SANTA ANA – The five women who had served as jurors on a Newport Beach murder trial were led into the courtroom, one by one on Thursday, so the judge could ask them some unusual questions.

“Did you visit any type of beauty salon during the trial, around Mother’s Day?” Orange County Superior Court Judge Gregg Prickett wanted to know.

The judge had removed his robe and sat in a chair near the jury box, so the women wouldn’t feel like they were being interrogated.

“Do you do your nails yourself?” he asked. “I apologize for asking this, how old are you?”

In his third trial for the same crime, former death ow inmate James Andrew Melton was convicted in May of first-degree murder for the 1981 killing of Anthony DeSousa in Newport Beach.

Melton, 65, was supposed to be sentenced to life in prison without parole this month, but his case has now hit a snag. It was revealed that an alternate juror may have talked about the murder case to a manicurist at a Fountain Valley nail salon while the trial was underway, court documents show.

Anna Saloky, a clerk at the West Justice Center, said she just happened to be sitting nearby and overhead the conversation. Saloky said the juror told the manicurist she had “talked to her husband about the case, but that he did not want to discuss it with her,” as the court documents put it.

Saloky told her supervising judge, Richard Lee, who passed along to Prickett the scenario that might have been juror misconduct.

If it is determined that juror misconduct did occur, it is possible another trial would play out.

Melton’s defense attorney, Associate Defender Denise Gragg, is now investigating whether his case may have been compromised.

On Thursday, Saloky was called into the courtroom along with the five female jurors.

The former jurors were separately asked a series of questions, including whether they had visited a beauty salon during the trial. While some had been to salons, all five said they had not visited the Fountain Valley one.

A sixth juror was weeded out, because she is a 70-year-old widow. The clerk has said the talkative juror was in her late 50’s or 60’s.

Saloky quietly identified one juror as the woman she had seen in the salon. But that woman maintained that she lives and works in South County and did not visit any Fountain Valley salons.

Senior Deputy District Attorney Steve McGreevy said the court clerk’s description doesn’t match any of the jurors. The woman Saloky described is in a different age range and had a different hair color, he noted.

“The prosecution has always maintained that Mr. Melton received a fair trial and conviction,” he said.

The judge gave Gragg more time to investigate and ordered Melton to return to court on Nov. 17 for further proceedings.

Melton was originally sentenced to Death Row in 1982, but his conviction was overturned after a federal judge in 2007 ruled that medical staff at the Orange County Jail gave him psychiatric drugs for mental-health issues that impaired his ability to understand his trial.

Prosecutors then chose not to pursue the death penalty, with his second trial, in 2014, ending in a mistrial when the jury deadlocked 10-2 in favor of conviction. Then there was the May conviction.

Melton has been behind bars since 1981.

Prosecutors have accused Melton of plotting to meet rich, older men through ads in gay magazines to rob them in their homes. He met DeSousa through an ad, prosecutors said, and then robbed and strangled him in his Newport Beach condo.

He was later arrested with several of DeSousa’s belongings, including his car.

The defense has argued that a key witness in the case lacked credibility, and that Melton’s DNA was never found at the crime scene.