Daughter Beseeches Court to Preserve Pearce’s Life

Convicted killer Roberta Pearce broke into tears Wednesday as she listened to her 23-year-old daughter’s plea to a Vista Superior Court jury to spare her mother from execution.

Rebecca Green, herself sobbing and halting as she spoke, urged jurors to instead sentence Pearce to life in prison so that she and her mother could somehow be together after years of separation.

“We had so much time lost because I had such a hard time dealing with the fact she gave us up,” Green said. “Now I don’t want to lose her again.”

Pearce, 42, a former teacher’s aide, was convicted March 12 of hiring two 15-year-old boys to murder her estranged husband, Wayne Pearce, so she could collect $200,000 in life insurance. He was stabbed and hacked to death on June 31 last year.

The same jury that found her guilty of first-degree murder with special circumstances and of conspiring to commit murder heard final testimony Wednesday in the penalty phase of the trial.

Because of the special circumstances of murder for financial gain and lying in wait, the sentence must be life in state prison without parole or death.

For three days, the jury heard testimony about a Roberta Pearce they had not known, about a woman deeply in love with the husband, who left her for another woman, about a woman so desperate for another child that she cradled a beloved pet as if it were a baby.

And finally, the last person trying to persuade the jury to save Pearce’s life was her daughter, who recounted a pained mother-daughter relationship that only in recent years had begun to mend.

Green told how she and a sister went to live with their father after Pearce’s divorce from her first husband in 1974. As the years passed, Green said, she saw her mother less and less, until communication stopped when she was 12 or 13.

“My father didn’t like us seeing her, there were a lot of bitter feelings,” Green said. Finally, Green said, she sent back the letters that her mother had mailed to her. But, when Green turned 19 and left her father’s home, she found Pearce and resumed a relationship.

“It’s been very sad we had all that time lost,” said Green as her mother sat with her head bowed, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue.

When the prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Tim Casserly, asked Green how she felt about her mother paying to have her second husband slain, she said, “I love her. . . . I believe people can make mistakes.”

Green was one in a procession of character witnesses for the defense who implored the jurors to have sympathy for Pearce and to consider her clean past. The prosecution called no witnesses.

Robin Martin, a special education teacher at San Pasqual High School in Escondido, where Pearce worked as an aide, recounted that she loved Wayne and wanted more children because he did.

She loved animals so much, Martin recalled, “I remember one day she brought her little dog to school and cradled it just like a baby.”

But, because of her inability to get pregnant and her broken marriage, Martin said, “I think she was under a lot of stress” that “had to be overwhelming to her.”

Martin and two other former school colleagues depicted Pearce as being kind and patient with learning-disabled students and as someone whose life is still useful, even if it is spent in prison, possibly teaching other inmates.