Orinda Man Charged With Girlfriend's Murder Pleads Not Guilty
ORINDA (CBS SF) - An Orinda man accused of brutally beating and hacking his live-in girlfriend to death with a machete in June pleaded not guilty to murder and torture charges in Contra Costa County Superior Court Thursday afternoon.
James Collin, 62, entered the pleas in a Martinez courtroom Thursday in connection with the killing of his longtime girlfriend, 56-year-old Evangeline Devera.
Police found Devera the afternoon of June 26 lying facedown in the kitchen of the couple's home in the 600 block of Moraga Way in Orinda after receiving a report of a murder there.
Police said Collin confessed to officers arriving on the scene that he was responsible for the slaying.
Autopsy results listed Devera's official cause of death as "blunt force" and a "sharp force injury" to the head.
Collin was arrested and charged with murder. This week, Contra Costa County prosecutors filed a torture charge against Collin after reviewing crime scene photos revealing deep gashes on multiple parts of her body and other evidence, including the machete used in the attack, according to Deputy District Attorney Mary Knox.
Knox said the evidence shows that Devera's body was slashed with a machete multiple times before she ended up facedown on the ground.
In addition, the District Attorney's Office is also reconsidering a 1986 case in which Collin fatally shot his younger brother, 32-year-old Tim Collin, on Halloween night in the same home where Devera was killed, according to Knox.
According to a police report of the incident, James Collin was walking through the house cleaning his shotgun when he started having problems with the weapon and it fired, shooting his brother in the chest.
The Contra Costa County Sheriff's Office ruled the death an accident, and the case was never forwarded to the district attorney's office, Knox said.
She said that while investigators are reviewing the 1986 case, it has not officially been reopened.
In 2006, Collin did face legal consequences for a domestic assault on Devera. A judge sentenced him to probation after Collin pleaded no contest to misdemeanor domestic battery charges.
The Orinda man is scheduled to return to court to set future court dates on Aug. 20.
(Copyright 2012 by CBS San Francisco and Bay City News Service. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)
