Floating Dead Body at Sea Lands Man a Murder Conviction

Photo: Lonnie Loren Kocontes

SANTA ANA – Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer announced the murder conviction of
former attorney Lonnie Loren Kocontes (62) of Safety Harbor, Florida.

The jury deliberated less than an hour on June 15th before convicting the man of strangling his wife and throwing her overboard for financial gain.

Although Kocontes had planned what DA Spitzer called “the perfect crime,” closer examination revealed a crucial omission. “The defendant thought he committed the perfect crime by throwing the victim overboard from the balcony of a cruise ship in the middle of the ocean. But he made a mistake. Despite all of his painstaking planning to pick the perfect ship, the perfect room and the perfect time to commit a murder, the fact that he strangled her before throwing her overboard gave us the very evidence to convict him of murder.”

“She couldn’t breathe in water because she was dead long before her body ever hit the ocean,” added
Spitzer, “and when authorities found her, her cause of death was determined to be asphyxiation – not
drowning.” The ex-lawyer who strangled his ex-wife, threw her body overboard during a Mediterranean cruise to inherit more than $1 million as the beneficiary of several bank accounts and the sale of the couple’s home.

Kocontes faces life without the possibility of parole, for the verdict which came 14+ years after ex-wife
Micki Kanesaki’s death while aboard a Mediterranean cruise in 2006.

The defendant was indicted by a grand jury on June 14, 2013, and is scheduled to be sentenced September 18, 2020.

“He chose the ship, he chose the balcony room,” said DA Spitzer, “and now the judge will decide his
fate.”