Edwards Sentenced to Death for Murder of Girl, 12, in Forest

Thomas Francis Edwards, convicted of the 1981 murder of a 12-year-old girl in the Cleveland National Forest, was sentenced Thursday to die in the gas chamber.

By imposing the death penalty, Orange County Superior Court Judge James F. Judge upheld the verdict returned in October by a jury. Defense attorneys had sought to have the jury’s verdict set aside and for Edwards, 43, to be sentenced to life imprisonment.

The question of whether Edwards should have been sentenced to death was argued three times in trial since his murder conviction in 1983. The first two penalty-phase trials resulted in mistrials.

“I think he’s one of the most dangerous people I’ve ever had to deal with, probably the most dangerous in 15 years as a prosecutor,” Deputy Dist. Atty. John B. Conley said Thursday.

Joseph Iberri, father of the slain girl, said after the sentencing that he was glad that California Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird had been voted out of the Supreme Court so that “finally we may see people put to death” after such sentences are imposed.

“An eye for an eye,” Iberri said. “We can’t rehabilitate these people. It just doesn’t work.

“He’s been in jail,” Iberri said of Edwards. “He’s institutionalized. Being in jail is like being home, as far as I’m concerned. That’s no torture.”

Edwards was convicted of shooting to death 12-year-old Vanessa Iberri on Sept. 19, 1981, with a single blast between the eyes and of wounding her best friend, Kelly Cartier, also 12, with another shot to the head. The girls were on a two-night camping trip with Vanessa’s mother and her mother’s boyfriend at Blue Jay Campground, five miles northwest of the Ortega Highway.

Edwards had driven past the two girls on a narrow dirt road, then waited for them to pass his parked truck, Judge said. As the girls passed, Edwards called out to them, and when they turned to look at him, he fired twice, striking each in the head, Judge said.

He said the special circumstance of “lying in wait,” which is required for the death penalty, was present in the case because Edwards had “a secret plan to take them (the girls) by surprise.”

“It was an intended execution,” Judge said. “The appropriate penalty in this case is death.”

Deputy Public Defender Michael P. Giannini said the case will be automatically appealed, as are all capital cases.

Though a jury sentenced Edwards to death, law provides that a judge may reverse that finding. During testimony before Judge this week, psychiatrists called by the defense said that they could not explain why Edwards shot the girls.

But Martin Salisbury, director of education at Patuxent Institution, a state correctional facility in Maryland, testified that Edwards had been confined there 14 years because he was “a sociopath, too dangerous to release,” prosecutor Conley said. Edwards originally had been sentenced to Patuxent for three years for conspiracy to commit robbery, Conley said.

Authorities were forced to release Edwards and others at the facility in 1977 after a change in Maryland law prohibited the indefinite confinement of prisoners who had been deemed “too dangerous to release,” Conley said.

Edwards’ confinement at Patuxent was not brought out during his murder trial, Conley said. But Salisbury testified earlier this week that while in custody at Patuxent, Edwards was a model prisoner and had harmed no one.

Giannini maintained that Edwards had been distraught over the failure of his four-year marriage, that the crimes were an “absolute aberration” of his behavior and that he had been subjected to “more stress than he could handle.”

But Conley characterized Edwards as a deliberate killer.

Edwards was convicted of murder and attempted murder in 1983. But jurors could not agree on whether to impose the death penalty, which led to a second penalty trial and a new jury.

At the second trial, Edwards fired his public defender but presented no defense. That jury gave him the death penalty in June, 1985. But before sentencing, Edwards asked to have attorneys from the public defender’s office reinstated to his case.

Giannini was appointed and won Edwards a new penalty trial, his third. After two weeks of trial and three days of deliberation, a jury decided in October that Edwards should die for Vanessa Iberri’s murder.

This week, Judge heard testimony that Edwards has a “women’s hair fetish” and is “basically a sexual sadist and seems to enjoy inflicting pain,” Conley said.

Conley said that during Edwards’ marriage, the only way he could be sexually aroused was to pretend to tie up his wife, “then pretend to cut her throat and watch her bleed . . . (while she) pretended to beg for her life,” Conley said.

When Edwards was booked at Orange County Jail, written notes were taken from him in which he allegedly wrote: “There’s a lot of good to some pain,” Conley said.

He added: “Edwards has deep, deep, deep problems.”