Man Guilty in Death of Mother of 6 : 2 Jurors Hold Out Successfully for a 2nd-Degree Verdict

A Santa Ana man was found guilty of second-degree murder Friday in the death of a young mother of three sets of twins, but many of the jurors said later that they let him off too easy.

Jurors said afterward that 10 of them felt to the very end that 29-year-old Roger Max Keller was guilty of first-degree murder for the Nov. 14, 1987, strangulation death of Lisa Maria Guardiola of Anaheim. Her body was found by a jogger early that morning near the Chapman Road entrance to Irvine Regional Park.

But the jurors said they finally agreed to the lesser verdict when it was clear that at least one and possibly two of them would not budge from a second-degree verdict.

“We read the judge’s instruction that it was OK to compromise if we at least all agreed he was guilty of murder,” said Walter B. Johnson of Anaheim, one of the jurors who supported a first-degree verdict.

Johnson said the majority finally agreed that a second-degree verdict was better than a mistrial. The deliberations, which began Wednesday, had taken several turns.

On Wednesday, all 12 agreed on second-degree murder but decided to sleep on it. On Thursday, the majority said they really supported a first-degree verdict and told Superior Court Judge Everett W. Dickey that afternoon that they were deadlocked. But he sent them back Friday to try again.

The compromise turned out to please both Keller’s attorney and the prosecutor.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Jill W. Roberts lost her best evidence when Dickey ruled that Keller’s confession to the killing had not been voluntary. Keller at first had refused to talk to Orange County Sheriff’s Department investigators after his arrest in Houston, nearly two weeks after the killing. Then, in an about-face, he decided to confess.

Prosecutor Roberts was so relieved to hear that Keller was found guilty of at least some type of murder that she was red-faced with tears as she hugged several of the jurors.

“I’ve got to be happy with this,” she said. “I’ve got enough confidence in our parole system to believe that he’s going to be put away from a long time.”

A first-degree murder verdict, which includes premeditation by a defendant, carries a standard sentence of 25 years to life in prison; second degree is 15 years to life. While most of those convicted of second-degree murder serve no more than half the minimum, the parole board does have some discretion to lengthen the term, Roberts said.

Keller’s attorney, Paul G. Stark, was also relieved after he heard from jurors how close his client had come to a first-degree murder conviction.

“I really can’t complain,” Stark said. “Although I would have preferred a not guilty, second-degree (murder) was certainly within the realm of the evidence.”

Also in tears and exchanging hugs with jurors was Lu Rutters of Santa Maria, mother of the victim.

“It’s been a long 18 months,” she said. “After the confession was thrown out, I was pleased it was at least second-degree murder.”

The question only partially answered is why Keller killed the young mother.

Keller was an acquaintance of the victim’s husband, Alfredo Guardiola. Lisa Guardiola had been out with a friend and returned home about 1 a.m. the morning she was killed.

An argument broke out between the husband and wife, with Keller present. Keller later said he killed her on orders from her husband, but prosecutors say that at the very most, Keller only “read too much into” the husband’s angry statements.

“I don’t think we will ever really know what he (Keller) was thinking when he killed her,” Roberts said.

Without the confession, Keller was connected to the crime through trace evidence--fibers from his car’s carpet were found on her shoes, and a pigment Keller used in his job as a color-mixer were found on her clothes.

Also, Keller was the last one seen with the woman before her death. Jury foreman Samuel B. Adams of Fountain Valley called that the key factor in deciding Keller was guilty. But Adams was one of the holdouts for a second-degree verdict.

“I just did not think that premeditation had been proven by the evidence,” Adams said.

Adams left alone while other jurors remained to talk with the lawyers. Many of them said that Adams was the most adamant of the two who supported second degree. Alfredo Guardiola has since taken the twins, all 5 years old and under at the time of the killing, to his native Colombia.