Jury to Get Pearce Murder Case Today

The prosecutor in the Roberta Pearce murder trial admonished the jury Wednesday to convict the former teacher’s aide of first-degree murder, saying the two teen-age boys who admitted killing her estranged husband had no reason to implicate her unless she had put them up to it.

“When you look at this case,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Tim Casserly, “it’s a real simple one to analyze. There are two versions of what happened, and only one can be true.

“Version One is that (Isaac) Hill and (Anthony) Pilato killed Mr. (Robert Wayne) Pearce because Mrs. Pearce asked them to,” he said. “Version No. 2 is that, for some mysterious reason that we haven’t figured out yet, they killed Mr. Pearce and decided to implicate Mrs. Pearce. But what would be their motive to do that? There is none.

“If ever there was first-degree murder, this was first-degree murder,” he said during nearly 2 1/2 hours of closing arguments to the Vista jury.

For his part, Roberta Pearce’s defense attorney, Bill Fletcher, chipped away at what he said were inconsistencies by the three teen-age prosecution witnesses against his client, and at the end of his two-hour summary focused on the issue of reasonable doubt.

“I don’t agree with Mr. Casserly that the greatest travesty would be to let a guilty person off,” Fletcher said. “The greatest injustice would be to convict an innocent person.

“There’s no question that things got out of control during those last two weeks in January,” Fletcher said of the life style at Pearce’s Valley Center home, where teen-agers congregated and partied--and from where, the prosecution alleges, the woman hatched her murder plan. “But Mrs. Pearce is not charged with having sex (with a teen-ager) or smoking marijuana (with another), and those two things don’t make her a murderer.”

The jurors are scheduled to begin deliberations this morning after receiving their final instructions from Vista Superior Court Judge Franklin J. Mitchell Jr.

Pearce, 42, is charged with first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder and soliciting murder for the Jan. 31, 1989, stabbing death of her estranged husband, Robert (Wayne) Pearce, outside his Cardiff apartment.

The district attorney’s office alleges that Hill and Pilato, who were both 15 years old at the time, killed the construction worker at Roberta Pearce’s behest, on the promise of each receiving $50,000 and a car.

Hill and Pilato confessed to first-degree murder, have been sentenced to the California Youth Authority until they turn 25, and testified against Pearce.

Robert Wayne Pearce was struck 27 times with a kitchen knife and a carpenter’s hatchet as he left his apartment and was jumped by the teen-age assailants. He struggled back to his third-floor apartment, and was airlifted to Palomar Medical Center in Escondido where he died.

If the jury convicts Roberta Pearce and finds the special circumstances that the murder was done for financial gain and after lying in wait, Pearce could be sentenced to death or to life in prison without parole.

Casserly acknowledged that the testimony by Hill and Pilato was inconsistent at times as to the sequence of events and dates but said their overall story was consistent and true to form virtually from the day of their arrests: that they were asked by Pearce to kill her estranged husband so she could collect his $200,000 life insurance policy and keep the couple’s Valley Center home that otherwise would have been sold because of the couple’s pending divorce.

Pearce had testified on her own behalf that while she was angry at her husband, she didn’t hire his killers.

Her attorney argued Wednesday that the testimony of Hill, Pilato and a third teen-ager--Mandy Gardiser, who had lived with Roberta Pearce for the two weeks prior to the killing and who testified against her--were not to be believed.

Among the issues during Wednesday’s 5-hour session:

* Fletcher argued that there were no signs of blood in Roberta Pearce’s Lincoln, which the boys said they drove on the night of the killing. Casserly countered that Pearce had time to clean the blood that morning, before she drove to the hospital, where her husband died in surgery. Furthermore, she had her car commercially washed the following day--an act that was inconsistent, he said, with a grieving widow unless she was trying to clean off incriminating fingerprints.

* Casserly recalled testimony by Hill and Pilato that Pearce withdrew $300 in cash two days after the murder, to give to the two teen-agers who were hiding out in Tijuana. Fletcher countered that Roberta Pearce didn’t have time that day, given some witness accounts, to drive to Tijuana to deliver the money--and that for all anyone knew, her unsearched purse still had the money in it.

* If his client was guilty, Fletcher asked, “Why didn’t she run?” Answered Casserly, “Where would she go? Where would she hide? She has no place to run. There’s another place to run--to denial.”

* Fletcher argued that the prosecution witnesses implicated his client so they would receive generous treatment from a parole board. Casserly countered that Pilato and Hill had no reason to incriminate the woman, especially since they fully admitted their culpability to the tune of first-degree murder and weren’t given leniency deals in exchange for their testimony.

* Fletcher reminded jurors of testimony that Gardiser, who was 16 at the time, boasted at Orange Glen High School in Escondido that Robert Pearce had been killed, and that she spoke meanly about him. Of course she did, Casserly said; but because she didn’t personally know the man, she clearly had been influenced by the very woman who wanted him dead--Roberta Pearce. Furthermore, Gardiser is clearly out to tell the truth, he said, because she even admitted during testimony that she was under the influence of drugs when she testified against Pearce during her preliminary hearing.

* Fletcher contended that Roberta Pearce would have had more to gain financially if her husband was not killed because the couple’s assets and debts would have been resolved more favorably to her in a divorce. Casserly responded that Fletcher was applying faulty numbers to his courtroom chart and, besides, it was unlikely that Roberta Pearce used a calculator and a ledger sheet in deciding whether to kill her husband.

During his rebuttal, Casserly chided the defense for not answering the most significant question that might acquit Roberta Pearce: What were the boy’s motives in killing Robert Wayne Pearce if it weren’t at Roberta Pearce’s solicitation?

“When the defense gave its opening statement at the beginning of the trial, I thought, ‘Oh good, now we’re going to find out why Pilato and Hill killed Mr. Pearce,’ ” Casserly said. “But when we got to the opening statement, we didn’t hear it.

“When Mrs. Pearce testified, I thought, ‘Now we’ll find out why.’ Well, she testified, and we still don’t know. So I thought, maybe in the closing arguments we’ll find out from the defense perspective why all this happened.

“I’ve waited for that answer. I never heard it, and you’ve never heard it. And that’s probably the most significant thing in this case: They (Pilato and Hill) had no motive to kill Mr. Pearce, unless they were hired.”

Fletcher said of Pilato’s and Hill’s testimony against his client, “They can’t remember anything. Is that the strength of the testimony you convict someone for murder on?”

“If you think she’s probably guilty--but you’re still troubled by all the deception and lies that can’t be reconciled,” Fletcher concluded, “the law says you still must return a verdict of not guilty. You have to be convinced 100 absolute percent.”

Casserly closed, “She doesn’t want to accept responsibility. Certain people won’t accept responsibility. You have to tell them, ‘You are guilty, you are responsible.’ ”