SUNSET BEACH : Jury Orders Death for Murderer

A Superior Court jury Thursday ordered the death penalty for a Sunset Beach man and life imprisonment for his partner in the brutal 1988 shootings that left a mother of four dead and her husband permanently paralyzed.

Judge Frank P. Briseno in Santa Ana set Jan. 31 for sentencing of Robert Taylor, 39, and his partner Norman James Dewitt, 34, of Cypress. While Briseno could reduce Taylor’s death sentence to life imprisonment without parole, no Orange County judge has overturned a jury’s death verdict since the state’s 1978 death penalty law was enacted.

Taylor, Dewitt and Taylor’s girlfriend, Nanette Scheid, 29, of Newport Beach, had gone to the home of Kazumi and Ryoko Hanano in June, 1988, after reading the couple’s newspaper advertisement of a $20,000 Corvette for sale.

According to prosecutors, Scheid left the house and the two men handcuffed the Hananos together, making the couple kneel by their bed. The men then shot the victims in the head and took the car.

The Hananos were forced to put their heads under their mattress to help muffle the sounds of the .45-caliber shots, prosecutors said.

Last January, a jury recommended that Scheid receive 25 years to life. Prosecutors decided not to seek the death penalty for her because she was not present when the Hananos were shot. She is to be sentenced later.

Ryoko Hanano, 60, who became so frightened during the ordeal that she began chanting a Buddhist prayer, died instantly from the gunshots, but her husband, then 62, survived two bullet wounds and remains paralyzed below the neck.

“I think it was a pretty fair sentence,” said Dean Hanano, 22, who found his blood-soaked parents in their house six hours after the shootings. “Taylor did all the shooting. . . . Dewitt is not the malicious person that Taylor was.”

Dean Hanano, along with two sisters and a brother, were in the courtroom when the jurors announced their verdict after 2 1/2 days of deliberations. His father, who testified in court earlier and identified Taylor and Dewitt, was at home when the jury announced the sentences.

“My father’s wishes were that they both get the death penalty,” said the older son, Russell Hanano, 35.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Bryan F. Brown said he was satisfied with the decision. “It could have gone either way,” he said of Dewitt’s life sentence.

The last person sentenced to death by an Orange County judge was mass murderer Randy Kraft in 1989. A jury returned a death penalty verdict in October for child-killer Richard Lucio DeHoyos, but he has not yet been formally sentenced.

Defense attorney Michael A. Horan of Irvine said Taylor’s death penalty will undergo an automatic appeal.

“I think he expected it,” Horan said of Taylor’s reaction to being ordered to death by the five-man, seven-woman jury.