Grim Testimony of Child’s Slaying Unfolds at Trial

Twelve-year-old Steven Frizzell remembers being jealous of little Robyn Jackson.

That was 2 1/2 years ago, Steven said, when 10-year-old Robyn was getting free Popsicles from the ice cream man who peddled treats in their Baldwin Park neighborhood. Robyn was even allowed inside the truck to pick out her favorite flavor--a privilege Steven said was denied the other children.

Today, Steven is alive and Robyn is dead. But Steven recalled his envy earlier this month when he took the stand in Pomona Superior Court to testify in the rape and murder trial of Robert Edward Stansbury, the ice cream man who could end up on Death Row if convicted in Robyn’s death.

The case is expected to enter its fourth week of testimony this week. So far, the trial has revolved around the temperature of the child’s body shortly after her death and the noise made by a creaky car door.

Stansbury, who is acting as his own chief defense counsel, said in court that he expects another four to six weeks of testimony before a jury begins to deliberate his fate.

Convicted Rapist

The prosecution contends that the 41-year-old convicted rapist used his role as an ice-cream truck driver--a job forbidden by law to sex offenders--to enter the neighborhood without suspicion, where he selected Robyn as his victim and spent weeks winning her confidence.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Burns said in his opening remarks that he will prove Stansbury smuggled the child from her neighborhood on Sept. 28, 1982, raped and beat her, hid her in the truck’s ice cream cooler and dumped her body in a Pasadena flood control channel in the early hours of the next morning.

The temperature of Robyn’s internal organs had dropped to 70 degrees when it was measured a few hours after her body was found. Burns said that with testimony from experts, he will prove that Stansbury stuffed the child into the ice cream compartment, kept at a temperature of about 40 degrees, while she was still alive. He said the child was living, though barely, when she was dumped in the channel.

“During the last moments of her conscious living,” Burns said, “she (Robyn) was, in fact, alone, in the worst sense of the phrase, alone.”

Doctor Tells Cause of Death

Dr. Sara Reddy, a medical examiner, testified that Robyn apparently died of the exposure to cold and a blow to her skull when it struck the concrete floor of the drainage ditch.

Despite stern advice against it from Judge James Piatt, who is hearing the case, self-acknowledged “jailhouse lawyer” Stansbury has insisted on acting as his own lead attorney. With the help of lawyer David Daugherty, who was appointed to assist him, the defendant told the jury that he will show that the prosecution’s case is based solely on circumstantial evidence.

“Not a single one of those witnesses that the prosecution will provide will even attempt to say that they saw me murder a young child,” Stansbury argued in his opening statement, “because they can’t.”

If Stansbury is wrong, it could cost him his life. If he is found guilty of murder by inflicting great bodily injury with “special circumstances”--that the death occurred during a kidnaping, rape or an act of lewd conduct with a child under age 14--Stansbury could be sentenced to death.

After hearing the prosecutor’s opening statement and before Stansbury made his own presentation to the jury, the judge warned the defendant: “If Mr. Burns can prove and presents all that evidence to the jury, you’re in big trouble.”

The judge added: “I’m not saying that you are incompetent. But, Mr. Stansbury, I really think you should give some very serious thought before you make any presentation to the jury.”

Stansbury, dressed in a neat brown suit and showing no trace of the woolly red beard he wore when he was arrested, spoke of his nervousness in his opening statement and said: “It has often been said, an attorney who represents himself has a fool for a client.” He also told the jury, “I’m not saying that I can totally prove my innocence.”

Attorneys and witnesses in the case have been under a gag order since January, when one was imposed by the judge after a motion by Stansbury. It has prevented information from being revealed to the public until it is brought out in open court.

Witnesses so far have included Robyn’s mother, Sharon Sanchez; forensics expert John Mosbrucker, an investigator for the Los Angeles County coroner’s office; Reddy, the doctor who examined Robyn’s body; a former cellmate of Stansbury; and Andrew Zimmerman, who found her body and reported it to the police.

Mosbrucker and Reddy testified that Robyn had been exposed to very low temperatures and deprived of oxygen before she died--the basis of the prosecution’s claim that the girl was placed in the ice cream compartment of Stansbury’s truck.

But much of the testimony to date has focused on temperature readings of Robyn’s liver, taken about 6:45 on the morning her body was found.

Burns and the two witnesses maintained that the human body’s “core” temperature, normally 99 degrees, was unusually low in Robyn at 70 degrees.

But Daugherty, Stansbury’s court-appointed assistant, questioned the validity of the results by citing a number of variables, including the air temperature when Robyn was dropped into the ditch. Witnesses have testified that the air temperature could not be accurately determined. (The Times’ temperature records for the period reveal that the low on Sept. 28 was 57 and the low on Sept. 29 was 58).

Trickle of Water

The witnesses said the reading could go as low as 77 degrees for a child of Robyn’s size when other factors are considered, such as the rivulet of water that trickled beneath Robyn’s body as she lay in the ditch. Although testimony has established that Robyn’s body was discovered almost immediately after it was dumped, it was kept at the scene during the early course of the investigation.

Zimmerman, who lived in Pasadena at the time, testified that he saw someone pull up in a sedan and drop Robyn’s body into the ditch early on the morning of Sept. 29 as he exercised his dogs at a nearby park.

“I didn’t know what it was,” Zimmerman told the jury. “I thought it was perhaps a pet or a mannequin. Something about it made me feel very uncomfortable. I had visions of horrible things.”

Burns led Zimmerman, who studied music at USC, through a complex description of a popping noise made by a door of the car and how the noise, along with a sketchy description of the car, helped him identify the same auto later as one Stansbury told police he had borrowed from a neighbor a few hours before the child was dumped into the channel.

Recognized the Noise

Zimmerman said that his training in analyzing sound enabled him to recognize the noise a year and a half later, when police opened and closed the car door for him.

Under cross-questioning by Daugherty, Zimmerman said that when he saw the car he had been uncertain of its make, model or even precise color; he was unable to identify its occupant as a man or woman, and said that information he gave police had apparently been exaggerated in police reports.

Zimmerman testified that he looked into the ditch, saw the body and ran for a telephone to summon police. Stansbury was arrested within days of the crime, after police interviewed witnesses and ran background checks.

After winning permission to act as his own attorney last July, Stansbury began priming himself with books from the law library at the County Jail.

At county expense, he ordered transcripts of numerous court cases from throughout the nation that he believed had some bearing on his case. He hired a staff of clerks to handle paperwork and a psychologist to aid in jury selection. He sent his two private investigators on almost daily assignments, interviewing witnesses, finding documents and even finding him a suit to wear to trial.

Lawyer Protested ‘Excess’

Despite mild protests against Stansbury’s “excess” from an attorney appointed earlier to assist him, Piatt authorized Stansbury to bill the public for the expenses to ensure that the legally inexperienced man could prepare an adequate defense.

But as the months dragged on, Stansbury repeatedly asked for trial delays. Piatt seemed to grow weary, eventually telling Stansbury that he was “playing games with the system.”

Since the trial began Feb. 25, Stansbury’s court presence has been less flamboyant but still distinctly individual.

He told Piatt on Feb. 28, the third day of the trial, that he was ill with a bad cough and asked to be excused. Piatt replied, somewhat sarcastically, that he had seen the defendant cough only once since he walked in that morning and denied the motion.

Wanted Coughs on Record

“Your honor,” Stansbury said, “I would at this time move that the court reporter record each and every time I cough throughout the proceedings.” That motion was also denied.

One motion Piatt granted, however, was that information about Stansbury’s criminal history be excluded from the trial.

References to portions of the nearly 20 years Stansbury has spent in state prisons are veiled in the presence of the jury, and one jailhouse witness, Donald Edward Mink, was described as having once “shared accommodations” with Stansbury. The accommodations were a jail cell.

Mink, who was in jail awaiting trial on theft charges when Stansbury was brought in, testified that Stansbury had told him he had picked up Robyn and had been wrongly accused of killing her; Stansbury later told police the girl had never entered his truck.

Served 14 Years in Prison

Stansbury has served 14 of the last 21 years in state prisons for sex crime convictions. He was convicted most recently in 1974 of raping a 21-year-old woman in Montclair and a 14-year-old girl in San Dimas. The girl was forced into a car at gunpoint and raped twice. The woman was raped five days later, also at gunpoint.

Police say Stansbury was paroled in October, 1981, and violated terms of the parole by taking the job as an ice cream vendor. Parole authorities have said he told them at the time that he was unemployed.

Stansbury is from Oklahoma, but has spent much of his life in California and was residing in Pomona when he was arrested on the murder charge. He is being held in Los Angeles County Jail without bond.