Pearce Says She Told Youths to Get Out

Testifying on her own behalf, Roberta Pearce told a Vista jury Wednesday that she ordered a group of disruptive teen-agers out of her Valley Center home on the eve of her estranged husband’s slaying, secluded herself in her bedroom and woke up the next morning to the news that he had been stabbed.

Her voice cracking, then dissolving into tears, Pearce said she was taking her morning shower Jan. 31 last year when she received back-to-back phone calls from friends of her husband. The calls told of her husband being rushed to Palomar Medical Center in Escondido with multiple stab wounds, after having been attacked outside his apartment in Cardiff, she said.

By the time she got to the hospital, she said, her husband, Robert (Wayne) Pearce, was dead.

Dabbing her eyes with a tissue, Pearce said she asked to see his body because “I guess I couldn’t believe it.”

During two hours on the stand in Vista Superior Court, Pearce, 42, disputed prosecution allegations that she hired teen-agers Isaac Hill and Anthony Pilato to kill her estranged husband so that she could collect his life insurance and keep the couple’s Valley Center home, which was in contention in divorce proceedings.

The two teen-agers already have pleaded guilty to first-degree murder for using a knife and hatchet in ambushing and killing Robert Pearce before dawn Jan. 31, 1989, as he left for work. They testified that they killed him at the behest of Roberta Pearce and her promise to pay them $50,000 each.

Pearce, a former teacher’s aide at Orange Glen High School in Escondido, could be sentenced to death because of alleged special circumstances that his murderers laid in wait and killed him for financial gain.

Pearce specifically denied having had sex with Hill, as he testified she had, and, when asked whether she provided drugs to the teen-agers who congregated at her sprawling ranch house, she answered firmly, “No, I did not.”

Asked to explain a note from Mandy Gardiser, who was 16 and a house mate of hers for two weeks before the killing, in which the teen-ager asked Pearce for a “line” of crystal methamphetamine, Pearce answered:

“Someone had given Mandy something called ‘crystal,’ and I took it away from her,” Pearce testified. “I flushed it down the toilet. I’m assuming she was asking me for it back.”

Pearce, however, did admit to keeping drug paraphernalia in a bedroom closet, the vestiges of her husband’s use of cocaine and marijuana before the couple separated, she said. On one occasion, she said, she found the box on a counter, apparently having been discovered by one of her teen-age house guests.

Brad Patton, one of Pearce’s two defense attorneys, did not ask her point-blank whether she had solicited her husband’s murder. The defense contends that Hill and Pilato killed Robert Wayne Pearce of their own volition because of their misguided perception that the woman wanted him dead.

To that point, Roberta Pearce testified Thursday that the teen-agers overheard her phone conversation to her husband involving the divorce-prompted sale of the couple’s red Corvette, which Pearce said she was trying to sell to Pilato over her husband’s wishes.

“We were both angry and upset with each other,” she said. “When I got off the phone, I was upset and crying. Mandy came over and hugged me and said, ‘Mom, we’re not going to let anything happen to you. We’re not going to let him hurt you.’ ”

In his questioning, Patton led his client to discuss other allegations, point by point.

* The prosecution alleges that she rented a car so that Pilato and Hill would not drive her own car to kill her husband. Pearce said Wednesday that she rented the car for Pilato so that he could visit his girlfriend.

* The prosecution alleges that a map found in Pearce’s glove compartment containing directions to Tijuana were consistent with other evidence that she drove there after the murder to give Pilato and Hill money while they hid from authorities. Pearce said Wednesday that the map had helped her find her way to Tijuana a month earlier when her parents were in town for a visit.

* The prosecution alleges that the Valley Center home became a hangout for the teen-agers, where alcohol, drugs and food flowed freely. Pearce said she was angry at Gardiser for throwing parties in her absence and was so upset that, on one occasion when she returned to a messy home, she turned around and left again, driving to Escondido to watch the movie “Rain Man.”

* Pilato and Hill testified that they had literally free access to Pearce’s Lincoln, and drove it frequently. Pearce said she never gave them access to her car and, when she discovered the car missing on the eve of the killing, “I was real upset, and I said (to other teen-agers at the house) that I was calling the police.”

She said she was talked out of it, but that, when the vehicle was returned later that night by Pilato, “I demanded the keys back. I told Mandy I couldn’t believe they’d take my car without my permission. I demanded that they all leave. That was it. I had had it. I was fed up. I took my keys, stormed out (of the kitchen) and went into my bedroom, where I spent the rest of the night.”

She awoke the next morning to the news of her husband’s killing, she said.