SANTA ANA, Calif. -- Sara Merrill's youngest son, the Baltimore boy she remembers with the sunny, winning smile, sits in the county jail here hoping for life as he once knew it.

He is thin-lipped and weary from the struggle to prove his innocence in a brutal crime he says he didn't commit. She is his lifeline, a soft-spoken woman from Monkton with the smarts and savvy to know that "nobody would listen to a mother" so she hired the best legal minds money could buy and drafted Episcopal church leaders to wage the fight on her son's behalf.

The first strategic battle in her war has been won: Thomas Read Merrill, a 29-year-old ex-Marine educated at private prep schools and Washington College on Maryland's Eastern Shore, will get a new trial, perhaps in May. Convicted of a double murder, he faced a life- without-parole sentence until a California court threw out his convictions last fall amid allegations of prosecutorial misconduct and incompetent counsel.

This is a case with a series of strange twists: The sole surviving victim of the crime believes Tom Merrill got "railroaded" in his first trial. A prosecution witness tells Mr. Merrill's new lawyers he was asked to keep quiet about evidence that favored the Marine's innocence. The judge in the case who thought "justice was done" overturns Mr. Merrill's conviction and grants him a new trial. Every twist only strengthened Sara Merrill's resolve.

"He was -- still is -- the first thing I think about when I wake and the last thing I think about when I fall asleep at night," the mother says. "What you learn when you deal with my mother is soft doesn't mean weak . . . " says the son. "If I had to fight this by myself from the inside, I don't know where I'd be."

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The last three years of Tom Merrill's life are chronicled in thousands of court documents that fill cardboard boxes and laundry baskets in his mother's house, a yellow colonial tucked on a hillside deep in the Monkton woods. Mrs. Merrill and her husband George, a psychiatrist and Episcopal minister, had retired to the country "for some peace and quiet" when they received a call from California in November 1990.

Their son Tom had been charged with the murders March 14, 1989, of two people at a precious metals dealership in Newport Beach. It was a robbery gone awry -- a crime to which Tom's roommate and fellow Marine, Eric Wick, had confessed and was awaiting trial.

Foggy, except for his innocence

By the time he was charged -- 18 months after the crime -- Mr. Merrill struggled to recall his whereabouts that day. He knew he was on duty the morning of the crime but could not detail his whereabouts that afternoon. What he was certain of was that he had committed no crime.

The shootings occurred at the Newport Beach Coin Exchange in a placid suburban shopping area several miles from the Tustin Marine base where Tom and Eric were stationed. When police arrived shortly after 5:30 p.m., they found the store's owner, William D. King, shot four times but alive.

Mr. King's wife, Renee, and his best friend, Clyde Oatts, were dead inside the store. Three witnesses who had come upon the robbery told police they had seen a man -- through the store's plate glass windows -- holding a shotgun before they heard shots ring out.

A police officer questioned Mr. King, while he waited for an ambulance. Bleeding profusely from the head, Mr. King gave "labored" answers: there were two suspects, one white and one black. When a detective asked Mr. King if he knew who shot him, he said "no." While en route to the hospital, Mr. King was questioned again by a police officer. He knew he had been shot. He thought he was dying. As the ambulance pulled into the hospital, Mr. King mentioned the name "Tom."

"Who is Tom?" the police officer asked. Mr. King didn't reply. When questioned again, Mr. King answered, "Tom shot me." Asked if he was black or white, Mr. King replied, "black."

Meanwhile, police collected several pieces of evidence from the store that eventually led them to Eric Wick, the fair-skinned, 22-year-old son of an FBI agent. They found a receipt for $45,000 worth of Australian coins in the name of "Eric Watt" and with the telephone number of a Tustin Marine barracks on it. A tire warranty in the name of Mr. Wick's father was found on the counter. Fingerprints and a palm print in the store matched those of Eric Wick.

Murder weapon found

Three months after the robbery, in June 1989, Naval investigators arrested Mr. Wick at his parents' home in Reno, Nev. The murder weapon, a 9mm Sig Sauer pistol, was found in Mr. Wick's Chevy Nova.

Also recovered from the car were three Australian platinum coins and several other guns. In his confession, Mr. Wick told police he committed the crime alone but "didn't plan on killing anyone," according to court records. He said he "did the shooting" because the store owner, Mr. King, "pulled a shotgun out and I had to defend myself," the records show.

Mr. King, the sole survivor of the crime, identified Mr. Wick as the Marine who ordered the coins from his shop under the name "Eric Watt," as the man who was in the store on the day of the robbery and, he believed, the person who shot him.

For 18 months, Mr. Wick was the only suspect in the case. During that time, Tom Merrill believed his close friend wasn't capable of committing such a crime.

In the summer of 1990, police arrested a second Marine, John Brady, a friend of both Eric and Tom. Mr. Brady was charged as an accessory to the murder after admitting he had helped move four guns owned by Eric from the Marine base to a storage locker rented by Eric and Tom. He told police that Eric had said he committed the robbery with a friend from Reno.

Mr. Brady was granted immunity to testify in the trial.

Then, in November 1990, police arrested Mr. Merrill. Until then, the Baltimore native's only brush with the law had been an illegal left-hand turn. He and his family were shocked. The evidence against him seemed to be circumstantial at best:

When questioned by Naval investigators some months before, Mr. Merrill had volunteered that he helped Eric move the 9mm pistol and other weapons to an off-base storage locker they shared.

A box of bullets for a 9mm pistol had been found in Mr. Merrill's car. One of the witnesses who had walked past the coin exchange during the robbery placed Mr. Merrill at the scene, but his identification was inconsistent.

Mr. Brady, the other arrested Marine, told police he, Mr. Wick and Mr. Merrill had talked about committing robberies, but could not say what, if anything, Mr. Merrill had said and described the conversations as "joking."

"Once I became absolutely convinced that Tom was absolutely innocent, I was so incensed," says Mrs. Merrill, a Welsh-born nurse whose voice still carries the lilt of her native country. "We were certain no jury would find Tom guilty."

But from the start of the trial, the prosecutor and Mr. Wick's attorney identified Mr. Merrill as the shooter. They hammered away at Tom's protestations of innocence and characterized the former college crew captain as the mastermind of the crime who dominated a younger Wick.

A slick and deft trial attorney, prosecutor Jeoffrey L. Robinson wove the disparate, circumstantial pieces of evidence against Mr. Merrill into a scenario of a well-planned robbery by two buddies who wanted no one left alive to identify them.

He tried to characterize Mr. Merrill as the killer by calling attention to his Marine rating as a sharpshooter, his martial arts skills and Mr. Merrill's Pakistani heritage. Tom -- adopted as a boy by the elder Mr. Merrill -- has an olive complexion and is darker-skinned than Eric Wick.

(Witnesses had described the two robbery suspects differently -- from a black man and a white man to a dark-skinned man and a light-skinned man.)

Relying on testimony that Mr. Wick was seen holding only a shotgun, Mr. Robinson maintained that Mr. Merrill had to have fired the murder weapon. He focused on Mr. King's statement that "Tom shot me" -- despite the store owner's testimony that he could not remember anything he said immediately after the shooting.

"We'll never know specifically what went on on March 14, but I believe . . . that the shooter in this case was Mr. Merrill and Mr. Wick had taken part in a robbery and was of lesser role than Mr. Merrill," Mr. Robinson said during a later court hearing.

But the first time Mr. King ever saw Tom Merrill was during the trial.

"Nothing more I wanted to do [than] say that he was there," says Mr. King, a cellular telephone salesman now living in Arizona. "I couldn't pick out Tom Merrill to save my life."

Despite Mr. Wick's confession, his lawyer, public defender Tim B. Severin, argued to the jury that Mr. Wick had been under Mr. Merrill's influence. He claimed Mr. Wick had even tried to stop the shootings. The lawyer relied on the testimony of two witnesses who contend they saw Mr. Wick, through the store's plate glass windows, holding a shotgun.

Mr. Merrill's court-appointed lawyer, Gary M. Pohlson, accused Mr. Wick's attorney of misleading the jury by giving the impression that Mr. Wick had implicated Mr. Merrill, when in fact Mr. Wick's confession did not do that.

Testifies in own defense

Unlike his co-defendant, Mr. Merrill testified in his own defense and stated under oath that he did not commit the crime. Even when prosecutors secretly taped a conversation between Mr. Merrill and Mr. Brady, he didn't incriminate himself.

But, a jury convicted both Mr. Merrill and Mr. Wick of the double murders and the attempted murder of Mr. King. Mr. Merrill, however, received the stiffer penalty -- life without parole. Mr. Wick received a life sentence with the prospect of being paroled some 30 years later. (Mr. Wick's lawyer would not permit him to be interviewed for this story.)

Mr. Merrill's lawyer implored the judge to give his client a new trial: "I don't think he is guilty and . . . I just know in my heart he didn't get a fair trial," Mr. Pohlson said.

The judge felt differently: "The court can't agree with you. . . . Justice was done."

For Sara Merrill, nothing was further from the truth. And she set out to prove it.

"This is a mother fighting for her son's life," said the Rev. Carl N. Edwards, the pastor of Glencoe Immanuel Episcopal Church, whose congregation has lent emotional support to Mrs. Merrill and shipped paperback books to her jailed son, an avid reader.

By her own admission, Sara Merrill was a conservative, a supporter of the death penalty, a believer in the criminal justice system. Until, that is, events in a suburban Orange County courtroom shattered her faith in that system and propelled her to action.

"I had enough sense to know that nobody is going to listen to a mother. So I had to have other people speak for me," says Mrs. Merrill, 56.

She was prepared intellectually and emotionally: Since Tom's arrest, she had immersed herself in her son's case, receiving copies of every court document. She read criminal justice tomes. Reared in wartime Wales, she sought out accounts of Holocaust survivors and drew strength from them.

Looking to church for help

The daughter of an activist church elder, Mrs. Merrill looked first to her church for help.

With a stack of court transcripts in her luggage, she flew to North Carolina to meet with an Episcopal priest who had fought to free inmates from death row.

The Rev. Jim Lewis helped her craft a strategy to "let the system know we were watching." Four Episcopal bishops -- including former Maryland Bishop A. Theodore Eastman -- wrote to California's top law enforcement officer, expressing concern that Tom did not get a fair trial.

On the legal front, she hired a Baltimore defense attorney to determine her son's chances of winning a new trial and recommend California lawyers to handle the appeal.

After reviewing the court record, lawyer Steven A. Allen felt strongly that if Tom Merrill had been tried separately from Mr. Wick he would have been acquitted of the charges.

"What happened to Tom Merrill, he was fighting two sets of prosecutors," Mr. Allen said.

With recommendations in hand, Mrs. Merrill interviewed several California attorneys to handle Tom's appeal.

She chose William J. Genego, a law professor and criminal defense attorney who favors khakis in his oceanside office, motorcycles on the weekends and a sharp, evocative style in his appellate briefs. The prosecutor's alleged misconduct in the case and repeated missteps by Tom's trial lawyer were the crux of the appeal.

Legal experts were hired at $250-an-hour to assess the competency of Mr. Merrill's lawyer in the first trial. Two neurologists were asked to comment on Mr. King's mental acuity following the shooting.

Bank records pulled

To try and pinpoint Mr. Merrill's whereabouts at the time of the robbery, bank records were pulled. They showed the young Marine had withdrawn $20 from an automatic teller machine at the Tustin Marine base at 5:01 p.m. that day, raising doubts as to whether he could have driven the four miles to the coin store and participated in the robbery before 5:30 p.m.

Mr. Genego, 44, needed a local Orange County attorney on the case. But John D. Barnett -- who successfully defended one of the police officers in the Rodney King beating -- first wanted to read the trial transcripts before he agreed to join the team.

"Ineffective assistance of counsel and prosecutorial misconduct are raised on almost every single appeal and most of the time they are without merit," said Mr. Barnett, a 46-year-old cigar-smoking lover of the law.

The court record proved otherwise. "The enormity of the violation of the judicial system was shocking," said Mr. Barnett.

The most shocking miscarriage of justice discovered by the two lawyers and Mrs. Merrill involved a witness for the prosecution named Finn Olsen, a commercial baker who was in the parking lot behind the coin exchange 15 minutes after the robbery. And they learned about it from an unlikely source: Bill King, the coin store owner who survived the shootings.

On the day of the robbery, Mr. Olsen saw two men acting suspiciously in the parking lot. He later described the men for police. But when the prosecutor's investigator showed Mr. Olsen a picture of Tom Merrill, the baker said he could not identify him.

"I told them [the prosecution] that I would not testify that I had seen Tom Merrill because it was not true," Mr. Olsen said in an affidavit in Mr. Merrill's appeal. "I also told them that if the two people I saw on March 14, 1989, were the two people who had committed the crime, then Tom Merrill was innocent because he was not one of the persons I had observed."

Mr. Olsen said the investigator and the prosecutor, Mr. Robinson, tried to persuade him differently. "But I refused to be persuaded," Mr. Olsen said in his affidavit. "Failing this, they requested I not volunteer this information."

Mr. Olsen agreed but insisted that if he was "asked [during the trial] if Tom Merrill was one of the persons I saw, I would tell the truth; he was not."

The question was never asked.

Tom Merrill's murder convictions were thrown out and a new trial granted because the prosecution didn't tell the defense about the entirety of Mr. Olsen's statement. Mr. Merrill's lawyers now are seeking a pre-trial hearing in an effort to get the charges against him dropped. When Bill Genego considers the well-fought victory, he credits Sara Merrill "as the person most responsible for us getting as far as we have."

"Just about every person I can imagine would not have fought as hard or with as much perseverance," he says.

For Sara Merrill, the impact of the past three years can be measured in ways, great and small. After Tom's arrest, she felt tethered to the telephone and arranged her day around the times her son would call. The most routine chore -- like fixing dinner -- painfully reminded her of his imprisonment.

To relieve the tension, she played Christian hymns "over and over" again on the living room piano or swam. She chain-smokes Marlboro Lights now.

Maintaining control

Throughout, she struggled to maintain self-control, seeking to emulate she says the stoicism of Jacqueline Kennedy following the assassination of her husband. But she's the first to admit that at times she gets "irritable."

If her view of the criminal justice system has radically changed, so has her sense of the people it imprisons. The same woman who has debated legal strategy with lawyers also has discussed the intricate beauty of a hornet's nest with an inmate.

"I started out being only interested in innocent people. Now I'm interested in all of them," says Mrs. Merrill, who visited her son in two California state prisons.

For Tom Merrill, the events of the past three years have been akin to drowning, that unmistakable feeling of helplessness.

Seated behind a plexiglass window in the Orange County Jail visitors' room, Mr. Merrill speaks quietly but deliberately. A weariness pervades his 6-foot frame, clothed in the baggy gold jumpsuit that inmates wear.

System 'has flushed me'

"The system has flushed me," says the brown-eyed, LTC bespectacled Mr. Merrill, an avid reader whose lawyers would not permit him to discuss the charges against him. "Everything that has pointed to my innocence has come from outside the system."

Now, he adds, "there's hope that the system is going to do what it's supposed to do."

The District Attorney's Office in Orange County is gearing up to retry Mr. Merrill. "I don't know of any facts that would change our position that this defendant was the actual slayer of the two individuals," said Rick King, the new prosecutor in the case. "We feel there is sufficient evidence to show a jury he is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt."

Soon, Sara Merrill will leave her gracious Monkton home and her frail 81-year-old husband to join her son in court. Hopefully, it will be her last trip to California.

"It's never going to be completely over for me," Mrs. Merrill says in her gentle, bird-like voice. "What about all the other faceless, nameless people in [prison] who don't have a mother with a big mouth and a checkbook? They're God's children just as much as Tommy is."