Jury Convicts Financial Advisor in Murder of Life Sciences Investor

Here at Xconomy, it’s unusual for us to shift far from our focus on the business of innovation—especially to cover something off the local police blotter.

But the 2010 murder of retired biotech CEO and angel investor John G. Watson hit close to home for San Diego’s innovation community, especially among local life sciences investors and members of the San Diego chapter of the Tech Coast Angels (TCA). Shortly after Watson’s body was discovered on June 8, 2010, San Diego police arrested Kent Thomas Keigwin, who knew Watson and had been working as a financial advisor in a local office of Wedbush Securities.

The case came to an end Friday, when a San Diego jury convicted Keigwin of first-degree murder, identity theft, attempted grand theft of personal property, burglary, and forgery. Deputy District Attorney Sharla Evert argued that Keigwin killed Watson to steal his money, firing a stun gun at Watson and strangling him inside Watson’s La Jolla apartment. The prosecutor said Keigwin used personal information he found in Watson’s wallet to impersonate him, transferring some $8.9 million from Watson’s accounts.

Keigwin’s lawyer, Deputy Public Defender Stacy Gulley, argued that the evidence showed only that Keigwin had committed a theft.

The trial began on Nov. 7, and ended exactly two weeks later. Dana Littlefield of the San Diego Union-Tribune reports that jurors also found Keigwin guilty of committing the murder under special circumstances—murder for financial gain and murder during a robbery. That makes him eligible for a sentence of life in prison without parole.

During his years in San Diego, Watson’s social network consisted mostly of the local innovation community. As I reported at the time, he was a 65-year-old bachelor and former pharmaceutical executive who had settled into his retirement in La Jolla after moving to San Diego several years earlier to run Ionian Technologies. Watson was active in the Tech Coast Angels, a group of individual investors who fund and mentor early stage startups, and Connect, San Diego’s nonprofit group for technology and entrepreneurship.

Judge Frederic Link, who presided at the trial, set Keigwin’s sentencing hearing for Jan. 20, at 9 a.m. in the downtown San Diego County Courthouse.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.