Judge Orders Death Penalty for Woman

A 20-year-old mother of four convicted in the fatal stabbing of a 9-year-old girl was condemned to Death Row Tuesday, becoming the third woman in California to be sentenced to die in the gas chamber.

In upholding a Superior Court jury’s recommendation that Maria (Rosie) del Rosio Alfaro receive the death penalty for the slaying of Autumn Wallace, Judge Theodore E. Millard denounced the murder as the most “senseless, brutal and vicious” killing he has known.

A jury in March convicted Alfaro of first-degree murder during a burglary and robbery. But the same jury deadlocked 10-2 in favor of recommending the death sentence for her for the June 15, 1990, murder. The young girl was stabbed 57 times and left bleeding to death on a bathroom floor in her Anaheim home.

A second jury last month unanimously recommended the death sentence after a retrial of the penalty phase.

Tuesday, relatives of the victim and the defendant sobbed as they listened to two mothers--one fighting on behalf of her child’s memory and the other for her daughter’s life--addressing the court.

Her voice breaking, Linda Wallace, 42, asked Millard to send her daughter’s killer to the gas chamber. Equally emotional was Silvia Alfaro, who said, before running out of the courtroom in tears: “Please, I beg you, please forgive my daughter. . . . Please, don’t kill her.”

During her trial, the defendant, who has four young children, testified she was a drug addict and was “wired” on drugs the day Autumn was killed. She said she and two men drove to the house that day to burglarize it for drug money.

At the house, she stabbed Autumn several times, Alfaro testified, but she maintained that one of the men did the actual killing. She refused to name him.

Linda Wallace later found her daughter lying in a pool of blood. Investigators found Alfaro’s thumbprint in the bathroom and a bloodstained shoe print matching what prosecutors said was a sole of the shoes she wore that afternoon.

Alfaro will join only two other women on Death Row: Maureen McDermott, a Los Angeles registered nurse, who was convicted in 1990 of hiring a co-worker to murder her roommate so she could collect on a $100,000 mortgage insurance policy, and Cynthia Lynn Coffman, 30, who was convicted of the 1986 kidnaping-murder of a woman in San Bernardino.