Jury Votes Death Sentence 2nd Time for Child Slayer

Convicted murderer and child molester Theodore Frank, whose case became a cause celebre in the successful effort to oust Rose Elizabeth Bird from the California Supreme Court, was given the death penalty Wednesday by an Orange County jury for the second time in the 1978 torture-murder of a 2-year-old Camarillo girl.

Frank, 51, was convicted in 1979 for the murder of Amy Sue Seitz and was sentenced to die in the gas chamber. However, in 1985, the state Supreme Court overturned the death verdict while upholding the conviction, forcing a new penalty trial. Former Chief Justice Bird voted to overturn Frank’s conviction as well as his death sentence.

The jury deliberated less than four hours before returning the death verdict Wednesday. Frank appeared calm as the verdict was read. Jury foreman Richard Edes of Mission Viejo said the jurors were never close to voting for the only other choice before them, life without parole.

“I feel good about it,” Ventura County Deputy Dist. Atty. Thomas J. Hutchins said of the verdict. “Not happy--good . . . it was the right penalty. The crime was so gruesome.”

Opponents of Bird’s Supreme Court confirmation in last November’s election used the Frank case as an example of how the Supreme Court was refusing to impose the death penalty. Amy’s grandmother, Patricia A. Linebaugh, 51, was so upset by the Supreme Court ruling that she started her own chapter of SLAM, a statewide group working against child molestation, in Thousand Oaks and went on the speakers’ circuit to campaign against Bird.

“You just can’t believe the relief that we feel,” Linebaugh said Wednesday.

Amy Seitz was abducted from a relative’s home in Camarillo on March 14, 1978, and was raped, forced to drink beer, tortured with locking pliers and strangled.

The Supreme Court ruled that Frank’s prison diaries were illegally seized during a police search of his Woodland Hills apartment. The majority of justices decided, however, that the evidence against him was too overwhelming to let the seizure of the diaries interfere with his conviction. But they ruled that the diaries were a significant factor during the penalty phase of his trial. Frank said in his diaries that he enjoyed torturing children.

The diaries were barred from introduction into evidence in the two-month penalty trial that ended Tuesday. The justices split, 4 to 2, in the decision to overturn Frank’s 1979 death sentence. Voting against the majority were Justice Otto M. Kaus and then-Justice Joseph R. Grodin, who also was ousted from the court in the November election.

After the jury’s verdict was read Wednesday, Superior Court Judge John J. Ryan set formal sentencing for Feb. 11. While Ryan has the authority to reduce Frank’s verdict to life without parole, no Orange County judge has done so since California’s new death penalty law was enacted in 1978.

Though the crime occurred in Ventura County, Frank’s first trial was held in Orange County on a change of venue. Under state law, the second trial also had to be held in Orange County. It also took the jury in 1979 less than four hours to return a death verdict.

Prosecutor Hutchins said after court Wednesday that he thought the first verdict had been vindicated by the second verdict.

The reading of the verdict at Frank’s first trial was interrupted by shouts of glee from an uncle of the victim. The verdict Wednesday came during the noon hour, and few people were in the courtroom.

The person who seemed the most disappointed was Willard P. Wiksell, the Ventura attorney who represented Frank at both trials.

“I put as much effort as possible to show he was mentally ill,” Wiksell said. “I think the jury realized he was not faking the mental illness. But they felt, ‘So what--that does not balance out what he did.’ ”

Wiksell said that Frank was “scared” by the verdict and added that his client does not believe that there is much chance he will win another reversal. In fact, the lawyer said, Frank believes that he received a “good trial.”

Under state law, every death sentence is automatically appealed to the Supreme Court.

Court records show that Frank has been a child molester most of his adult life. Hutchins brought in evidence of six other incidents of Frank molesting or assaulting children between the ages of 4 and 11. Four of the six testified in court, and transcripts of the testimony of two others from Frank’s first trial were read to jurors.

Frank was convicted in three of those cases. Two others were dismissed in a plea-bargain, and the sixth one was not pursued by authorities in Missouri, where the incident took place.

Frank was sent to Atascadero State Hospital in 1974. He was released in 1978, six weeks before the Seitz murder.

While Ventura County authorities were still searching for the girl’s killer, Frank assaulted two other young girls--torturing one of them. He admitted those crimes after his arrest in July, 1978. But he continues to deny that he killed Amy Sue Seitz.

Jury foreman Edes said the most difficult task the jurors faced was reviewing the pictures of the victims who had been battered.

“That is not something I would ever want to do again,” he said.