Secret audio, overturned convictions and a jail death: The legal saga of an art dealer’s murder

INDIO, Calif. — For people who were close to Cliff Lambert, the still-unresolved legal saga surrounding his brutal killing more than a decade ago has been agonizing. 

Lambert, a retired art dealer described by a friend as a “rich, gay socialite” in the California desert city of Palm Springs, was fatally stabbed in 2008 in what prosecutors have described as an elaborate plot orchestrated by two grifters — one who posed as an exiled prince from Nepal and the other who once captured media attention when he accused a prominent San Francisco financier of sexual abuse. 

With four accomplices, prosecutors have said, Kaushal Niroula and Daniel Garcia took Lambert’s money, identity and life.

Daniel Garcia at his second trial.Dateline

A series of arrests, trials and convictions for murder and other crimes followed. But nearly 16 years after Lambert’s murder, the case remains unfinished.

In 2020, four murder convictions were overturned after illegally recorded courtroom audio revealed that the judge in the proceedings made derogatory and biased comments about two defendants, including remarks suggesting that he hadn’t reviewed filings because of Niroula’s sexual orientation and HIV status.

After a new round of trials that ended in October 2023, all three of the surviving defendants were convicted again. (Niroula was fatally assaulted in jail while awaiting a new trial; two defendants previously pleaded guilty, and their convictions weren’t overturned.) But amid claims of ineffective lawyering, health problems and other issues, two of those defendants — including Garcia, whom prosecutors have described as the plot’s “idea man” — haven’t yet been sentenced.

Kaushal Niroula.Courtesy Mark Evans

The delays have stoked frustration, anger and charges of bias among Lambert’s friends.

“If Cliff’s family had a ton of females crying in the courtroom and all that, you bet your ass this would have been over,” said Eddie Mullikin, a friend who was a witness at both trials and spoke exclusively to NBC News. “I think this would have been different if this was a straight person with a straight family.”

Eddie Mullikin arrives at a Riverside County courthouse to testify.Dateline

"We need some closure on this,” said another friend, Steven Kilkullen, 59. “We need to see these terrible people receive their punishment. We need to see them pay for what they did to Cliff.”

A court spokesperson for Riverside County Superior Court Judge Anthony Villalobos, who is presiding over the case, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

A spokesperson for the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office wouldn’t comment. Lawyers for the defendants didn’t respond to requests for comment.

At an Oct. 11 court hearing for Garcia, 42, and another defendant, David Replogle, 75, the judge agreed to push sentencing back again, this time to November. A prosecutor objected, saying the government couldn’t agree to further delays, but the judge responded: “I’m trying to make sure that Mr. Garcia gets all of his rights.”

 A self-made success

Lambert, 74, was originally from the Midwest, and by the time Kilkullen met him in the mid-’90s, he’d become wealthy by developing a process for duplicating master artworks, his friend recalled. Lambert was theatrical and gregarious and a celebrity of his own making — someone who’d come from nothing and become well-known in the art world, Kilkullen said.

Cliff Lambert.Courtesy Tom Fitzmaurice

Mullikin met Lambert while he was working as a go-go dancer after he arrived in Palm Springs in the mid-2000s with a plan to stay sober. To him, Lambert was a role model because he was a successful gay man who hadn’t died from HIV/AIDS and offered sincere friendship, Mullikin said.

“It was just a really stunning example of a good friend,” said Mullikin, 55. 

Lambert was also lonely. After the sudden death of his partner, he created an online dating profile, according to Robert Hightower, the former Riverside County prosecutor who tried Lambert’s killers the second time. That’s how Lambert met Garcia, then in his mid-20s, and he flew him to Palm Springs in spring 2008, an appeals decision in the case shows.

Mullikin, who met Garcia during the visit, recalled that he seemed like a nice kid who was looking for someone to fund his business.

The realization of what Garcia was really after — an investor, not a romantic partner — prompted Lambert to throw him out, Hightower told the jury last year. Enraged, Garcia stole Lambert’s credit card and upgraded his airline ticket to first-class, Hightower said. Then, he and Niroula began developing a plot to defraud and murder Lambert, the prosecutor said.

A high-profile sex abuse case

Garcia and Niroula had met at a San Francisco bar a few years before, after Niroula saw a magazine story about a lawsuit Garcia filed in 2002 against financier Thomas White, Garcia’s cousin told “Dateline.” A separate suit filed the next year in federal court by nearly two dozen young men and boys in Mexico also accused White of sexual abuse.

All of the litigation was handled by a San Francisco lawyer — David Replogle.

Defendant and former San Francisco Bay Area lawyer David Replogle.Dateline

White maintained that the claims were false, but he settled both actions, paying Garcia and another plaintiff $500,000, according to a lawsuit White filed in 2013 related to the allegations. The suit, which didn’t say how much White paid the Mexican plaintiffs, alleges that he was coerced into making the settlements. The plaintiffs and their legal team carried out an “orchestrated fraud” to extort him, his suit alleged.

At least four of the 22 boys who accused him had recanted their statements, and one said he’d been paid to fabricate the claim, according to White’s lawsuit. 

Garcia hasn’t recanted his account. In a filing the following year, his attorney said White was “engaged in an unrelenting vendetta” against him and accused White of libel.

White, who was imprisoned in Mexico in connection with the allegations, died in custody after he filed the 2013 lawsuit, according to one of his former lawyers, Stuart Hanlon.

Always 'over the top'

Hightower described Niroula as an “exceptionally charming” personality — someone who falsely claimed to be a prince and liked to appear as a high roller. Tyson Wrensch, who recalled meeting Niroula and Garcia in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood after his settlement with White, told “Dateline” that the pair would arrive in three Lincoln Town Cars to make it appear like “a Secret Service kinda thing.”

Niroula “would go to the bar and throw down hundreds and buy everybody a drink,” Wrensch said. “Everything was over the top.”

Tyson Wrensch and Daniel Garcia.Courtesy Tyson Wrensch

At one point after Niroula and Garcia embarked on the plan to kill Lambert, Niroula texted Garcia: “Honey, everyone believes me until they have been conned,” according to the appeals decision. “Some even after that.” 

To help defraud Lambert, they enlisted Garcia’s lawyer from the sex abuse case — Replogle — and a Coachella Valley man whom Niroula had a brief relationship with, Hightower said. To carry out the killing, Niroula also recruited a San Francisco bartender and a former cook in the Marines who was the bartender’s roommate, according to the prosecutor. 

In November 2008, Niroula — posing as a lawyer acting on behalf of a deceased art collector and friend of Lambert’s — called Lambert and said the collector had left him some artwork, according to the appeals decision. All Lambert needed to do was sign documents to get it, the decision says.

"Cliff Lambert believed it,” Hightower told the jury.

On Dec. 5, while they were having cocktails with Lambert in his home, Niroula let the bartender and the cook in through the kitchen, Hightower said. They fatally stabbed Lambert, rolled him up in a rug and loaded his body into the trunk of his Mercedes, Hightower said.

On their way to the Bay Area, the prosecutor said, they buried Lambert in a shallow grave on a mountain pass north of Los Angeles.

The unraveling 

In the weeks after Lambert’s death, the group fabricated powers of attorney in Lambert’s name, drained roughly $200,000 from his bank account and met with a pair of real estate agents in an effort to sell his home, the prosecutor said.

But by January, the conspiracy had begun to unravel after the bartender returned with a moving truck. He was arrested after concerned neighbors dialed Palm Springs police, Hightower said. 

Within months, the others had been arrested. Four of them, including Niroula and Garcia, were charged with murder, conspiracy, grand theft and other crimes, court records show. 

The former cook confessed to the killing and cooperated with authorities, Hightower said. He pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced to 25 years, records show. The sixth suspect pleaded guilty to fraud and was sentenced to five years in prison. (He was later released and died in 2021, public records show.)

The four others were convicted of murder at separate trials in 2011 and 2012. They were sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. 

But in less than a decade, those verdicts and prison terms were thrown out after Niroula made an explosive series of claims in an appeal and other post-conviction filings.

The allegations were linked to secret recordings made on Garcia’s courtroom laptop that captured off-the-record conversations between Judge David Downing and his clerk. 

In a comment detailed in a 2016 petition that sought to overturn Niroula’s conviction, Downing’s clerk said the defendant “likes licking envelopes” and noted Niroula’s HIV-positive status. The judge responded: “Ewww lord knows where his tongue has been and for that very reason I don’t like to touch or read anything he gives me and I deny everything as I don’t read it. It’s a tough world folks,” the petition says.

In another comment, the petition says, Downing used an expletive to describe the defendants and said they “can file anything they want, but I won’t grant any important motions. I have given them just enough money so no court will believe I was biased but besides that let the DA hang them.”

During a private meeting with Garcia at which the defendant confronted the judge about the recordings, Downing said he was protected by the First Amendment and had treated everyone in the case appropriately, according to the appeals decision.

Downing’s California law license has been listed as inactive since 2013, state records show. A message left on a phone number listed under his name wasn’t returned.

On May 15, 2020, the Riverside County prosecutor’s office said it didn’t oppose new trials to “prevent even an appearance of impropriety,” case filings show. Less than a month later, a judge overturned the four murder convictions and set the cases for retrial. 

To Mullikin, who had reported Lambert missing and testified at the trial, the entire experience of dealing with his friend’s murder and its aftermath was surreal and overwhelming — like “a nightmare soap opera,” he said. 

When he learned why the convictions were reversed, Mullikin said, he wasn’t angry at the judge — “I’m a gay man in the United States; we are insulted, f—-- with and, our entire lives, you learn to just move past these people,” he said — and he didn’t believe Downing’s comments exonerated the defendants.

"That doesn’t excuse you from this,” Mullikin said. “You still murdered my friend.”

Where the cases stand

On Sept. 6, 2022, while he was awaiting retrial at a Riverside County jail, Niroula was beaten and strangled to death by another inmate, according to a wrongful death lawsuit Niroula’s family filed last year. The suit accuses the county sheriff’s office of allowing Niroula — who at the time of the killing identified as a transgender woman, according to the suit — to be preyed upon by a man officials understood to be a violent predator. 

The sheriff’s office denied the allegations, a filing shows, and the case is ongoing.

In 2022, Replogle was retried and convicted of murder and other crimes. The next year, the bartender’s retrial also ended with a guilty verdict, as did Garcia’s retrial four months later. Yet only the bartender has been sentenced. Last November, he was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

The delays in sentencing Garcia and Replogle stem in part from their legal representation. Since their convictions, both defendants have parted ways with the lawyers who represented them at trial, and at the Oct. 11 hearing, Replogle sought to have a newly appointed attorney thrown off the case over what he described as “a conflict.”

Villalobos, the judge, denied the request, saying it had taken a long time to find the new lawyer.

“There’s going to be no more playing games,” he said.

Garcia, meanwhile, initially sought to represent himself but then requested a new lawyer. A representative for that attorney appeared at the Oct. 11 hearing and reported having obtained only half of the 11,000 pages of transcripts from Garcia’s second trial.

In court hearings and filings, Garcia has raised other issues, as well, including that he hasn’t been provided accommodations compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act. In a 2022 petition, Garcia said he has a rare genetic disorder that causes extreme sensitivity to sunlight.

That and other matters would be discussed at a Nov. 13 hearing, the judge said last month.

Lambert’s friend Kilkullen remains baffled that the judge keeps delaying the sentencing hearings.

“I don’t understand for the life of me: Why is he giving more time?” Kilkullen said. “I personally am ready for this closure, and I need to know that the court places value on Cliff’s life, on Cliff as a human being, on the experience that he went through with these people. I am tired of feeling like the court values these criminals more than the person that they did this to.”

Tim Stelloh reported from Alameda, California. David Ketterling reported from Indio.