Execution Scheduled for Girl’s Murderer : Justice: More avenues of appeal remain for torture slayer Theodore Frank. But Dec. 6 is his first date with the gas chamber at San Quentin.

An Orange County Superior Court judge has scheduled Dec. 6 as the execution date for Theodore Frank, who tortured and murdered 2 1/2-year-old Amy Sue Seitz of Camarillo 13 years ago.

Judge John J. Ryan issued the death warrant Friday morning, decreeing that Frank should die in the gas chamber at San Quentin state prison.

“We got the execution date set, and what that means in a nutshell is that he’s a step closer to the execution,” said Assistant Dist. Atty. Colleen (Toy) White. “But by no means do most of us think that will be the actual date, because he still has the federal appellate process to go through.”

Frank, 56, of Woodland Hills has already appealed his case to the state and U.S. supreme courts. But appeals are still available to Frank, who learned of the execution date in his San Quentin cell, state Deputy Atty. Gen. Jeffrey Koch said.

Frank’s attorney could petition U.S. District Court in Los Angeles for a writ of habeas corpus, a ruling that the verdict or sentence violates his constitutional rights. Such a case could take two to four years to work its way through the federal court system before it is resolved, Koch said.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that if a conviction has been unsuccessfully challenged in state court, it may be heard in federal court on a habeas corpus petition only in an “extraordinary instance.”

Frank’s attorney, state Deputy Public Defender Kent Barkhurst, said he will petition the federal court sometime before Dec. 6 for an order to stay Frank’s execution until it can rule whether he is being improperly held for the murder.

Frank, 56, was convicted in 1980 of kidnapping the girl from her baby-sitter’s front yard on March 14, 1978. He forced beer down her throat, then tortured and mutilated her with vise grips, raped her, strangled her and dumped her body in Topanga Canyon.

Just six weeks before the murder, Frank had been declared cured and released from Atascadero State Psychiatric Hospital, where he was kept in 1974-78 on a conviction for sexually assaulting a 4-year-old Bakersfield girl.

After his arrest in Amy Sue’s death, Frank admitted that he had molested 100 to 150 children in four states in 1958-74, and after leaving Atascadero in 1978.

In 1985, the state Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird, overturned Frank’s death sentence. But a retrial of the penalty phase of Frank’s case resulted in a second death sentence. He was tried in Orange County on a change of venue.

This summer, Frank petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his appeal, but on June 10 the court refused to do so.

“We weren’t terribly optimistic they would grant us any relief,” Barkhurst said recently.

Judge Ryan was originally scheduled to issue Frank’s death warrant Sept. 27 and schedule the execution date for Nov. 22.

But prosecutors agreed to reschedule the hearing for Friday after a court clerk neglected to send a notice of the proceedings to Frank.