The State - News from Jan. 27, 1985

A San Jose man accused of arranging the murder of a witness against him in a Santa Clara computer chip theft will serve a prison sentence of three years or less in that case as a result of a plea bargain. Larry Lowery, 38, pleaded no contest to a charge of being an accessory to the murder of Dennis Roberts, 29, a former electronics salesman whose body was found in a remote San Mateo County area in 1981. Authorities allowed Lowery to plead to the reduced charge because they were concerned about the credibility of the chief prosecution witness, according to San Mateo County Assistant Dist. Atty. Tom Stevens. “The plea bargain was the best we were going to do,” he said. Lowery still faces trial in Santa Clara County for the theft of $3.5 million in computer chips from Monolithic Memories of Sunnyvale--the largest such theft in Silicon Valley history.