Trial Ordered in Slaying of 2 Studio Guards

A former mental patient was ordered Friday to stand trial in the slayings of two Universal Studios guards he reportedly said God told him to kill.

Los Angeles Municipal Judge Elva R. Soper ordered Nathan N. Trupp, 42, to stand trial after a one-hour preliminary hearing in which a security guard and a sheriff’s deputy described the Dec. 1 shootings and recounted Trupp’s explanation.

Soper ordered Trupp to be arraigned Thursday on charges that he killed Jeren Beeks, 27, of La Crescenta and Armando Torres, 18, of Los Angeles after they had turned him away from Universal Studios.

Trupp is also accused in the slayings of three people in a bagel shop near where he lived in Albuquerque, N. M., two days before the Universal Studios killings. The Los Angeles case will proceed first.

Authorities said Trupp opened fire on the guards at Universal’s main gate shortly after they turned him away when he asked to see actor Michael Landon.

Abelardo Solarez, another guard, testified Friday that he saw Trupp pacing Lankershim Boulevard near the studio entrance. Then Trupp casually approached the two guards, pulled a gun and opened fire without breaking stride, Solarez said. The guard said Trupp shot Beeks three times and Torres once before walking back to Lankershim, then west on Bluffside Drive.

Fired a Shot

Solarez said he began following Trupp but then saw a sheriff’s car, which he flagged down. Deputy James Campbell said he and Solarez followed Trupp a short distance but when the deputy stopped the car to talk to Trupp, the suspect fired a shot at him.

Campbell, unhurt, threw himself to the ground and shot Trupp in the side and arm. Campbell and Solarez testified that as they waited for paramedics to arrive, Trupp repeatedly talked of the shooting and asked the guard and deputy to kill him.

“He kept saying that someone sent him to kill the two guards,” Solarez said. “I asked him who it was and he said, ‘God.’

“He wanted us to finish him off because he was in pain. He said, ‘Kill me, kill me, it hurts.’ He was crying at the time.”

Authorities said Trupp was under the delusion that the victims killed in Albuquerque, the two guards and Landon--star of the TV series “Highway to Heaven”--all were Nazis conspiring against him.

Trupp, who was treated at a New Jersey mental institution in 1988 and at a Maryland institution in the early 1970s, was originally ruled mentally incompetent to stand trial. However, in June a Superior Court judge held that treatment with drugs and therapy had restored his competency.

In court Friday, Trupp sat calmly, handcuffed to a chair, and did not speak.