of the crews, the drafting of the wills, the surveillance research, the financial planning, all of it had been done from Orange County.
The killing may have happened on the high seas, but the architect had drawn the blueprints in Lera Ranch.
There is a symmetry to this story that the narrator should never need to state directly, but it sits in the structure and it waits for the audience to feel it.
In 1960, a young girl named Mickey sailed on a boat from Japan to the United States.
She sailed with her family.
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