Witnesses ask jury to spare killer’s life
A convicted killer who could be executed for the 1979 rape and murder of a Glendale woman grew up in an abusive household in a gang-infested Echo Park neighborhood, witnesses testified this week.
Defense attorneys called several witnesses to describe Darrell Gurule’s troubled upbringing to jurors who last week convicted him of murdering Barbara Ballman and are now considering whether he should be sentenced to death.
A neighbor who shared an Echo Park duplex with Gurule’s family in 1963 testified Wednesday that she heard screaming and crying, constantly, coming from upstairs.
“I saw bruises on the children, all four of them,” said Violet Martinez, referring to Gurule and his three brothers. “Bruises on the mom, her face.”
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The boys were always hungry, she said. Sometimes, when they came over, they headed straight to the refrigerator.
A social worker who handled the family’s case for two years in the 1970s would struggle to track down Gurule’s mother, who she testified was either gone from the home or sleeping off a drug or alcohol binge. She said she remembers getting calls that the kids weren’t showing up for school.
Gurule, sitting in court wearing a purple shirt and tie, wiped his eyes with a tissue as the woman described his family’s case as among the top 10 worst of her six-year career.
A 1973 newspaper article revealed that on Fourth of July that year, Glendale police found Gurule’s seven siblings — Gurule was in juvenile hall at the time — in a home alone, among rotting food, feces and overflowing toilets, according to Philip Peng, an alternate public defender representing Gurule. Gurule’s mother, who died in 1997, was on a date at the time.
Gurule’s brother Joseph Jr., the oldest of four boys and four girls, testified that he lost contact with his siblings after they were placed in different foster homes.
“He didn’t have a chance. He didn’t have a fighting chance,” Gurule’s maternal aunt Lita Hopkins told the jury after Peng asked what qualities she’d miss about her nephew if he were executed.
Before this week, she hadn’t seen Gurule in 50 years.
“Darrell Gurule is a good boy, a good man,” she said. “Had he had the opportunities, I believe that Darrell would’ve shown the world a lot of good.”
Gurule, who his brother said joined a gang in his youth with the moniker “Loco,” has a criminal history that stretches back to 1973, when, according to Glendale police, he was arrested for larceny and assault.
In 1977, at 17 years old, he pointed a shotgun at a woman who was leaving work in her car and forced his way into the driver’s seat.
After driving her somewhere, Gurule told her to take off her clothes and forced her to perform oral sex. She distracted him and escaped before Gurule drove off in her car. Los Angeles police later caught him driving the car, with the woman’s belongings in his pockets.
Five months after his release from a juvenile facility in 1979, children found Ballman’s body, lying naked on the front seat of her Volkswagen Beetle, across the street from Thomas Edison Elementary School in Glendale. She’d been raped and killed by a single shotgun wound to her abdomen.
Ballman’s case went cold for decades, until breakthroughs in DNA analysis led Glendale detectives to Gurule in 2004, according to Deputy District Atty. Jonathan Chung. By that time, he was serving a life sentence for kidnapping and fatally shooting a man in the back of his head in 1987.
In 2009, Glendale homicide detectives visited Gurule in prison, carrying photos of Ballman, along with shots of her crime scene. Gurule denied ever having met her.
During a cross-examination of Hopkins, Chung recounted Gurule’s violent criminal history and asked: Would you still say your nephew is a good man?
“The Darrell I knew was a good man,” she said.
He asked her when she last saw Gurule. Not since he was 6 or 7 years old, she said.
“The Darrell you knew when he was 6 or 7 was a good man?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” Hopkins replied.
A chaplain testified Thursday that in more recent years, Gurule taught Bible study to other inmates and attended her and her husband’s chapel services, where he sat behind her and protected her from other inmates.
“He follows the Lord. He’s helping other individuals,” Joseph Gurule Jr. testified a day earlier. Until this week, the pair hadn’t seen one another since 1987.
“I just ask you guys to please consider letting my brother live,” he said.
Testimony is slated to resume next week.
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Alene Tchekmedyian, alene.tchekmedyian@latimes.com
Twitter: @atchek
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