Prosecutor Says Pearce Should Die for ‘Vile’ Orchestration of Murder

Roberta Pearce should die in the gas chamber because she not only premeditated the killing of her estranged husband but also hired two teen-agers--”boys in men’s bodies”--to do the job, the prosecutor said Thursday.

In closing arguments for the case’s penalty phase, Deputy Dist. Atty. Tim Casserly told a Vista Superior Court jury that Pearce is unworthy of sympathy and a life sentence because the way she orchestrated the killing of Wayne Pearce was “evil, vile and calls for the death penalty.”

But Pearce’s attorney, Brad Patton, making a final bid to save the life of the 42-year-old former Escondido teacher’s aide, implored jurors to consider how Pearce was devastated and irrational when her husband of 14 1/2 years left her and she realized she would never have his baby.

“She was down on her knees, it was her lowest point,” he said, describing the two weeks she contemplated the crime as a “period of aberration” in an otherwise normal, decent life.

Jurors will receive instructions from Judge Franklin Mitchell Jr. early Friday and begin deliberations on their two choices--death or life in prison without the possibility of parole for Pearce.

She was convicted March 12 of first-degree murder with special circumstances and conspiring to commit murder in her husband’s death on Jan. 31, 1989. The special circumstances that could bring the death sentence are murder for financial gain and lying in wait.

The jury agreed that Pearce had her husband killed to get his $200,000 life insurance benefits so she could keep the couple’s Valley Center ranch house for herself and her pets.

In choosing the penalty, Casserly argued Thursday that jurors shouldn’t base a decision on her formerly productive life, but on her crime. “There’s no way you can insulate yourself from the death penalty by hiring someone else to do your dirty work for you,” he said.

“Who did she hire in this case? Kids!” he said. “Not sophisticated hit men, she involved kids in her crime, boys in men’s bodies.”

Doing that was especially sinister considering that Pearce had been a teacher’s aide, Casserly said. “For a teacher to use and abuse (her) position of trust . . . that’s particularly vile,” he said.

As for the actual killing Jan. 31, 1989, by Isaac Hill and Anthony Pilato, who were 15 then and were sentenced to the California Youth Authority for their first-degree murder convictions, Casserly said, “There are ways of killing that are quick, efficient and painless.”

But Pearce, he stated, knew the boys intended to stab her husband. He received 23 wounds from a kitchen knife and a carpenter’s hand ax, and later died at the hospital.

Casserly said that, when the hospital called Pearce about her husband, she showed no remorse, but was angry with Hill and Pilato, telling them, “You guys blew it.”’

The nature of the crime and the motive, money, were aggravating factors that outweighed other factors such as Pearce’s clean record and previously constructive life, Casserly argued. Thus, there isn’t sufficient reason to spare her from the death penalty.

However, Patton maintained that in cases involving a potential death penalty, only aggravating factors that weren’t an element of the crime can be considered in sentencing.

He declared that Pearce is hardly among “the worst of the worst” who deserve the death sentence. That is usually reserved for serial or random killers who act without feeling and without motive, he said.

Patton depicted Pearce as a woman whose life and ability to reason simply came apart when her husband walked out, leaving her without hope of having another child--she had two by a previous marriage--and unable to support herself or keep the house for her and her pets.

She was in a “tailspin” and “thinking crazy things,” he said.