Closing chapter plays out in 2008 Palm Springs murder case

[Editor’s note: This is an expanded story from reporter Ed Walsh, who filed the first article just after the sentencing hearing concluded.]

The closing chapter of more than 16 years of litigation involving the Bay Area men convicted for an infamous 2008 Palm Springs murder is playing out in Riverside County Superior Court. Daniel Garcia, 42, was sentenced on Friday, April 25, to life in prison without the possibility of parole. His former lawyer, David Replogle, 76, is expected to get the same sentence later this spring.

The victim was Palm Springs resident Clifford Lambert, 74. He was a retired art dealer.

Riverside County Senior Deputy District Attorney Lisa DiMaria, who was at the sentencing as an observer, summed up what many legal observers have said about the case.

“There had never been a case like this,” DiMaria told the Bay Area Reporter on Friday, April 25. “This is definitely a historical case in California. It’s crazy.”

The story is gaining new attention with a recently released podcast and will garner even more notoriety with a planned two-hour network TV program based on the case.

At the April 25 hearing, Riverside County Superior Court Judge Anthony R. Villalobos handed down the life term to Garcia. The hearing took place in Indio, about 20 miles south of Palm Springs.

Villalobos rejected Garcia’s motion for a new trial. He also refused to allow Garcia to represent himself. His lawyer, Peter Scalisi, told the judge he planned to file an appeal immediately after the hearing.

Garcia asked the judge to recommend that he serve his time at either San Quentin Rehabilitation Center in Marin County, Mule Creek State Prison in Ione in Amador County, or Valley State Prison in Chowchilla in Madera County because they are closer to his elderly relatives, who live in the Central Valley. The judge agreed to make that recommendation.

In an exclusive jailhouse interview with the Bay Area Reporter on February 27, Garcia said he was confident his conviction would eventually be overturned on appeal. He had also maintained that he was convicted with fabricated evidence.

Garcia was not in Palm Springs at the time of the murder, but juries in two separate trials found him, along with Miguel Bustamante, Craig McCarthy, Kaushal Niroula, and Replogle, guilty of conspiring to kill Lambert. Bustamante is serving a life sentence and McCarthy was given a 25-year prison term. He had testified against the other men.

A jail cellmate murdered Niroula in 2022. Niroula’s parents filed a federal wrongful death lawsuit against Riverside County in 2023 stating that Niroula identified as a transgender woman and shouldn’t have been put in a cell with a violent sex offender. Denisse Gastélum, an attorney representing Niroula’s parents, stated in an email that the case is in litigation with trial set for September 23.

DiMaria, the prosecutor, attended last Friday’s hearing. She won convictions against Garcia and Niroula in 2012, but those convictions, as well as those of Replogle and Bustamante, were thrown out as a result of Garcia secretly recording the judge in the case saying he didn’t want to open envelopes with correspondence from Niroula because he was HIV-positive.

DiMaria attended Garcia’s sentencing not as a representative of the DA’s office but as an observer. The veteran prosecutor has a reputation in Coachella Valley as being tough, tenacious, and tireless. She personally investigated the case in the field and methodically laid out the evidence on poster boards to guide the jury to a guilty verdict in the first trial.

Her tenacity for helping to bring justice to Lambert’s murder was evident as she spoke to the B.A.R. outside court.

“There are no words to explain the amount of blood, sweat, tears and time I put into that case and making sure it was solid,” she said. “And the thing that really gets to me is that the reversal never had anything to do with his guilt or the evidence. It was some flippant comment from a judge, but there was never a question about innocence. There was never a question about whether or not he did it.”

When asked how she felt about seeing Garcia in court again after winning a conviction more than a decade ago, DiMaria told the B.A.R. that seeing Garcia just caused her more frustration.

“I wish I had a synonym for frustration. I really do,” she said. “Seeing him and the fact he was in court just frustrated me that we’re doing this all over again. There are no personal feelings about it, just aggravation. Aggravation that we are in 2025, and he is just finally getting sentenced for a murder that occurred in 2008.”

Scalisi, Garcia’s attorney, told the B.A.R. that a sentence of life without the possibility of parole was what he and Garcia had expected. He filed an appeal immediately after the sentencing but he said that a successful appeal would be challenging in part because Garcia took to the stand in his own defense.

“As a general rule, and this is not hard and fast, when a client testifies in his own trial and is convicted, it’s far less likely that the Court of Appeal is going to grant an appeal and reverse a conviction,” he said.

The defense attorney noted that Garcia had a different belief of his appeal chances.

“It’s a stretch, but he is hopeful. He is optimistic,” Scalisi said.

The attorney told the B.A.R. that Garcia is dealing with health challenges in court and suffers from porphyria, also known as the vampire disease, making him overly sensitive to light. Scalisi said that Garcia’s father died of the disease.

‘Gay grifters’
Prosecutors say Niroula and Garcia were involved in a number of cons. Niroula was from Nepal and falsely claimed to be a member of the Nepalese royal family. He was dubbed the “Dark Prince.” A Japanese woman visiting Hawaii said Niroula conned her out of more than $500,000. He was granted a student visa to study at the now-closed New College in San Francisco's Mission District. He promised the school a $1 million donation. The donation never came. New College eventually closed in 2008, months before Lambert's murder. Niroula was connected to a real estate con for over $2 million in connection with falsified real estate deeds for three condos at One Rincon Tower in San Francisco.

Garcia was connected with a case that resulted in the imprisonment of San Francisco philanthropist Thomas White in a jail in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Garcia told the B.A.R. that he was violently sexually assaulted by White when he was 16 and that federal investigators informed him that White had similarly abused other underage boys. Garcia said that against his advice, his attorney, Replogle, included some Mexican boys in a lawsuit against White who were never molested by him. Mexican authorities charged several of the boys who accused White with extortion for lying about being molested for the promise of a lawsuit payout. White was 78 when he died in custody in 2013 after more than a decade in jail.

Lambert was stabbed to death in his Palm Springs home in early December 2008. His remains were not discovered until 2016 and 2017 near Castaic, in northern Los Angeles County. But the remains were not identified through DNA as being Lambert’s until 2020.

The case that earned the moniker “gay grifters” has gained new attention with a 12-part podcast called “American Hustlers.” A producer from the NBC “Dateline” program was in attendance to video Garcia’s sentencing. The network plans a two-hour program on the case. NBC was waiting for all the defendants to be sentenced before editing and eventually airing the story.

Scalise echoed what DiMaria said about the uniqueness of the case.

The defense attorney told the B.A.R., “It’s very unique. It had, to say the least, a tortured history. So, in that sense, it was very unique. The actual facts of the case are pretty easy to understand. It’s not a complicated case, really.”

Noting the delays and two retrials in the case, DiMaria told the B.A.R., “I think the most aggravating part is that [Garcia] conned and manipulated the system, just like he did with his victims.”