A 34-year-old Newport Beach man has been convicted in the gruesome murder of his parents and their housekeeper more than six years ago, officials with the Orange County District Attorney’s Office announced.
In the weeks before their deaths, Richard and Kim Nicholson grew concerned that their then 27-year-old son was behaving erratically, using illegal drugs, steroids, watching a lot of pornography and contacting escort services.
The couple told a private detective they hired to find their son that he’d been a normal, happy child until he spent nine months on a Mormon mission at the age 19 and returned severely depressed and began acting strange.
In Dec. 2018, following a heated confrontation with his parents about checking into a mental health and addiction treatment facility, Camden Burton Nicholson stormed out of the house, stole his mother’s vehicle and vanished.
“They feared he might have committed suicide or was in the hospital somewhere,” the private detective told KTLA shortly after their Feb. 2019 murders.
The then 27-year-old later turned up at a Marriot hotel and, using his father’s credit card, began spending lavishly. When the card was cancelled, he began sending angry text messages to his parents. Despite telling them not to contact him, his parents insisted he return home.
Investigators say that on Feb. 11, 2019, Camden confronted his father in the family’s Newport Beach home in the upscale gated community of Bonita Canyon and repeatedly stabbed him. When his mother returned home a few minutes later, he attacked her with metal statue and stabbed her to death in the garage.
“The next morning, Nicholson attacked the family’s longtime housekeeper, Maria Morse, when she arrived to clean the house,” the OCDA’s office said in a news release. “Nicholson stabbed Morse repeatedly and slit her throat before stuffing her body in a large plastic bin in the kitchen pantry.”
Prosecutors said that after he killed his parents and their housekeeper, the then 27-year-old went on a shopping spree, spending hundreds of dollars at a dispensary in Santa Ana and buying sex toys.
At around 8:30 p.m. the next evening, Camden drove his father’s car to a Kaiser Permanente facility in Irvine where he called 911 and told police that he’d killed his parents in self-defense.
Newport Beach police conducted a welfare check at the family’s residence, found the home in disarray, with blood throughout it, and all three victims stabbed to death.
This week a jury in Santa Ana found the 34-year-old guilty of three counts of first-degree murder along with the special circumstance of committing multiple murders.
During his trial, his attorneys argued that the 34-year-old should be found not guilty by reason of insanity due to a schizoaffective disorder diagnosis. The sanity phase of the trial is scheduled for Oct. 23 and will determine whether Camden was criminally insane at the time of the murders.
“Those verdicts will determine whether Nicholson is sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole or if he will be sent to a mental health facility,” prosecutors said.
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