Jury Rules Convicted Murderer Was Sane : Crime: Decision means Michael Robert Pacewitz will be sentenced to state prison instead of a mental hospital.

A jury decided Wednesday that Michael Robert Pacewitz was sane when he stabbed to death a 3-year-old girl he was baby-sitting--a ruling that qualifies him for a lengthy prison sentence rather than an indeterminate stay in a state mental hospital.

Pacewitz, 21, a former psychiatric patient, told police and defense psychiatrists he thought Satan possessed the little girl and that he had to kill her to defend himself from the devil.

“I didn’t buy it,” jury foreman Don Shrake of Anaheim said after eight days of deliberating whether Pacewitz was sane during the crime.

Almost a month ago, Pacewitz was convicted of first-degree murder for the March 3 death of Marcelline Onick, who had been left in his care in Fullerton along with her baby brother. She was found in a bedroom, stabbed 44 times. Her head was nearly severed by a butcher knife.

Pacewitz was also found guilty of the attempted murder of his mother and assault with a deadly weapon on her boyfriend. The attacks occurred at their Anaheim apartment before Marcelline was killed. The jury found him sane during those assaults as well.

One juror said the panel decided that Deputy Dist. Atty. Bryan F. Brown, the prosecutor, gave the most reasonable explanation for the attack on the little girl.

Brown told jurors that Pacewitz was so angry at his mother that he killed Marcelline to get back at her. His mother, Elena Fontaine, with whom he had had a stormy relationship, used to baby-sit the girl and treated her a granddaughter.

“We tried to come up with motives, and that was probably the most plausible motive we could figure out,” said juror Ron Simpson of Cypress.

The sanity finding means Pacewitz will be sentenced to state prison for 26 years to life instead of a mental hospital. Superior Court Judge Richard L. Weatherspoon set formal sentencing for Dec. 7.

Brown said he will support a recommendation that Pacewitz be sent to prison in Vacaville, where there is a mental facility. Prosecutors argued that Pacewitz was sane and opposed a mental hospital commitment partly because it would mean that Pacewitz could be released any time doctors deemed he was cured.

“He may very well be schizophrenic,” Brown said. “But a lot of schizophrenics know the difference between right and wrong. That doesn’t mean he was criminally insane.”

Deputy Public Defender E. Robert Goss Jr. questioned numerous psychiatrists at the guilt and penalty phases to show that Pacewitz believed he was attacking Satan. The doctors accepted Pacewitz’s statements that he kept hearing voices that told him to kill Satan.

“He might have heard voices, but we don’t believe those voices told him to kill the little girl,” Simpson said. “We thought that the psychiatrists homed in on the Satan thing and ignored a lot of the other evidence. We didn’t ignore any of it.”

Pacewitz also drastically changed his version of events shortly after his arrest. He told The Times in a jailhouse interview that he worshiped Satan and that he killed the little girl for Satan. He later said he believed the child was Satan and that voices had told him he should make up the story for the newspaper.

The night of the attacks, Pacewitz was apparently unhappy with his mother’s recommendation that he attend church to help him with his mental problems. About 8 p.m., he entered her home and tore her throat with a knife.

He might have killed her, prosecutors believe, if her boyfriend, Juan Marin, had not fended off the attack long enough for someone else in the house to contact police.

Before authorities arrived, Pacewitz fled. They were searching for him when he hitchhiked to a Fullerton apartment complex and met some friends. In one unit, Joann Boydston was planning out for the evening and needed someone to watch her two children, including Marcelline.

Pacewitz was enlisted to help with the baby-sitting. He told The Times he killed the little girl in her sleep.

Boydston said during Pacewitz’s preliminary hearing that she forgave him for what he did. “I had to. I was so tormented, it was the only way I could find peace,” she said.