Crime History - Power Ranger kills couple over yacht
By: Scott McCabe
Examiner Staff Writer
November 15, 2009
On this day, Nov. 15, in 2004, actor Skylar Deleon forced the owners of a 55-foot yacht to sign over the ownership of the boat before throwing them overboard to their deaths.
Retirees Thomas and Jackie Hawks placed an ad to sell their yacht, the Well Deserved, in Southern California.
Deleon, a former child actor who at 14 appeared in the series "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers," answered the ad along with his pregnant wife and two friends.
Off the coast of Newport Beach, Deleon and his accomplices bound and gagged the couple, lashed them to the anchor and tossed them overboard. Their bodies have never been found.
When police interviewed Deleon, he showed them proof-of-purchase documents. Police arrested him the next year after an accomplice confessed.
Defense lawyers said Deleon needed the money to finance a sex-change operation.
He was found guilty of the Hawkses' murders and to killing a third man in Mexico.
In April, Deleon was sentenced to death.
-- Scott McCabe
