Ex-Teacher Convicted of Killing Prostitute

Former college professor Max Bernard Franc was convicted Tuesday of the first-degree murder of a teen-age male prostitute, who was shot in the head last August and dismembered with a chain saw.

Franc, 58, stood quietly while the verdict was read. Later, his attorney described him as being “stoic” about the outcome of his monthlong Los Angeles Superior Court trial.

Jurors, who began deliberating Thursday, hurriedly left the courtroom after the verdict was read and declined to talk with reporters.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Sterling E. Norris said he believed “justice was done.”

But the prosecutor expressed disappointment that the jury had not been given a chance to decide if Franc should receive the death penalty. Special circumstances originally lodged in the case were ruled out by the judge.

Franc faces a prison term of 25 years to life when he is sentenced July 29.

“I’ve tried a great number of death penalty cases, and I think this certainly at least ought to fall into that category,” Norris said. “At least a jury ought to be able to make that decision.”

Testimony disclosed that Franc had lived a double life for years. He was known as a conservative political science professor at Fresno State University. But in West Hollywood, where Franc maintained an apartment, he was a homosexual voyeur who paid young men to be photographed in sexual poses.

Norris offered evidence that the victim, Tracy Leroy Nute, an 18-year-old runaway from Kansas City, Mo., was shot by a bullet from Franc’s handgun found in his desk at the university.

Norris said he believed the motive was sex and money but said that he was never able to establish firmly why Franc killed Nute.

‘Disappointed’ by Verdict

But Deputy Public Defender Mark Kaiserman said his client’s only involvement in Nute’s death was the rental of the chain saw used to cut up the youth’s body. Parts of the body were found near Fresno and Valencia.

“I’ve never been as disappointed in a verdict as I was in this verdict,” Kaiserman said. “I think that, considering the type of individual that Dr. Franc is and having spent the amount of time that I spent with him, you just really start to believe that what he has been saying is true.”

After initially telling police that he used the chain saw to cut up a dog that he had struck with his car, Franc blamed the killing on an acquaintance, Terry Adams.

But Adams was never located, and Norris maintained that he “is a figment of the defendant’s imagination.” The prosecutor also said that, even if another killer exists, Franc was just as culpable in the role of aider and abettor.

“There is no question in my mind that he (Adams) exists,” Kaiserman said Tuesday.

Kaiserman had hoped to suggest to the jury that Adams might be Peter Krizek, a 30-year-old carpenter, who was tried four times for the 1980 murder of his lover and another man. Three trials ended in hung juries, and his one conviction was reversed on appeal.

As a prosecution witness, Krizek denied that he is Adams, and Judge John H. Reid did not allow Kaiserman to question the witness about the earlier killings.

The defense attorney said he planned to use the judge’s ruling limiting Krizek’s testimony as the basis for an appeal.