A former businessman accused of hiring hitmen to execute a lawyer in Rolling Hills Estates and a former employee in Whittier before moving to Montenegro was extradited back to the United States to face a pair of murder charges, authorities announced Monday.
Richard Harry Wall Sr., 73, is scheduled to appear in Los Angeles County Superior Court on July 1, where he will face two counts of murder and two counts of conspiracy to commit murder with special allegations, according to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office and court records.
Inmate records show he was booked into the Men’s Central Jail in Los Angeles County on Friday.
Wall is accused of being “the mastermind behind the execution-style slayings” of attorney Jeffrey Tidus, who was gunned down outside his Rolling Hills Estates home in 2009, and 35-year-old Juan Gabriel Mendez-Ramirez, who was shot and killed in front of his children at his Whittier apartment in 2011, prosecutors said.
Wall was also accused in a third murder in Las Vegas, prosecutors said.
He allegedly ordered the killing of Tidus after the attorney won a $1.7 million settlement against a close friend of Wall’s, prosecutors said. He allegedly ordered Mendez-Ramirez’s death after Mendez-Ramirez, a former employee of Wall, sued him because he wasn’t paid overtime for his work and was offered no breaks. A jury sided with Mendez-Ramirez, who was awarded $300,000.
But by the time Wall was identified as a suspect in the killings in 2017, he had moved into a $2 million home along the Adriatic Sea in Montenegro, a country that lacked an extradition treaty with the United States. In a phone interview with the Daily Breeze in January 2020, he denied committing the crimes or that he fled Whittier for Montenegro to avoid prosecution.
“I’m not guilty,” Wall said at the time. “The story that I’m hiding here from Interpol is just an attempt to make some sensational story about some cop as a hero blaming me for the death of some people I know. I don’t know where they got it from and why.”
He told a reporter at the time that he had sold his company and didn’t want to stay in California.
“We bought a house in Montenegro, and now we live here,” he said.
In the spring of 2017, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department announced a $100,000 reward for information leading to an arrest in the killing of attorney Jeffrey Tidus. Wall was later named as a suspect and in April 2025, the District Attorney’s Office filed charges, according to court records.
After Tidus’ slaying in 2009, Rolling Hills Estates wouldn’t have another murder until 2018, when Cherie Townsend stabbed to death 66-year-old Susan Leeds in the parking structure of the Promenade at the Peninsula during an attempted robbery. Townsend was convicted of the murder in late 2025 and was sentenced in February to 26 years to life in state prison.
Detectives believe Wall orchestrated Tidus’ Dec. 7, 2009, slaying outside his home on Sugarhill Drive. Tidus and his wife had just returned home at 8:30 p.m. that night from a fundraiser and he had gone back out to his car to get his laptop computer when he was ambushed. His wife, Sheryl, heard the gunshot and found her husband on the ground. Tidus died the next morning.
Tidus’ client list as an attorney included major banks, savings and loans, mortgage firms and automakers. Two years prior to his death, Tidus had won a major civil court verdict for his client, Jon Gunderson, in a business dispute with Wall for $2.5 million after jurors declared Wall’s business had engaged in fraudulent activity.
According to a criminal complaint filed by the District Attorney’s Office, Wall allegedly showed a photo of Tidus to an unnamed co-conspirator in order to have Tidus killed and paid the co-conspirator, who obtained a handgun and drove to the Tidus home and waited outside to kill him. The co-conspirator allegedly called Wall afterwards and told him Tidus was dead and that he had shot him one time in the back of the head.
In the criminal complaint, prosecutors alleged Wall had also provided a gunman a photo of Mendez-Ramirez as well as his address. The gunman knocked on Mendez-Ramirez’s front door on Feb. 26, 2011, and when Mendez-Ramirez opened the door, shot him in front of his two children. Mendez-Ramirez tried to run down a stairwell, but the gunman followed and continued to shoot. The gunman then allegedly left and called Wall to tell him the job was done.
When detectives, who had suspected Wall’s involvement in both shootings, served a search warrant on Wall’s business in the summer of 2017, they were told he was on vacation.
Wall and his wife purchased a home in the city of Kotor, a secluded coastal city of about 13,000 residents along the gulf of Kotor, on July 7, 2017, records show. They listed their Whittier home for sale on the same date and closed a $970,000 sale two months later on Sept. 5, 2017.
The home purchase in Montenegro occurred just days before investigators held a news conference to identify Wall as a suspect to the media.
Details of Walls extradition back to Los Angeles County were not immediately available.