Supreme Court Rejects Appeal in ’78 Slaying

The U.S. Supreme Court refused Monday to hear an appeal for Theodore Frank, who was sentenced to death for the 1978 kidnaping, rape, torture and murder of a 2 1/2-year-old Camarillo girl.

By rejecting Frank’s appeal, the nation’s highest court upheld a November decision by the California Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously that Frank should be executed for torturing and murdering Amy Sue Seitz.

Monday’s rejection by the U.S. Supreme Court was the latest defeat in a volley of legal pleas that Frank has tried to avoid the gas chamber.

The state Supreme Court’s sentence cannot be appealed further. But Frank, 55, may keep his case in court by appealing to U.S. District Court another ruling made by the state high court, state Assistant Atty. Gen. Harley Mayfield said.

On May 31, the California Supreme Court denied Frank’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus, Mayfield said.

Mayfield said that if he appealed that ruling to U.S. District Court, Frank “would be asking the court to find that his federal constitutional rights were violated in some manner, to entitle him to have either his death judgment or conviction be overturned,” Mayfield said.

Frank’s attorneys, who could not be reached Monday for comment, have not filed such an appeal in U.S. District Court, Mayfield said.

Meanwhile, Frank is on death row at San Quentin.

Evidence during his trial indicated that Amy Sue had been kidnaped from her baby-sitter’s residence, bound hand and foot, forced to drink beer and then raped, tortured and mutilated with locking pliers before she was strangled.

Frank killed the child just six weeks after he had been released from Atascadero State Hospital. He had a 20-year history of child molestation.

In a diary presented to jurors in the first trial, Frank wrote: “I want to give pain to these little children. I want to molest them. I want to be sadistic. I want to harm them.”

Frank was initially convicted and sentenced to death in 1980 in Orange County after the case was transferred there from Ventura County.

Five years later, the California Supreme Court overturned the death sentence for Frank in a controversial decision that was cited in the successful campaign to defeat Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird in November, 1986.

A retrial of the penalty phase of Frank’s case resulted in the second death penalty, which the U.S. Supreme Court let stand Monday.