Week in Review : MAJOR EVENTS, IMAGES AND PEOPLE IN ORANGE COUNTY NEWS : COURTS : Sellers Sentenced to Life for Brutal Irvine Murder

It took a jury in Santa Ana only three hours to decide that Robert L. Sellers, convicted of the murder of an Irvine woman, should be sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole rather than to die in the gas chamber.

“The crime itself is so horrible it cannot be mitigated,” argued prosecutor Richard M. King, but the jury sided with defense attorney Jennifer L. Keller, who said, “The death penalty should be reserved for people who really have no redeeming value as human beings. That’s not who my client is.”

Sellers was convicted of beating and strangling a 22-year-old woman in her Irvine apartment seven years ago. At the time, he was a Marine stationed at Camp Pendleton but also worked as a security guard at the apartment complex where the victim lived.

Sellers had confessed to police that he had slipped through the apartment’s bedroom window and waited for the woman, Savannah Leigh Anderson, to finish talking on the phone. He then raped her, beat her, strangled her and returned two hours later to rape the corpse, the prosecution said.

Five years passed before police matched Sellers’ fingerprints with some found in the apartment, and jurors said their sentence was influenced by Sellers’ life during that period. In those five year, Sellers was honorably discharged from the Marine Corps, was married, started a family and held a full-time job.

“He really was a very decent human being, and he did not deserve to die,” Keller said.