COURTS : Child Killer Given Second Death Sentence

A jury had convicted Theodore Frank in 1979 of torturing and murdering a 2-year-old Camarillo girl, and he had been sentenced to death.

But in 1985, the state Supreme Court overturned the death sentence, and then-Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird voted to overturn the conviction as well. The Frank case became a cause celebre in the successful campaign to remove Bird and two other justices from the Supreme Court.

Last week, another Superior Court jury in Orange County took only four hours to reinstate the death sentence. The foreman said the jury hadn’t come close to voting for its only alternative, a life sentence without parole.

“I feel good about it,” said the prosecutor, Ventura County Deputy Dist. Atty. Thomas J. Hutchins. “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. “If anyone, anyone at all, is going to die in the gas chamber, it’s going to be Theodore Frank . . . if he only lives long enough.”

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.