Jury Implored to Condemn Murderer

Prosecutors told a Vista jury Thursday that putting to death Rudolph Jose Roybal, the “coldblooded killer” of a 65-year-old Oceanside woman, would be “morally right.”

Quoting the Old Testament during closing arguments in the penalty phase of Roybal’s trial, Deputy Dist. Atty. Jack Koerber implored the jury to sentence Roybal to die for killing Yvonne Weden in June, 1989, while burglarizing her home.

“Don’t let him hide behind your conscience, because he has no conscience,” Koerber said.

The prosecutor, who referred to the biblical commandments not to steal or kill, told the jury that Roybal knew Weden was vulnerable and chose to victimize her because of those weaknesses.

“She was an elderly woman; she wore hearing aids in both ears; she had a foot in a cast,” Koerber said. “And her husband, the man of the house and her protector, was away that night.”

Weden had hired Roybal in May, 1989, to do some yard work. The jury determined that several weeks later, Roybal broke into Weden’s home while her husband, Paul, was at work and stabbed her 13 times, slitting her throat and wrenching her wedding ring from her finger as she lay dying.

He was convicted of murder after the jury deliberated for less than two hours.

“She put her hand out to him, and said, ‘I will hire you, a person I don’t know,’ ” Koerber told the jury. “She trusted him to come into their home, trusted him to work in their yard.”

Using graphic pictures from the crime scene and the autopsy, Koerber went on to detail how Roybal repeatedly stabbed Weden in the hallway of her suburban Oceanside home, breaking her ribs and puncturing her lung and finally slitting her throat.

Koerber accused the defense of not wanting the jury to know Roybal’s full life story, noting that none of the witnesses during the 1 1/2-week penalty phase testified to what a “good guy” Roybal was. Doing so, Koerber said, would have allowed the prosecution to hear from witnesses with contradictory testimony.

Instead, the defense relied on witnesses to Roybal’s impoverished and abusive upbringing, charging that his mother, Stella Roybal Orozco, had neglected him because he was born from an adulterous relationship and that she felt his birth had destroyed her marriage.

Orozco drank heavily while carrying Roybal, the defense contended, and that led to mental disorders that haunted him.

But those circumstances are not excuses, Public Defender Kathleen Cannon told the jury, and “there is no apology for murder.”

“We’re not asking for forgiveness,” Cannon said. “But if there is something still lingering in you about this case, how can you not spare this man’s life?”

A power outage at the courthouse cut short the hearing, and attorneys will continue their closing arguments today, with jurors beginning deliberations afterward.