Drifter Convicted in Kidnap-Murder of Chatsworth Girl

A 60-year-old drifter was convicted Wednesday of kidnaping and murdering a 14-year-old Chatsworth girl and shooting her 13-year-old friend, leaving the wounded girl for dead in an abandoned car.

It took a jury just four hours to convict Roland Norman Comtois of charges stemming from the September, 1987, attack near Chatsworth Reservoir.

The bearded defendant sat expressionless as the guilty verdicts for each of the eight counts against him were read in San Fernando Superior Court.

Relatives and friends of the slain girl, Wendy Masuhara, hugged each other and wept as the verdicts were announced.

“It won’t bring her back,” the victim’s father, Allen Masuhara, said outside the courtroom later, but “it will make it a little bit better.”

Judge Ronald S. Coen instructed the jury to reconvene June 18 to begin hearing arguments in the sentencing phase, which is expected to last about two days. Deputy Dist. Atty. Harold S. Lynn, who prosecuted Comtois, said he will seek the death penalty.

“The facts are about as gruesome as you can get,” Lynn said outside the courtroom. Comtois can be sentenced to death because the jury found the crime included legally required special circumstances, including the charge that the murder was committed during the course of a kidnaping.

Comtois’ alleged accomplice, Marsha Lynn Ramos, 36, could also face the death penalty. Her trial on murder and other charges is scheduled to begin July 9.

The jury found Comtois guilty of first-degree murder in the killing of the Masuhara girl, who he shot in the head in an abandoned station wagon in remote Woolsey Canyon near Chatsworth Reservoir on Sept. 19, 1987. He was also found guilty of attempted murder in the shooting of the girl’s friend, who survived because her upraised hand deflected the bullet and Comtois left her for dead.

It was the surviving girl’s description of her assailant that led to Comtois’ arrest four days after the attack, and it was her testimony in the two-week trial that provided the foundation of the prosecution’s case.

She testified that she and her friend were lured into Comtois’ camper by Ramos while walking in the quiet residential neighborhood where they lived. Comtois came up behind them with a gun and drove them to another location, where he forced the younger girl to orally copulate him, she said.

The girl said Comtois injected her with cocaine and drove to the canyon where he placed both girls in the station wagon and shot them. The survivor, wearing a blood-soaked sweater around a wound in her neck as she walked along a nearby road, was seen by a passing motorist who drove her to a hospital.

Comtois has spent most of his life in and out of prison for crimes that included rape, robbery and heroin dealing. In 1962, a probation officer wrote of Comtois: “He has lashed back at society with a vengeance.”