Jury convicts man in ex-wife’s slaying

Marvin Moran speaks with an inflection that matches the voice on the 911 recording.

“There’s a (expletive) dying,” the caller said. “Go help her out. Ain’t no joke.”

On the morning of June 13, his ex-wife, Iris Moran, lay face up in a pool of her own blood, with her hands bound behind her back. She was dead before emergency crews found her.

Even their children testified during a weeklong murder trial that they recognized their father’s voice.

But Marvin Moran tried rather unsuccessfully to deny that he made the call.

“You know, like everybody been testifying here, you know, I’m saying no because that’s what I said from the beginning and I’m not going to contradict myself in regards to that,” he said, responding to questions from his defense lawyer Christy Craig. “The jury can make their own arguments.”

When prosecutor Jeff Rogan played the recording again and asked Moran whether he made the call, he gave a more direct “no,” and he denied breaking into his ex-wife’s southwest valley apartment and killing her.

A Clark County jury did not believe him.

Six men and six women took about three hours Tuesday to convict the 37-year-old of first-degree murder in the brutal beating death.

The jury also found Marvin Moran guilty of kidnapping and burglary for getting inside Iris Moran’s apartment before she died on June 13.

Two days before the slaying, Marvin Moran told his ex-wife, “if I find out you have a boyfriend, I’m going to kill you,” prosecutor Tierra Jones told jurors. He then learned that she had been seeing another man.

During closing arguments, Craig pointed out that Moran was born in El Salvador, where he lived for the first 15 years of his life before moving to the United States. She suggested some of her client’s testimony may have been lost in translation.

Prosecutors said that the defendant stalked his ex-wife, placing a application on her cell phone so he could read her text messages, see who she called and track her location. She had divorced him just four months before she was killed.

Jurors saw images of Iris Moran’s bruised and bloody face. Her teeth had been knocked out of her mouth and across the room.

Defense lawyers argued that no forensic evidence pointed to Marvin Moran as his ex-wife’s killer. The couple had been married for 13 years and only had two notable quarrels before Iris Moran died, according to the defense.

Investigators pulled fingerprints, DNA and blood samples from the crime scene. Police even searched Marvin Moran’s apartment and found no bloody clothes, weapons or rope that matched the one used to bind Iris Moran’s hands behind her back.

“How do you commit an up-close, personal killing like that and not have any blood on you,” Craig said. “Where the heck did it go? And how could you make it just disappear?”

Marvin Moran told jurors he was out looking for a place to hold a yard sale between 4 a.m. and 8:45 a.m. June 13, when his ex-wife was beaten to death inside her Las Vegas apartment. He said he hoped to inquire with someone out walking a dog but never found anyone.

“That’s a bit weird,” Rogan said. “That’s a bit unbelievable.”

While Iris Moran worked as a housekeeper at MGM Grand, Marvin Moran didn’t have a job and pawned things to scrounge up cash. He had even pawned several garden tools hours before he said he was going to hold the yard sale.

Prosecutors said that Marvin Moran had left his own apartment early on the morning of the killing to catch his ex-wife as she returned home from her overnight shift. She had just kicked off her shoes when he stopped her near the front door of the apartment.

She threw up her arms to block the blows to her head, prosecutors said, so he tied her hands behind her back and beat her until she died.

“This is overkill,” Jones said. “He has a hatred toward Iris.”

He dumped the contents of her purse onto the floor next to her body and picked up her cellphone.

The voice on the 911 call told a dispatcher that the woman was inside apartment 873 at an address on South Durango Drive. Police arrived at the scene and found Iris Moran in apartment 273. The complex does not have an apartment 873, Rogan said.

A detective later asked Marvin Moran where his ex-wife lived, and he told the detective that she lived in apartment 873.

He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole at a penalty hearing Wednesday.

Contact reporter David Ferrara at dferrara@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-1039. Find him on Twitter: @randompoker