Death Penalty Voted for Gem Store Killer

A Superior Court jury voted the death penalty Friday for Steven Livaditis, a 23-year-old drifter who last year staged a bloody siege of a Beverly Hills jewelry store that resulted in the deaths of three people.

“It was . . . the cold-bloodedness of the murders” that influenced the jury, said juror Rod E. Seldon of Van Nuys. “There wasn’t anything (the victims) could do to defend themselves.”

Livaditis showed no emotion as the clerk for Santa Monica Superior Court Judge Laurence J. Rittenband read the verdict. At one point, before the court convened, he smiled briefly while talking with his attorney, Deputy Public Defender Michael H. Demby,

Mother Weeps

Livaditis’ mother, Sophie, 54, a diminutive, frail-looking woman, had flown in for the trial from her home in Athens, Greece. She sat in the front row of the courtroom directly behind her son, fingering a crucifix and almost imperceptibly weeping.

“Don’t worry,” she whispered to her son just before the judge entered the courtroom.

After the verdict was read, Demby escorted Livaditis from the courtroom and later told reporters that Livaditis had told him that his fate “was now in God’s hands.”

In that brief private meeting, Demby said Livaditis declared he “had done some horrible things. And then he thanked me.”

Demby had argued for a sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole, the only other option the jury had after Livaditis pleaded guilty April 28 to three counts of first-degree murder, including five counts of special circumstances involving burglary, robbery and multiple murder, making him eligible for the death sentence.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Dona Bracke told reporters after the verdict was read that “I think this case deserves” the death penalty “because of the two murders” inside the store. She called the killings “senseless . . . outrageous” and, as she had said in her closing argument urging the gas chamber for Livaditis, “I didn’t see any remorse.”

“There is absolutely nothing that could mitigate what he did,” Bracke concluded before the jury on Tuesday.

Siege of 13 1/2 Hours

The bloody siege at the exclusive Van Cleef & Arpels store on Rodeo Drive occurred almost a year ago, last June 23, and lasted about 13 1/2 hours.

In a jail interview, Livaditis described how he was taunted by a security guard, William Richard Smith, 54, and how he tied the guard’s hands behind him before stabbing him in the back. The guard died almost instantly.

Livaditis said he heard a store clerk, Ann Heilperin, 40, crying and ordered her to lie face down next to Smith’s body. With her hands also tied behind her back, he then shot her in the back of the head with a .357-Magnum revolver.

Several hours after these killings, Livaditis attempted to flee the store with three surviving hostages and was captured by police. During the escape attempt, the store manager, Hugh Skinner, 60, was killed by a sheriff’s sharpshooter who had been mistakenly informed that the gunman was the only white man in the group. Livaditis was also charged with this death.

Pleas From Family

Pleading for the jury to spare Livaditis’ life during the death-penalty phase of the trial was his mother, his older brother, an older sister and other family members, several of whom, like his mother, had flown in from Athens for the trial.

His family described Livaditis’ early life as one of growing up in a poor but close-knit Greek family in Brooklyn and then in Texas, a life constantly fraught with abuse from his father, who eventually divorced his mother and who died in 1980.

Livaditis’ mother testified that since he seemed to lack direction in his life, she attempted to straighten out her son, the youngest of four children, by sending him and one of his sisters to a Catholic orphanage in upstate New York, and that twice she paid his way to Greece so that he could live with relatives.

Washed Out of Service

Livaditis did a brief stint in the Army Reserve in 1981, ending up the next year in Las Vegas, where his service was terminated for bad attendance.

In Las Vegas, Livaditis ran up a string of traffic arrests, committed a burglary of a computer store, violated parole and robbed a jewelry store in February of last year, a few months before the Beverly Hills siege. By March of last year, Livaditis was having financial problems and had moved to an apartment on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood.

Livaditis, who will be formally sentenced July 8, becomes the 211th individual sentenced to die in San Quentin’s gas chamber, where there has not been an execution since April, 1967. An appeal of the sentence to the state Supreme Court is automatic.