Murder suspects hop fence near Carlsbad lagoon – updated 12-6-21

Ted said, “I got a phone call from my girlfriend.” It was just after 9 on a Monday morning.

Ted said he stood up and turned away from his computer and looked out the window. “Just out of the corner of my eye I saw two people hop over the fence. In a flash. And go into the bushes. And I said to her, I just saw two people hop over the fence and they’re in the protected area.”

Ted lives in a two-story home overlooking the lagoon in Carlsbad. The wild area around the lagoon is just steps from his home on Park Drive, and there is a chain link fence protecting the nature preserve.

He only got a fleeting look at one man and one woman that morning two years ago, on March 11, 2019. “So I just happened to see them literally for two seconds.” The pair quickly crossed Park Drive before they cleared the six-foot fence. “Really fast. And just dive into the bushes.” Neither person hesitated, the man did not pause to help the woman over. “They went over the fence at the same time, she was on the right, he was on the left.”

Ted was impressed. “I can tell you, I’m a Marine officer, and I’ve gone over a lot of fences, training; they went over that fence so fast. It wasn’t like, you see some guy who’s kind of overweight straddling the fence, trying to get his balance. It was like BOOM.”

It made Ted suspicious. “They were up to no good, I knew in my mind they were up to no good, nobody does that.”

Ted's girlfriend asked him, What are they doing? He told her they were crawling around, “Cause I can see the tops of the bushes going like this.” (When he testified in court two months after the incident, Ted motioned with his hands, waving back and forth.) “And the bushes are fifteen feet tall. And I can see right in there so I know they’re crawling. And she said, Well what do you think? I said, Well, I’m just going to call the cops, I’ll call you back.”

The police quickly came to Ted’s house. “I took them upstairs, and the one officer he said, Well where are they? And I said, I’ll show you exactly where they are! Right there. So he says, are you sure? Yeah I’m sure.” The cop told him to stay there, and to yell if the suspects made a run for it. “So I said okay. So I waited, he came back pretty quick with, like, a bunch of cops.” The police hopped the fence. “Right there in the corner. That’s the only part where there’s a gate, right there.” That gate is always locked.

“And then I saw a female officer walk down the fence line, she kept looking at me, she had her blue gloves on.” Ted stayed on his balcony while he directed the policewoman. She travelled maybe 30 yards in from the fence.

Ted signaled the cops with his hands, he did not use the phone and he did not yell out. He demonstrated his hand gestures in court, go this way, a little further, a little further, and then stop. Ted said he took video of the arrest and gave it to cops.

When Ted testified at a pre-trial hearing in May 2019, he identified two people, the defendants in the courtroom. “That’s him and that’s her. Her hair was a little more disheveled. And he looks about the same.”

Ian Forrester Bushee, now 39, is described as 6 feet 1 inch tall and 215 pounds.

Malissa Deanna James, now 28, is described as 5 feet 1 inch tall and 150 pounds. When they arrested her, police noticed that Malissa James had electrical tape wrapped around her right thumb. When they looked they saw a deep cut there.

Both defendants are charged with multiple burglaries and the murder of a 63-year-old woman. The deceased woman was apparently surprised in her bedroom late Sunday night, approximately nine hours before two suspects were spotted by Ted returning to their encampment at the lagoon. They were arrested just a short walk from the crime scene on Outrigger Lane.

A prosecutor said the victim was first attacked on her bed, then on the floor next to her bed. Apparently she was able to make it out onto her back deck where the attack resumed, and finally the gravely wounded woman crawled back to the foot of her bed where she dialed 911 for help. This scenario was deduced from a blood trail, the prosecutor said this included blood smears from the victim and blood droplets from her attacker.

A doctor who performed the autopsy testified that the woman slowly bled to death from 142 cuts and stabs, most less than four inches deep. The doctor said that no single wound would have been fatal, but altogether the total blood loss was not survivable. A small folding knife believed to be the deadly weapon was recovered in the woman’s home in the 1800 block of Outrigger Lane.

Prosecutor Nicole Rooney said that Ian Bushee and Malissa James are transients, and they have previously acted together to commit crimes in San Bernardino County and Arizona. Their prior arrests were for burglaries and shoplifting, and when they were arrested in San Diego County they were both on multiple probations.

Prosecutor Rooney claimed the pair committed a prior burglary one year earlier, in which Malissa James reportedly confronted the homeowner after he unexpectedly returned to his house in Rancho Cucamonga. That man said Malissa James walked towards him holding a kind of arrow in her hands, while he was standing in his front yard, and she fled only after he cocked the pistol he held. That homeowner said that Ian Bushee had already bolted out of his home, and fled, before the female burglar exited his home and approached him.

The defense attorney for Ian Bushee insisted that Bushee was not the one who stabbed the woman to death on Outrigger Lane in Carlsbad. Although police found many blood droplets which DNA-matched to Malissa James, there was no DNA nor any other evidence showing that Bushee was ever in that home, according to his defense attorney John Patterson.

Honorable judge Brad Weinreb ordered both defendants to answer multiple charges at trial, and held without bail, at the end of a hearing in May of 2019. Their current date for trial, which is eligible as a death penalty case, is set for March 25, 2021.