Murder charges to be dismissed against Gilroy doctor

Oct. 07--GILROY -- Four months after a Gilroy doctor was accused of hiring a friend to stab to death his 74-year-old physician wife, prosecutors plan to dismiss the murder charges against him Tuesday.

Dr. German Baldeon, 68, was arrested in June and accused of hiring David Galvez to kill his wife, Dr. Doris Knapp. According to search warrant affidavits, Gilroy police believed Galvez repeatedly stabbed Knapp on April 1 in exchange for a free condominium Knapp and Baldeon owned in Ecuador.

Baldeon also stood to collect $441,567 in life insurance from his wife's death, according to court documents. Galvez was also charged, but he has fled to Ecuador, which does not have an extradition treaty with the United States.

It now appears Galvez acted independently, Baldeon's Burlingame-based defense attorney, Paula Canny, said late Monday.

Santa Clara County assistant district attorney Marc Buller confirmed the charges will be dismissed against Baldeon at the South County Courthouse on Tuesday afternoon, but he did not provide a detailed explanation. It will be the second time in a week that the District Attorney's Office has dismissed a high-profile murder case.

"Our job is to continue to investigate," Buller said of the Knapp case. "You dig and dig, and sometimes you find contrary or conflicting evidence."

Canny proved to prosecutors that it was Knapp, not Baldeon, who'd taken out two of the most lucrative insurance policies shortly before she died. After the documents involving the family's condo in Ecuador -- where Baldeon was originally from -- were translated into English from Spanish, it turned out that Galvez wasn't given the condo after all.

The defense attorney said it appears Galvez was trying to swindle the family out of the condo and got angry at Knapp, who handled the finances and may have been getting wise to his con game. Initially, Baldeon's bail had been set at $1 million, but prosecutors agreed to release him on his own recognizance in July after the new information began turning up.

"I am grateful to Santa Clara County and prosecutor Angela Bernhard for their objective revisiting of the facts, and for the absolutely ethical way they handled this difficult situation," Canny said. "How many times in your career do you get to be Matlock and save an innocent guy? Not many in my career."

Last week, prosecutors dropped murder charges against brothers David and Robert Zimmer, who were accused in the 1989 cold-case strangulation of David's estranged wife, Cathy Zimmer. Her body was found in the back seat of her car at the San Jose airport, wrapped in a colorful patchwork quilt whose origins are still unknown despite widespread publicity.

In that case, the dismissal was prompted by prosecutor Ted Kajani's affair with his chief witness and his failure to turn over a mountain of evidence to defense attorneys on time.

Contact Tracey Kaplan at 408-278-3482. Follow her at Twitter.com/tkaplanreport.

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