REDWOOD CITY, Calif. -- Ronald J. McIntosh, the escaped con man who flew his jailhouse sweetheart out of prison in a helicopter, is a suspect in the murder-for-hire of a former partner in a fraud scheme, deputies said.
McIntosh, sentenced last week to 25 more years in prison for the daring but short-lived prison escape, should be kept in a local jail until the murder investigation is completed, sheriff's officials said Monday.
Investigators said the victim in the three-year-old murder case was Ronaldson Ewing, 26, a minor partner of McIntosh's in a fraud scheme. Ewing was shot three times and his nude body was left on a beach south of San Francisco.
A spokesman for the San Mateo County Sheriff's Department said Ewing had threatened to expose McIntosh, 42, and Michael Anthony, 30, as ex-felons with fraud convictions.
Anthony was McIntosh's partner in the $18 million investment fraud scheme that landed McIntosh in prison.
Sheriff's detective Mifflin Singleton said Ewing had been 'blackmailing them and was threatening to expose them as ex-cons unless they paid him a percentage of what they were taking from investors. They wanted to eliminate him from the business.'
The break in the previously unsolved murder case came when a young woman who said she witnessed the killing recently identified the alleged contract killer as Draxel Quartermain, 44.
The woman, who has not been identified, said she had gone to the beach with Ewing, Anthony and Quartermain and that Ewing had been told a cocaine deal deal would be made. Instead, it was a setup for Ewing's slaying, deputies said.
Deputies last week arrested Quartermain and Anthony during the weekend. They will be arraigned Wednesday on murder charges, Singleton said.
No charges have been brought against McIntosh, but San Mateo County officials indicated they would ask that he remain in a Bay Area jail until the murder investigation is finished.
McIntosh and Samantha Lopez were caught 10 days after their Nov. 5 escape from the minimum-security Federal Correctional Institute federal prison at Pleasanton, Calif.
After they received extended prison terms last Friday for the escape, it was revealed they had been married in a secret courtroom ceremony only minutes before being sentenced.
The ceremony was performed in whispers, and in a few seconds, by McIntosh's attorney Jud Iversen, an ordained minister, at a courtroom table and nobody else knew about it or even noticed, Lopez's attorney Geoffrey Hansen said.
'They both said 'I do,' signed the papers and that was it,' Hansen said.
McIntosh, 42, had walked away from custody in October while making an unescorted transfer to another prison.
He hijacked a helicopter after renting it from a San Jose firm and flew it into the Pleasanton prison yard to a waiting Lopez. To the cheers of inmates, the two flew over the wall to freedom.
Authorities have said the prison lovebirds will serve their time in separate prisons.