Jury Votes to Spare Life of Killer of 4 Women

A shipping clerk convicted of murdering four elderly women between 1981 and 1983 and suspected in as many as eight similar slayings should be spared the death penalty and sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury recommended Friday.

The same jury that on July 25 found Brandon Tholmer, 29, guilty of the four murders after two weeks of deliberations took only about an hour to decide that he should not go to the gas chamber.

Juror Robert Novak, 45, of the Wilshire District said the panel was heavily influenced by testimony about Tholmer’s upbringing.

“He was just kind of isolated,” said Novak, who works for an insurance company. “We thought there was nobody who took any interest in him. He had suffered most of his life.”

Broken Home

Co-defense counsel William D. Weiss, a deputy public defender, said he had emphasized to the jury during the two-day penalty trial that Tholmer, a native of Louisiana, came from a broken home and as a “a young boy of 8, was out walking the streets at night.”

At age 11, Weiss said, Tholmer was sent to a juvenile detention center in New Orleans by his mother. Less than a year later, Tholmer, who is black, was sent to a segregated state industrial school in Baton Rouge for stealing a newspaper and loitering, according to court testimony.

Deputy Public Defender Kathleen B. Cannon said Tholmer, classified as “borderline retarded,” was still in first grade at age 11.

“That was the way they handled his slow-learning problem,” she explained.

Jurors also said they gave weight to testimony from George Mercer, a brother of Mary Pauquette, 72, who was beaten to death by Tholmer in September, 1983.

Mercer urged the jury to recommend a prison term, saying his sister would not have wanted Tholmer to be executed.

No Verdict

Tholmer was also convicted of murdering Rose Lederman, 80; Wolloomooloo Woodcock, 69, and Dorothy Fain, 70. All lived in the East Hollywood-Silver Lake area. Jurors were unable to reach a verdict on whether Tholmer murdered Lorraine H. Wells.

However, the jury found that Tholmer, a previously convicted mentally disordered sex offender, who had been released from Patton State Hospital in 1979, committed rape, sodomy, arson and burglary in the course of the murders for which he was convicted.

Judge Clarence A. Stromwall scheduled sentencing for Sept. 8.

Tholmer remains a suspect in seven other cases, according to Deputy Dist. Atty. Lance Ito, who prosecuted him.

Ito said he was disappointed and surprised by Friday’s decision, which he described as “one of the quickest verdicts I’ve ever heard of.”

Cannon said she was cheered by the brevity of the deliberations.

“The fact that they chose life, and did it so quickly, gives me some sense of hope that we’re not on a treadmill toward the gas chamber,” the defense attorney said.