The Region - News from Feb. 12, 1987

Theodore Frank, who wrote in his prison diaries that he derived pleasure from torturing children, was given a death sentence for the second time for the kidnap-murder of a 2-year-old Ventura County girl. “Mr. Frank does have a mental illness,” Orange County Superior Court Judge John J. Ryan said, but Frank “had the capacity to appreciate what he was doing.” Frank, 51, spent almost six years on San Quentin’s Death Row for the March 14, 1978, murder of Amy Sue Seitz of Camarillo before the state Supreme Court overturned his death sentence in 1985 and ordered a new penalty phase jury trial.