Student Changes Plea, Admits Killing Teacher, Youth

Robert Gregg Butler changed his plea to guilty on Tuesday in the slayings of a Pasadena high school teacher and a student in an unexpected plea-bargain that will result in the defendant receiving 27 years to life in state prison.

Butler, a 22-year-old, nationally ranked college track star who has twice pleaded innocent to the murders, changed his plea in exchange for the dismissal of special circumstances charges that could have led to the death penalty.

Formal sentencing in Pasadena Superior Court is scheduled for June 27.

The plea-bargain, a surprise to the prosecution and a shock to Butler’s family, came in the fifth day of jury selection in Butler’s trial.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Walt Lewis said Butler’s lawyer approached him Tuesday morning with an offer to settle the case before trial.

“I wasn’t expecting it,” the prosecutor said, “but I think it’s a fair deal for everyone.”

Philip Jefferson, Butler’s attorney, declined to comment Tuesday on why his client changed his plea. But Butler’s stepmother, Penny Holmes, expressed shock when asked, minutes before jury selection was to resume, if her stepson was going to change his plea.

“I don’t know anything about a plea-bargain,” she said. “I just talked to our attorney. He didn’t say anything about it.”

Butler pleaded guilty to the Dec. 12, 1985, shooting deaths of Robert E. Jones, 47, a popular and respected social sciences teacher at John Muir High School, and Ronald McClendon, 17, a junior varsity basketball player at the school. Their bodies were found in Jones’ home in the Hastings Ranch area of Pasadena.

Dressed in a sports jacket and dark slacks, Butler spoke in a barely audible voice as Lewis asked him if he understood the terms of the plea-bargain.

“Are you pleading guilty to the murder of Robert Jones because you did, in fact, murder Robert Jones?” Lewis asked.

After a long silence, Butler answered, softly, “Yes.”

A signed confession by Butler was introduced as evidence in his March 12 preliminary hearing in Municipal Court. Despite the confession, however, Butler pleaded innocent at that hearing and at his subsequent arraignment in Superior Court.

Police testified that Butler said he killed Jones because his former teacher had “stopped communicating” with him.

In his confession, Butler said he went to Jones’ home late on the night of Dec. 11 “to talk.” He said he entered the home through an unlocked back door and went to Jones’ bedroom, where the teacher was asleep. But when Jones, after awakening, said he was tired and wanted to go back to sleep, Butler told police that “it was more than I could stand,” Detective Donald Gallon testified.

He said Butler told him he went to the laundry room where Jones kept a loaded revolver in an ice bucket and returned to the bedroom, where he shot Jones once in the head and once in the body.

Butler then walked to the living room where McClendon was sleeping on the couch, and shot the youth twice, Gallon said.

Butler’s friends and relatives have steadfastly maintained his innocence, saying he is a gentle and shy young man, incapable of violence. Butler was a police science major at Azusa Pacific University and had applied to the Sheriff’s Academy.

Two former roommates testified in the preliminary hearing that Jones had told them that he was gay, though both denied ever having had a homosexual relationship with the teacher. Members of Butler’s and McClendon’s families said the teacher attempted to buy the affections of the young men by giving them cars, credit cards and money.

In the spring of 1985, Butler finished second in the nation in the National Assn. of Intercollegiate Athletics 110-meter high hurdle championship.