Dana Point Women Go to Court Monday : 2 Schoolteachers Agree to Plead Guilty in Bombings

Two Dana Point schoolteachers, facing 100 years in prison for hiring a band of mercenaries to firebomb cars, agreed Friday to plead guilty to two of the 10 federal charges filed against them.

Charlotte Ruth Wyckoff, 52, and Elizabeth Leta Hamilton, 39, are both scheduled to plead guilty Monday to one count of racketeering and one count of being an accessory to a firebombing, Assistant U.S. Attys. David W. Wiechert and Charles S. Stevens said Friday.

The pleas will be entered before U.S. District Judge Alicemarie H. Stotler. Both women have been held without bail since their arrest May 20.

By accepting the government’s plea bargain, the women, who operated a chain of private schools in Orange and San Bernardino counties, face maximum sentences of 20 years and up to $375,000 in fines.

“We believe that a 20-year possible period of incarceration will give the court sufficient flexibility to mete out any appropriate punishment with additional time for probation,” said Wiechert in an interview.

Three other defendants in the case are scheduled to go on trial Tuesday.

But the expected pleas will close at least one chapter in a story that has unfolded in the last 14 months with one bizarre revelation after another.

First, on Aug. 13, 1985, homemade firebombs concocted from soap, gasoline and flares blew two cars to smithereens in San Bernardino County. Nine months later, to the astonishment of their Dana Point neighbors, the two South Orange County women were arrested and charged in the case.

Federal prosecutors had more: they charged that the women had hired the owner and chief instructor of an Alabama mercenary training camp to intimidate six former employees who had complained to state officials about problems at the schools. The man, Franklin J. Camper, 39, was arrested and charged with masterminding the blasts.

“This is the stuff movies are made of,” said San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Detective Glen Pratt, who investigated the firebombings.

Testimony during a six-hour bail hearing last May as well as other statements and records on file in federal court portray Hamilton and Wyckoff as close friends who became deeply concerned about threats against their schools.

State records show that some teachers filed complaints about overcrowding, understaffing and inadequate food service in the schools. Three teachers who made similar complaints to Wyckoff and Hamilton were fired.

Wave of Vandalism

At the same time, beginning in late 1983, the pair’s five schools in San Bernardino County were hit by a wave of vandalism that has never been explained. Another incident, a February, 1984, arson at Wyckoff’s San Juan Capistrano school, didn’t result in charges either, but at the federal bail hearing in May, two Orange County sheriff’s deputies testified that they believed that the fire was deliberately set by Wyckoff and Hamilton.

Frustrated by the lack of progress local law enforcement officials were making in investigating the vandalism, Wyckoff and Hamilton hit on a solution while watching a cable television interview with Camper in July, 1985.

In late July, the women called Camper--described by Assistant U.S. Atty. Stevens as a man who “deals in death, destruction and intimidation”--and asked him to help investigate their problems.

“They knew that when they hired him, and they knew what would happen when he got out here,” Stevens said at the bail hearing.

Wyckoff, who also goes by the name Ruth, holds a lifetime California teaching credential issued in 1982 and a lifetime child development programs permit issued in 1977.

A friend said she became a teacher because her adopted son, Joey, 17, suffered from learning disabilities and his public school teachers told her there was nothing they could do for him. Joey was being trained by Camper and his associates to protect his mother and Hamilton at the time of their arrest, according to court testimony.

A native of Kansas, Wyckoff built up her business until by 1985 she owned seven private schools in San Juan Capistrano, Mission Viejo, Rancho Cucamonga, Alta Loma and Upland. She made a comfortable living and purchased a four-level home with an ocean view on Blue Lantern Street in Dana Point in 1983.

But, Wyckoff’s life began to change when Elizabeth Hamilton, who goes by her middle name Leta, came to work for her as a teacher around 1981, according to Wyckoff’s daughter, Shirley Wright. Hamilton pretended to be Charlotte’s daughter and called Charlotte “Ma,” according to several sheriff’s deputies who testified at the bail hearing.

Hamilton and Wyckoff declined to be interviewed. But their attorneys, law enforcement officials and others who know them painted a picture of two women who lived in fear for their lives and their livelihood:

- They were afraid their schools would be closed down if the complaints from former employees continued, according to Pratt, the San Bernardino County sheriff’s investigator.

- They were afraid of the vandalism and threatening and obscene telephone calls. Pratt spent weeks investigating reports of spray paint defacing walls, stolen chairs, broken windows and spent fire extinguishers. But no suspects were found. He said he even put a “trap” on the schools’ phones to record the origin of harassing phone calls, but none was ever recorded.

- Hamilton, a teacher and an administrator, didn’t have a valid teaching credential. Although the schools’ Yellow Pages ads referred to “credentialed teachers,” the state Department of Education said Hamilton didn’t have a valid California teaching credential. Hamilton applied for one, but information filed with the department regarding her alleged use of a fraudulent credential forced her application to be routed to the professional standards division. A spokeswoman for the division said Hamilton’s application is no longer being processed but declined to elaborate.

- And at least one of the teachers they fired thought the women were concerned that their close personal relationship might be used against them.

Began Buying Guns

By the summer of 1985, Wright testified, her mother and Hamilton began buying guns, which frightened Wright.

Hamilton “somehow brainwashed my mother or whatever into believing some of these really paranoid things,” Wright said. “If you do not get along with Leta, you will not be around,” Wright testified at her mother’s bail hearing. “I mean that’s just how the whole thing is, and everybody knows it. . . . Leta has a very close relationship with my mother.”

Steven Powelson, Wright’s former live-in boyfriend, testified at the women’s detention hearing that “they (Wyckoff and Hamilton) feared for their lives.”

Hamilton would sit behind the living room shutters with a loaded shotgun on her lap, Powelson said.

“If anyone comes looking for trouble, they are going to find it,” he quoted Hamilton as saying.

Wright, who lived with Wyckoff and Hamilton for several months last year, testified that her mother instructed her to write Frank Camper’s secret phone number in indelible ink on all her bras so she could reach him in an emergency.

‘Dangerous and Very Scary’

Finally, in April, 1986, Wright decided to resign from her $6-an-hour-job at her mother’s schools.

At the bail hearing, Wright read in court from her resignation letter:

“Your life is too dangerous and very scary,” Wright wrote her mother. She said her son “needs to go to school with no fear of being hit or thrown against the wall. If by chance, your life does calm down and you don’t have Rambo people around or druggies after you, maybe something could be worked out. But for now, I can’t worry about you or your business.”

Eight months earlier, in mid-August of 1985, a delegation from Camper’s survival and mercenary school in Hueytown, Ala., had arrived in California to begin their research, according to the government’s indictment. It included Camper, his girlfriend, Lee Ann Faulk, 27, and three teachers from the training camp, Paul Johnson, 42, James Larosa Cuneo, 22, and William Dean Hedgcorth, 23.

Posing as an attorney’s investigator, Camper collected home addresses and other information about six former employees. He put together a booklet of pictures of the employees and their children, according to the government’s trial memo.

After careful planning and a few trial runs, according to an affidavit filed in federal court, the firebombings took place on Aug. 13, two days after the mercenaries spent the day at Disneyland. The women allegedly paid Camper’s expenses and several thousand dollars in cash. They paid his associates $1,000 each, the indictment said.

Not Satisfaction

“We are not denying she (Leta) and Charlotte brought them out to investigate these people,” said James M. Epstein, Hamilton’s attorney. “They weren’t getting satisfaction from law enforcement authorities here and were hoping to turn up evidence to get them off their butts.”

The targets were all former teachers, the indictment alleges.

Robyn Rishoff, whose 1979 Mercury was destroyed, was fired by Wyckoff on June 10, three days after a state Department of Social Services evaluator arrived for an inspection of the San Bernardino County school where she worked.

Six months earlier, Wyckoff had fired Rishoff’s husband, David. On Aug. 13, the Rishoffs found a note taped to a wooden stake near their blown up car: “Pay your bills or next time it will be you.”

They told investigators that their only known enemies were Charlotte Wyckoff and Leta Hamilton, according to Detective Pratt.

Also on Aug. 13, in a pre-dawn attack, Harriet Russo, of Ontario, lost her 1976 Honda to a firebomb. Russo had been fired in June, 1985, allegedly after she complained to Wyckoff about conditions at the schools, court records show.

Victoria Winburn, another employee, had been fired in December, 1984, allegedly after spreading rumors about the close personal relationship between Hamilton and Wyckoff, according to court records.

The mercenaries planned to firebomb Winburn’s house but aborted the mission when they saw a patrol car cruising her Upland neighborhood, according to an affidavit filed by an investigating agent of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Wyckoff and Hamilton told Camper that the former employees were involved in a “drug ring,” but investigators said they could never substantiate their allegations, according to court records.

Camper, who has pleaded not guilty to the charges, is due to be tried along with Faulk and Hedgcorth, both of whom are from Birmingham. Johnson and Cuneo have pleaded guilty to the charges and are awaiting sentencing.

Today, Wyckoff’s and Hamilton’s spacious, Spanish-style house in Dana Point provides a roost for scores of nesting pigeons. The rooms are empty, the yard overgrown and the backyard Jacuzzi silent.

While they await sentencing, the pair share a cell at the Sybil Brand Institute for Women in East Los Angeles. They are described by jailers as model prisoners.