Teacher Aide to Stand Trial in Killing of Husband

A Vista Municipal Court judge ruled Monday that a popular high school teacher’s aide must stand trial on charges that she hired a pair of 15-year-old boys to slay her estranged husband, promising them two cars and $100,000 to split.

After a six-day preliminary hearing rife with dramatic testimony from teen-age witnesses, Judge Suzanne W. Knauf ordered Roberta Pearce, 41, bound over for trial on allegations that she hatched the plot to kill Robert (Wayne) Pearce.

The 40-year-old construction foreman was slain outside his Cardiff apartment as he left for work Jan. 31. Isaac Hill and Anthony Pilato, both freshmen at Orange Glen High School in Escondido, pleaded guilty last month to the slaying, saying they were put up to it by the wife.

Although Roberta Pearce has asserted her innocence since she was arrested in early February, prosecutors contend that she masterminded the slaying in an effort to collect $200,000 in life insurance and keep her Valley Center home in the face of the couple’s impending divorce.

Could Face Death Penalty

Deputy Dist. Atty. Tim Casserly said it is “highly likely” that prosecutors will file special-circumstances charges against Pearce before she goes to trial, raising the specter that she could face the death penalty if convicted.

Pearce’s attorney, William Fletcher of Carlsbad, contends that his client played no role in the killing, suggesting that angry statements she may have made about her husband might have been misconstrued by the teen-agers, prompting them to plot a slaying.

“Mrs. Pearce maintains she did not solicit these individuals to kill her husband,” Fletcher said after the hearing concluded. “She did not help them to carry out this crime. . . . She doesn’t have the personality, the stature or the demeanor to force those kids to do anything.”

Instead, Fletcher said, the teen-agers had “a lot to lose if they lost that house” and may have “misread her emotions.”

“Just because a kid is street-wise doesn’t mean they’re able to maturely read emotions,” Fletcher said. “She’s angry, she says some things, then they take them literally.”

Dressed in a dark blue sweat shirt and other standard prison garb, Pearce appeared unemotional as Knauf announced her ruling. Bound by handcuffs, Pearce quietly left the courtroom escorted by a single marshal after the hearing.

Aside from the murder charge, Knauf ordered Pearce to stand trial on charges that she initially solicited two other youths to kill her husband but turned to Hill and Pilato when the first pair refused to carry out the scheme.

The judge also leveled several new charges against Pearce, stemming from testimony during the preliminary hearing. They included two counts of providing marijuana and crystal methamphetamine to the covey of youngsters who frequented the Valley Center house in the weeks before the killing.

The teacher’s aide for students with learning disabilities at Orange Glen High also is to face a new charge that she had sex with a minor.

Hill, one of the admitted killers, testified during the preliminary hearing that he and Pearce made love one night in the weeks before the slaying. Fletcher said, however, that he plans to fight the charge, pointing to statements Hill made to police after his arrest suggesting that he and Pearce were never sexually involved.

Pearce faces arraignment on the felony charges in Vista Superior Court on May 22, the same day Hill and Pilato are set to be sentenced in San Diego Juvenile Court.

Those two provided perhaps the most dramatic moments during the drawn-out preliminary hearing. Although their testimony differed on several key details, both said they had killed Wayne Pearce at the behest of his estranged wife, carrying out the killing with a kitchen knife and hatchet.

Along with a 16-year-old girl who was befriended by Pearce in the weeks before the slaying, the two boys said the woman provided them with drugs and alcohol while helping to plan the slaying of her husband, who moved out of the Valley Center home over the Thanksgiving holiday.

Moreover, they said that Pearce had maintained a sexual relationship with Frank (Soddy) Rodriguez, a 16-year-old Orange Glen student arrested in late April and charged with helping plan the slaying.

After the hearing, Fletcher said the teen-age witnesses against Pearce had woven tales containing “some pretty major inconsistencies.”

Moreover, he said the statements of Hill and Pilato may have been prompted by a desire to improve their standing with prison authorities, and that the 16-year-old girl, who testified that she knew of the murder plot in advance, had been given “hip pocket immunity” against being charged by prosecutors.

Casserly, however, maintained that he had given the girl no immunity, telling her that prosecutors in the juvenile division might eventually file charges against her.