Girl, 16, Backs Killer’s Story Implicating Pearce

The 16-year-old housemate of Roberta Pearce, corroborating the testimony of a confessed teen-age murderer, tearfully testified Thursday in Vista Superior Court that Pearce wanted her estranged husband killed and told the two killers as they left her Valley Center home, “Be careful and don’t get caught.”

Mandy Gardiser, who said she moved into Pearce’s home about two weeks before the Jan. 31, 1989, killing of Robert (Wayne) Pearce in Cardiff, said the 42-year-old former teacher’s aide offered her “a line” of crystal methamphetamine after Isaac Hill and Robert Pilato left to kill her husband, and that she then helped clean the house of beer and wine containers that might bear fingerprints and other forensic evidence in case police came to search it.

The next day, Gardiser said, Pearce was angry that relatives called her to express their sympathy over Robert Pearce’s killing.

“She’d start crying and act real sad,” Gardiser said. “When she’d get off the phone, she wouldn’t be sad any more. She said, ‘I wish these people would stop calling me,’ because she had to put on a role.”

Roberta Pearce is charged with first-degree murder and could be sentenced to death if convicted.

The day’s most unexpected testimony came during Gardiser’s cross-examination by defense attorney William Fletcher, who hammered away at the inconsistencies of Thursday’s testimony with Gardiser’s previous testimony about the sequence and timing of events. Fletcher unwittingly elicited a confession by Gardiser that, when she testified last year at the preliminary hearing, she was under the influence of methamphetamine.

Fletcher and Gardiser were sparring over her specific recollections of conversations about the murder plan when, explaining the inconsistencies of her previous court testimony last year, Gardiser said, “I was on drugs at the time.”

“During the preliminary hearing?” Fletcher asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Did you tell Mr. (Tim) Casserly (the deputy district attorney who is prosecuting the case) you were doing drugs?” Fletcher asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Yesterday (Wednesday).”

“You were on drugs while under oath during the preliminary hearing?” Fletcher asked again.

“I was just really nervous,” she said. “I thought it would help me not be upset. I just thought it would help me get through it.”

Gardiser also apparently contradicted herself again Thursday, saying once that her recollection of events was skewed when she was interviewed by detectives three days after the slaying because, “at that time I was doing a lot of drugs.”

But, later in her testimony Thursday, she said she “was not on drugs” during her interview with detectives.

The issue of Gardiser, a key prosecution witness, admitting that she was under the influence of methamphetamine during her preliminary hearing testimony led to speculation among some defense attorneys Thursday that the defense would ask for a mistrial on the grounds that Pearce was ordered bound over for trial on murder charges based on incompetent testimony.

But other attorneys said the issue would only go to the strength of Gardiser’s credibility as a prosecution witness and not poison the prosecution’s case altogether.

Because of a court-ordered gag rule, neither Fletcher nor Casserly would discuss the development.

There were other inconsistencies with Gardiser’s testimony and that of Hill, who already has testified and who, along with Pilato, has already pleaded guilty to Pearce’s murder. Gardiser testified, for instance, that she never saw Pilato or Hill use drugs at Roberta Pearce’s home, while Hill said he smoked marijuana and was injected with an unknown drug by Pearce herself minutes before he and Pilato left to kill her husband.

Still, Gardiser consistently and vehemently denied that--as the defense contends--she spawned the plan to kill Robert Pearce without Roberta Pearce’s knowledge so that she could continue to live in the Valley Center home that would otherwise be lost in the pending divorce.