A 46-year-old man arrested in Hawaii last year in connection with a 2007 California murder case admitted Thursday that he killed his Japan-born wife during an argument and buried her body in the desert.
Anthony Simoneau entered a guilty plea in San Diego Superior Court in El Cajon, Calif., to one count of voluntary manslaughter in the death of Fumiko Ogawa, the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office said. Simoneau will be sentenced to a stipulated 11-year prison sentence on April 30.
The plea was entered during a status conference, the district attorney’s office reported. Simoneau, whose Honolulu residence was on Makaloa Street, would have faced a sentence of 25 years to life if convicted of murder. Simoneau, a former dental technician in the Navy, was charged with murder in the 2007 killing of the 41-year-old Ogawa.
According to the voluntary manslaughter plea agreement, Simoneau admitted he killed his wife as a result of a "sudden quarrel" and that he was somehow provoked, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Because of that provocation, he committed the killing in the "heat of passion," meaning he acted rashly under the influence of intense emotion that obscured his judgment, according to the plea agreement.
After the hearing, San Diego prosecutors said they initially charged Simoneau with murder because they said they have evidence to support the charge. However, they said, they accepted the plea offer from the defense as a means to allow the victim’s family some closure, the newspaper reported.
Simoneau’s plea will help hasten the release of Ogawa’s remains from the San Diego Medical Examiner’s Office to her family members. That, prosecutors said, was particularly important to them.
Simoneau moved to Hawaii from California in 2011 and was arrested in Honolulu on Sept. 4, 2011.
He waived extradition, saying at the time that he was looking forward to "my day in court in San Diego and proving these charges erroneous."
At his Sept. 29, 2011, hearing in San Diego, Simoneau pleaded not guilty to a count of first-degree murder.
Ogawa’s badly decomposed body was found Jan. 20, 2007, near the Bow Willow Campground in the Anza-Borrego Desert, but was not identified until 2011, after a family member in Japan provided a DNA sample. No cause of death was determined.
Her family had reported Ogawa missing in November 2007. Simoneau left San Diego that year.
No family DNA was collected at that time.
Simoneau never reported his wife missing, San Diego police said. He told people in San Diego that she was in Japan caring for a relative or in Hawaii working on their new home, police said.
The couple married in 1996, and filed for divorce in 2002, police said. However, divorce proceedings were put off after Ogawa inherited a significant amount of money from relatives in Japan. Simoneau then went on a spending spree, buying four luxury sport-utility vehicles including Land Rovers, four boats, a motorcycle and three other vehicles, police said.
In 2011, Simoneau was arrested in Honolulu for felony theft for stealing a $395 piece of luggage from Nordstrom. He pleaded guilty to theft, and a state judge sentenced him to probation and fined him $1,580.
