Grandmother Unconvinced That Girl’s Killer Will Pay

Patti Linebaugh hopes to watch as Theodore Frank dies in the gas chamber, but she fears neither of them will live long enough for execution day to dawn.

It was Linebaugh’s anger over Frank’s torture-murder of her 2-year-old granddaughter, Amy Sue Seitz, that moved her to play a prominent role in the campaign that unseated California Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird and two other state Supreme Court justices.

Linebaugh, who lives in Camarillo, says she is grateful to the voters and heartened by the prospect of changes on the high court and by imposition of a new death sentence on Frank this week. But, she said Friday, she is also so discouraged by delays in the criminal justice system that she fears the 51-year-old Frank could escape execution. Sometimes, she said, “I think he will die of natural causes in prison.”

Learned the System

“One thing I’ve gained over nine years is a lot of knowledge of our judicial system,” she said.

The death penalty imposed on Frank by a jury in Orange County on Wednesday--restoring a previous death sentence that was reversed by the Bird court--will not end her campaign to tighten legal penalties for child molesting and see Frank pay the supreme penalty, she said.

Linebaugh attended Frank’s trials as often as she could, given the more than 60 miles between Camarillo and the court in Santa Ana. She was bitterly disappointed that she was not present when the jury returned the second death verdict Wednesday, returning after less than four hours’ deliberation, which surprised her.

“The only reason I wasn’t there was because I didn’t have a helicopter,” she said.

But Linebaugh said she has learned not to expect that verdict to be the end of the case.

Unrealized Expectations

She said that, when Frank was first convicted and sentenced to death eight years ago, “I thought that, once we got the death penalty, it would be behind us--the legalities, at least. Amy’s death will never be behind us. She will always be a part of our lives.

“I know now that it will not be swift in the state courts, and then it will go into the federal courts. It will take at least five years, I think, and then it will depend on who’s on the state Supreme Court, and who’s the governor.

“I’d like to have it be Deukmejian--I’m a supporter of his--but he only has another four years, and I think it will take longer than that, based on the record in this state. After all, the people voted back the death penalty 10 years ago.”

Linebaugh spoke in the office of an Oxnard firm where she is an escrow officer. On the wall was a sampler embroidered with the words, “Families Are Forever,” recently made for her by her daughter, Cheryl Roberts, Amy Sue’s mother.

Amy Sue was kidnaped from a baby sitter’s home in Camarillo on March 14, 1978. The toddler’s body was found two days later in the Topanga Canyon area. She had been force-fed beer, tortured with locking-grip pliers, raped and strangled.

Police arrested Frank, who had a 20-year history of molesting children and had been released only six weeks earlier from Atascadero State Hospital, where he was sent for sexually assaulting a 4-year-old Bakersfield girl.

Children in 4 States

According to court documents, Frank admitted molesting 100 to 150 children in at least four states--Missouri, Illinois, Arizona and California. He had been incarcerated for nearly two decades but was not convicted of murder until his trial for the slaying of Amy Sue.

A jury in Orange County, where his trial was moved because of publicity in Ventura County, convicted Frank and held that he should die in the gas chamber.

The sentence, but not the guilty verdict, was overturned on appeal. State Supreme Court justices ruled 4 to 2 that the search warrant under which police seized Frank’s diaries at his Woodland Hills apartment was overly broad and that the diaries, in which Frank openly discussed his passion to molest children, had an important effect on the jurors in the penalty phase of the trial.

Bird argued that the conviction itself should also be reversed.

The ruling came in June, 1985, as the move to oust Bird gathered steam, providing emotional ammunition for the campaign that followed. Linebaugh, already one of four co-founders of Stronger Legislation Against Child Molesters, a national group known as SLAM, also became co-chairman of Crime Victims for Court Reform, the leading anti-Bird group.

An Important Role

Linebaugh told the story of Amy Sue and Frank to gatherings around the state, in personal appearances and mailings, and was credited with playing an important role in driving the chief justice from the bench.

“I think that our involvement really helped, that we really created an awareness,” she said.

“The voters of the state should be commended for voicing what they want--justice for all. If they hadn’t made changes on our Supreme Court, we wouldn’t have a chance of the case ever ending, and I think Frank would have been on the streets again, and he would have killed again.”

She disputed the charge by Bird supporters during the campaign that the anti-Bird movement would politicize the courts.

“The people of California on two occasions voted in the death penalty,”she said. “Rose Bird and her associates did everything they could to reverse death sentences. When you have 100% reversals, there is something wrong. They were saying that every death sentence by every judge and every jury had something wrong with it, and that just wasn’t believable.

“There are guidelines on the judiciary, and they should have to answer for their decisions.”

Linebaugh said she assumed the public role in her family’s vendetta because her job gives her some flexibility regarding time, because her daughter was too young--19 and single at the time of the killing--and to spare her daughter the emotional strain of repeatedly describing the death.

Like virtually all news reports, she said, she withheld the gruesome details of the torture. “It’s already beyond most people’s comprehension that something like this could happen to a 2 1/2-year-old child,” she said.

Her daughter has since married a Navy officer and lives in another state, she said. She has had three other children--all boys.

Unlisted Phone Number

About a year ago, Linebaugh got an unlisted home telephone number, she said, because she had become so well-known that parents elsewhere in the United States who had suffered similar tragedies sometimes called her, usually late at night, to discuss their anguish.

“They need to relate to someone, and I heard a lot of sad stories,” she said. But late-night phone calls “scare the daylights out of me,” she said, because of her memories of the two days Amy Sue was missing and the fact that one of her sons is an Oxnard police officer--a career she said he decided on “as a direct result of Amy Sue’s murder.”

She is still national president of SLAM, although most of the work recently has been done by others, she said. After devoting about 20 hours a week to the crime victims and anti-Bird campaigns in recent years--”as much time as I could give”--she is going to take a vacation of sorts to devote more time to her family and her work, she said, but then expects to return to her campaign.

She wants to be a witness at Frank’s execution, and will keep working for that, she said.

“If anyone, anyone at all, is going to die in the gas chamber, it’s going to be Theodore Frank,” she said. “I do believe he would be first, if he only lives long enough.”