Shooting Survivor to Retell Horrors in Effort to Block Parole

To prosecutors, the case of Maurice Seton Thompson represents the start of the death sentence controversy that led to the ouster of three state Supreme Court justices.

To June Felice, it’s more personal.

On Thursday, Thompson’s prosecutor and Felice will appear at a hearing at San Quentin state prison to oppose once again the 43-year-old killer’s parole. Felice will tell again about the night of Nov. 14, 1977, when Thompson barged into the La Habra home she shared with her fiance, Michael Whalen.

Thompson was convicted of killing Whalen with three shots from a .357 magnum. With three more shots, he ripped apart Felice’s body and shattered her life.

The memories of those events can reduce her to tears at any moment. But Felice, a 50-year-old bartender, still packs a bright spirit inside a body pieced back together by surgeons over the last 10 years.

“Support from my family and friends has helped me make it,” Felice said last week.

Her own pride has helped, too, and she is something of a medical marvel.

Felice lost a spleen and a gallbladder in the shooting. Three-quarters of her pancreas is gone; so is three-quarters of her liver. Her left lung was punctured. Her heart was scratched. She should walk with a limp, but she forces herself not to. Too proud, she says.

Every time she puts her stockings on, she can feel a bed of shrapnel, like loose BBs, just below the skin on her left leg, she said. Every time she dresses, her scars remind her of the 18 operations she has endured as doctors repaired her midsection.

“A lot of people suffer horribly when someone they love is killed in a vicious crime,” said Orange County Deputy Dist. Atty. Anthony J. Rackauckas Jr., who prosecuted Thompson. “But think about June Felice. It’s hard to imagine the terror she has experienced.”

Felice has since moved to Los Angeles County and to a new job. She busies herself with her work, her children and her three grandchildren. She has a new boyfriend. And she knows that an upcoming operation for a rupture to her midsection is not going to be as serious as the last one.

But Thompson is there every day, she said. He is in her nightmares, which come frequently.

“When I’m tending bar, and you can’t quite see who just came in the door when the daylight shines through, I always think it’s Thompson,” she said.

But it is not for herself that she will go to San Quentin on Thursday, she said.

“The good Lord gave me another 10 years of life. But if Thompson’s ever turned loose, I worry about my children and my grandchildren,” she said, her words lost in tears.

Thompson, a part-time carpenter who lived mostly in Los Angeles County, still denies killing Whalen. He even wrote to one of Felice’s children, saying Felice had sent the wrong man to prison.

Felice spoke at Thompson’s last parole hearing three years ago. And she will keep going back, she said, until one of them is dead.

Felice had expected Thompson to die a long time ago.

Thompson, who has a 10-year record of robbery and auto thefts, was sentenced to death for the Whalen killing in 1978. He was only the second Orange County man to receive a death sentence since the 1977 death law in California.

But in a major precedent, the state Supreme Court in 1980 reduced his sentence to life, making him eligible for a parole hearing in 1984. In a 4-3 decision written by then-Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird, the court said that if robbery is a secondary motive for murder, it cannot be a special circumstance that allows for the death penalty under state law. That meant prosecutors could not even seek life without parole for Thompson.

That decision also has prevented prosecutors statewide from seeking death sentences in hundreds of cases where they cannot prove robbery was a primary motive. The court had earlier reversed six other death verdicts, but Thompson’s was the most controversial.

The irony is that Thompson escaped death in part because of Felice’s vivid memory of that night.

Felice and Whalen had been to her bar, Felice’s Inn, earlier in the evening, where she had said hello to Thompson, an occasional visitor. She and Whalen went home about 10:30 p.m. While she was taking a bath, she heard a knock at the door. She thought it was her daughter, Lynne. But it was Thompson, holding a gun.

He asked for money but was not interested in taking any of Felice’s jewelry. He marched them into a rumpus room and ordered them to a couch.

“He stood by the bar and just stared at us for the longest time,” she said. Felice thought he would rob them and leave.

But then he said, “You know why I’m here, and you know who sent me.” Then he picked up a blue bolster pillow from the floor.

“I knew then I was going to die,” she said.

She remembers the sequence of shots. Thompson put the gun to the pillow and fired two shots at Whalen, then two at her--then one more at Whalen, then one more at her. Then he ran out the door.

Whalen tried to reach a telephone but stumbled and fell. Felice got to it and dialed.

Felice cries every time she recalls Whalen’s dying words to paramedics.

“He said, ‘Take care of my girl. We’re getting married Thursday.’ ”

Wayne Field, an investigator for the Orange County district attorney, remembers the near-perfect description of Thompson that Felice gave him at La Habra Hospital, from the mutton chop sideburns to the cleft in the chin.

As Felice was talking about the case last week, Field popped into the room.

“My, my, look at you now,” he said. “I’m sure glad we didn’t need your dying declaration.” She laughed. “So am I,” she said.

Felice assumed that after a few years of appeals, Thompson would be executed. But Chief Justice Bird wrote in the majority opinion that Thompson’s statement, “You know why I’m here,” clearly indicated he had not come to rob them; he had come to kill them for somebody. Without robbery as a primary motive, she wrote, he could not be executed.

“In a case such as this, where the moral equities so heavily weigh against a (defendant), an appellate court has a special duty to apply its objectivity in a dispassionate review,” Bird wrote. She added that constitutional protections “are not limited to people who are morally blameless.”

Defense lawyers praised those words as evidence that the Bird court was showing strong leadership in death penalty cases.

But Rackauckas was so angry at her ruling that he became a statewide leader in efforts to remove Bird from office. He was jubilant when voters ousted Bird and two others justices last November.

Felice does not understand all those legalities. She only believes it isn’t right for someone who could create such a nightmare to be released from prison.

But one day, Rackauckas said, that’s exactly what is going to happen.

“He has a good record in prison, especially since his last parole hearing. So it gets harder and harder with each hearing to give reasons for keeping him in,” Rackauckas said. “That’s why it’s important for the parole board to hear June’s story.”