Baby Killer’s New Penalty Hearing Begins

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 two other alleged victims testify Monday about how he molested them as children.

Ventura County Deputy Dist. Atty. Thomas J. Hutchins told jurors he would prove that Frank molested eight other children between 1968 and 1978, two of them after he murdered 2-year-old 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 were 11 years old at the time of the incidents, which occurred in 1968 in Kingman, Ariz., they testified.

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

The 1979 death penalty verdict against Frank, 51, in the Seitz killing was thrown out by the state Supreme Court in June, 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.

The Seitz child 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 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.

Death Penalty Urged

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.”

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 the Seitz child, 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 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 grips used to torture the girl.