Killer of Girl Faces Death as Third Penalty Trial Opens Today

Two weeks after starting seventh grade at Lake Elsinore Junior High School, best friends Vanessa Iberri and Kelly Cartier went on a two-night camping trip with Vanessa’s mother and boyfriend in the Cleveland National Forest.

They arrived at Blue Jay Campground five miles northwest of El Cariso on the Ortega Highway on a Friday night in 1981. On Saturday, the two girls, both 12, went looking for a spot for a picnic. Like Hansel and Gretel, they ran ahead, leaving a trail of paper scraps on a lonely dirt road so the adults could follow.

But instead of a picnic site, they found Thomas Francis Edwards, a gun expert who was driving his red and white pickup truck down the trail in the opposite direction. Moments later, Edwards turned the camper around, passed the pair, stopped the truck, called out “Hey, girls,” and shot them both in the head.

Edwards, now 43, was convicted in March, 1983, of first-degree murder in Vanessa’s death and of attempted murder for injuring Kelly. Now, as the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 19, 1981, attack nears, Edwards faces the gas chamber in his third penalty trial scheduled to begin today in Orange County Superior Court.

At the time of the shooting, Edwards was living out of his camper and working as a range officer at the South Coast Gun Club in Irvine. He was highly upset during the weeks before the shooting because his wife had left him, according to testimony at his first trial in 1982.

Although jurors at the first trial found him guilty, they could not agree to give him the death penalty, which led to a second penalty trial with a new jury. At the second trial, Edwards refused to let any attorneys represent him and presented no defense of his own. That jury gave him the death penalty.

Before sentencing, however, Edwards asked Orange County Superior Court Judge James F. Judge to reinstate attorneys from the public defender’s office to his case.

His reappointed counsel immediately attacked the testimony of Charlotte Tibjlas, Edwards’ ex-girlfriend. During the second penalty trial, Tibjlas testified that Edwards, from his jail cell, tried to get her to help him in plans to murder his former wife and former mother-in-law.

Deputy Public Defender Michael P. Giannini was successful in keeping Tibjlas off the witness stand at the first trial. With no one to object at the second trial, Judge permitted Deputy Dist. Atty. John D. Conley to call her as a witness. Both attorneys said Tibjlas has been banned from the upcoming proceeding.

“We had a hearing on her (Tibjlas) back in January,” Conley said. “The court determined that because of her mental state, she would not be competent as a witness.”

Before the second penalty phase, Edwards had asked the judge to impose the death penalty without the benefit of a trial. In published reports, Edwards said that he wanted to die, but Judge refused to render an automatic verdict of death.

“Thomas knows God forgives him, but he can’t forgive himself,” Shirley Pizzuto of Garden Grove, a close friend of Edwards, said at the time. “He thinks death is the only thing to set him free of his tremendous guilt.”

Giannini could not explain Edwards’ behavior except to say, “I think he just got worn down by the process, and the feelings of remorse and humiliation took over.”

Although Giannini refused to comment on whether Edwards admits to killing Iberri and seriously wounding Cartier, he said that the case “does not appear to be a whodunit.”

And he is pushing for a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole, which is the only other sentence possible beside the death penalty.

“One, the man is without violence (or) prior crimes,” Giannini said. “The second thing is that, except for the tremendously emotional side to the case--that the victims were two 12-year-old kids--this would never be a death penalty case.

“We unfortunately have a tremendous number of drive-by shootings in Santa Ana . . . just like this,” he said. “They are never prosecuted as death penalty cases.”

But the original jury in the guilt phase of Edwards’ first trial found him guilty of first-degree murder with the special circumstance of “lying in wait.”

Such a finding automatically gives jurors the option of sending the burly, balding man to the gas chamber.

Regardless of the finding of special circumstances, Giannini contends that Edwards did not ambush the girls as they searched for a picnic site in the Cleveland National Forest.

“It was not that he was hidden,” Giannini said, “he just took them by surprise. The D.A. can see that his truck was in plain sight all the time. It was a white-and-red sign, like a moving barber pole.”

Conley would only say, “I’m asking for death based on the aggravated nature of the case.”