After Killer’s Quick Conviction, a New Battle

Defense attorneys for Rudolph Roybal were shocked by the unusually quick verdict returned by a Vista Superior Court jury convicting the 35-year-old of murdering an Oceanside woman but said Wednesday they were confident they could save him from the gas chamber.

The jury deliberated for less than five hours Tuesday before finding the Santa Fe, N.M., native guilty of murdering 65-year-old Yvonne Weden after she discovered him burglarizing her home on June 10, 1989.

“The jury reached a quick and correct decision,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Jack Koerber, who had spent most of the past year putting the case together.

Koerber told the jury that Roybal stabbed Weden more than 13 times, broke several of her ribs and sliced her throat from ear to ear.

Then, as she lay in her hallway either dead or dying, Roybal wrenched her wedding ring from her finger, Koerber told the jury.

Roybal, who had done some gardening work for Paul and Yvonne Weden in the weeks before the murder, knew the layout of the outside of their home in the 800 block of Rio Viento and knew what time Paul Weden would be at work, Koerber contended during the trial. Roybal fled the state just hours after the killing and was caught with some of the loot from the burglary.

Deputy Public Defenders Kathleen Cannon and Jack Campbell had argued that Roybal was drunk the night of the killing, that he had planned all along to return home to New Mexico, and that a doorjamb with a bloody fingerprint that did not match Roybal’s proved his innocence.

Now, Cannon and Campbell will try to show that Roybal’s life should be spared.

“We’ll try to get the jury to at least get a sense of who this person is and that he is a human being,” Cannon said Wednesday.

Roybal faces either the death penalty or life in prison without possibility of parole.

Roybal’s mother, Stella Roybal Orozco, who testified on behalf of the prosecution during the guilt phase of the trial and had turned over damaging evidence to the police during the early part of the investigation, is expected to testify in favor of the defense during the penalty phase, Cannon said.

Cannon also said that the crime is essentially a murder committed in the course of a burglary and is typical of many other murders that are not death penalty cases.

“I don’t want to make it seem like it’s not a horrible crime, it is. It’s a felony murder, and if this warrants the death penalty, then every felony murder warrants it,” Cannon said.

Cannon pointed out that, in a trial being held in the courtroom next to that of Judge David B. Moon Jr., where Roybal’s trial was held, the defendant is accused of hiring hit men to murder a former business associate.

“The man is charged with conspiring and bringing in other people in for a murder. There’s planning and plotting and premeditation alleged in that case, and yet, at some point in time, the prosecution dropped the death penalty,” Cannon said, referring to the trial of William Wayne Nix.

Cannon said he feels that the county district attorney’s office has selectively enforced the death penalty based on race. Roybal, who is Latino, was convicted of killing Weden, who is white.

Dist. Atty. Edwin Miller declined to discuss the death penalty in connection with continuing cases.