Veteran Deputy D. A. Robert Jorgensen

Veteran Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert N. Jorgensen, who successfully prosecuted “Sunset Strip Killer” Douglas Daniel Clark in the grisly 1980 sex slayings of six women, has died of natural causes at age 56, officials announced Thursday.

Jorgensen’s body was discovered Monday at his Sherman Oaks home by fellow employees who became concerned after he failed to show up for work. An autopsy conducted by the county coroner’s office Wednesday determined that Jorgensen died last Friday night as the result of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Jorgensen, who joined the district attorney’s office in 1968 shortly after graduating from law school at UC Berkeley, was described as “a meticulous guy who took his job very seriously” by spokesman Al Albergate of the district attorney’s office.

During his 20-year career, Jorgensen worked in the special investigations and organized crime units of the office, as well as handling a series of gruesome murder cases. Garbed in a three-piece pinstripe suit and sporting a gold watch chain, Jorgensen struck a meticulous, straight-arrow image in the face of courtroom proceedings dealing with some of mankind’s most depraved behaviors.

In the Sunset Strip case, Clark, a factory boiler tender from Burbank, was convicted of shooting several victims in the head while they performed oral sex acts on him in his car. Another victim was beheaded and Clark refrigerated the head at his house and played with it, according to trial testimony.

After a jury ruled that Clark should receive the death penalty, Jorgensen reacted: “I would have been surprised if it had been anything else. It’s the most bizarre case I’ve ever seen and I hope I ever do.”

Israeli Mafia Case

The Clark case followed his successful prosecution of alleged Israeli Mafia members Yehudi Avital and Joseph Zakaria in connection with the 1979 slayings of a North Hollywood couple, Eli and Esther Ruven, in the downtown Bonaventure Hotel. The victims were dismembered and their body parts were removed from the hotel in suitcases before being dumped in San Fernando Valley trash bins.

Jorgensen’s other notable cases included the 1973 gang-rape prosecution of 18 defendants, several of them members of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang, and the 1978 prosecution of Weather Underground members for a plot to bomb the Fullerton office of then-state Sen. John V. Briggs.

More recently, Jorgensen helped prepare charges against two Los Angeles police officers, Richard Herman Ford and Robert Anthony Von Villas, for contract murder, attempted murder and armed robbery.

Jorgensen withdrew from the case after receiving adverse pretrial court rulings. But another prosecutor recently won conviction against the pair on the lesser charges, and the murder trial, in which the two are accused of killing a Northridge man for $20,000, is scheduled to begin Monday in Van Nuys Superior Court.

Funeral services for Jorgensen are set for Saturday in Salt Lake City, where he was born and raised. Jorgensen, who was divorced, leaves his mother, Clela Jorgensen of Salt Lake City; a son, Geoffrey Calley of New York; and three brothers, Dr. Joseph G. Jorgensen of Newport Beach, Craig B. Jorgensen of Rancho Palos Verdes and David Jorgensen of Portola Valley.