Frank Jurors Hear About Molestations

An Orange County jury that must decide whether to return Theodore Frank to Death Row for the 1978 torture and murder of a 2-year-old Camarillo girl heard other victims testify Monday about how he molested them as children 18 years ago.

Ventura County Deputy Dist. Atty. Thomas J. Hutchins told jurors that he would prove Frank molested eight other children between 1968 and 1978, two of them after he murdered Amy Sue Seitz. Two of the eight testified Monday as the presentation of evidence got under way after two months of jury selection. Both of Monday’s witnesses, now young women, were 11 at the time of the incidents in 1968 in Kingman, Ariz.

“I was scared,” one of them said. “I asked him why he was doing this to me. . . . He didn’t respond.”

Verdict Thrown Out

The 1979 death penalty verdict against Frank, 51, in the Seitz killing was thrown out by the state Supreme Court in June of 1985, and a new penalty trial was ordered. The court found that the jurors should not have been told of Frank’s prison diaries--in which he admitted he liked to torture children--because police had illegally seized them from his Woodland Hills apartment.

Amy Sue Seitz was abducted in Ventura County, but Frank was tried in Orange County after a change of venue. The retrial of his penalty phase is being conducted before Orange County Superior Court Judge John J. Ryan. Jurors must choose between a death verdict or life in prison without parole.

The Frank case was singled out by prosecutors statewide in the successful effort to oust California Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird from the state Supreme Court. Bird did not write the majority opinion in the Frank case, but she was the only justice to support reversal of both his death verdict and his first-degree murder conviction.

Bird argued that, in addition to the diaries not being covered in the search warrant, using them was an invasion of privacy. The diaries, she wrote in a separate opinion,”. . . concern (his) struggle to understand the motivations behind the crimes he had committed and were used as an aid to his psychiatric treatment.”

Frank had written those diaries while at Atascadero State Hospital, where he was imprisoned from 1974 to 1978. He was released just six weeks before the March 14, 1978, Seitz murder.

Without the diaries, prosecutor Hutchins is relying primarily on testimony from victims who claim Frank molested them. Seven of the eight are expected to testify.

Hutchins told jurors Monday that, after hearing about the eight and the details of the Seitz murder, they should find that “the only appropriate penalty is the death penalty.”

History of Mental Problems

Frank’s attorney, Willard P. Wiksell of Ventura, reserved his opening statement for later. The defense is expected to rely on Frank’s long history of mental problems.

Charges were filed against Frank in some of the eight alleged molestations on which Hutchins is relying, and he avoided prosecution on the others through plea-bargains.

Frank has denied killing Amy Sue Seitz, who was abducted from her aunt’s Camarillo home, not far from Camarillo State Hospital, shortly after Frank dropped off his wife at work.

The girl’s body was found two days later in the Topanga Canyon area of northern Los Angeles County. She had been raped and tortured with pliers before she was strangled. She had also been forced to drink beer.

During his opening statement Monday, Hutchins held up the vise-grip pliers found in Frank’s apartment, which medical experts say were the same vise-grips used to torture the girl.

Hutchins told jurors that one other Frank victim had been similarly tortured but had not been killed. Most of the eight, he said, were lured to Frank’s car by his promise of candy or by questions he asked them.

Lost Her Bicycle

The first victim to testify said that she had lost her bicycle at a store and that Frank had driven up in his car and told her that he knew where it was. When she got into his car, he took her to a vacant building and attacked her and ripped her clothes, then left, she said.

The second victim, attacked the same day, told jurors a man with a pipe walked into her house when she was home alone and molested her, then left. She could not identify Frank in court, but she identified him in a photo lineup at the time of the incident.

Frank lived in the St. Louis area at the time, and several of the eight are from that area.

Frank, dressed in a light-colored suit, leaned back in his chair and listened intently to prosecutor Hutchins’ opening statement to jurors. A thin man with silver hair and beard, he has been in isolation in the Orange County Jail since his return from San Quentin.