Drifter Sentenced to Die for Murder : Justice: Rudolph Roybal, 37, was convicted of stabbing an Oceanside housewife during a burglary.

A 37-year-old drifter was sentenced Tuesday to die in the gas chamber for stabbing an Oceanside housewife 13 times, slitting her throat from ear to ear and wrenching the rings from her fingers before looting the house for more jewelry.

In sentencing Rudolph Roybal to die for the 1989 murder of Yvonne Weden, 65, Vista Superior Court Judge David B. Moon followed the August recommendation of a jury that found the alcoholic felon from New Mexico guilty after two hours of deliberation but pondered his sentence for a week before recommending death.

“It was real important,” Weden’s son, Mike Boggioni, said of the death sentence, after he and his wife tearfully implored Moon to put Roybal to death. “I don’t think anybody wins in something like this, especially my mother.”

Weden’s murder marked the end of Boggioni’s musical career because he is afraid to leave his wife home alone and triggered a severe emotional crisis for the couple, Mike and Jo Anne Boggioni told the court.

Weden’s aunt also addressed the court before Roybal was sentenced, several family members wrote letters detailing the pain the murder caused them, and Deputy Dist. Atty. James Koerber played a videotaped interview with Weden’s husband, Paul Weden, who has since remarried and moved to Mammoth.

But the only statement submitted to the court on behalf of Roybal came from Roybal himself, scrawled on an unsigned loose-leaf sheet of paper.

“I can feel for the Wedens the hurt and the pain they must have gone through. But my own family have also been through a lot of pain and are still hurting,” he wrote. “I myself have been through a lot of changes. I know that I have faults, but I am no killer and will fight till the day I die to prove my innocence.”

Roybal, who was living at his stepbrother’s house in Oceanside, had been hired by the Wedens several weeks before the June, 1989, killing to do yard work. While Paul Weden was working his regular night shift at a local grocery store, Roybal broke into the Wedens’ home through the garage to burglarize it.

When he was discovered by Yvonne Weden, Roybal stabbed her 13 times, breaking her ribs and puncturing her lung, before slitting her throat from ear to ear and then stealing her rings and ransacking the house for more jewelry, the trial revealed.

He left town the next day and went back to his native Santa Fe, N.M., where his sister turned him in to his probation officer and his mother led police to a bag Roybal had hidden in a back-yard cinder brick wall. The bag contained the Wedens’ jewelry.

On Tuesday, Roybal’s two attorneys asked that their client be retried, on grounds that the controversial nature of the DNA evidence submitted at his trial was not made clear to jurors, that Koerber elicited inadmissible evidence from witnesses and that some jurors did not answer questions truthfully when they were selected to serve.

Moon denied that motion.

Deputy public defenders Jack Campbell and Kathleen Cannon also argued that Roybal’s abusive childhood, drug addiction and an alcoholic stupor at the time of the crime, along with significant mental illness, should be taken into account to reduce his sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. None of his former felony convictions involved this type of violence, they added.

But Moon found the heinous details of the crime, committed on an elderly woman for financial gain, outweighed any of Roybal’s shortcomings that might lessen his responsibility for the murder.

“This, folks, was a very gory murder. There was no compassion. There was no mercy. There was no justification,” Moon said as Mike and Jo Anne Boggioni erupted into sobs. “The fact that he took his knife and sawed across her throat, that one fact of the crime itself justifies the imposition of the death penalty.”

Any number of the 13 stab wounds alone would have been fatal to Weden, Moon added.

Roybal sat hunched and motionless through most of the proceeding, speaking to Moon only to arrange that some of his mother’s handkerchiefs, which he had decorated and that had been submitted as evidence, be returned to him.

“He’s handling it very gracefully,” Campbell said of Roybal’s response to the death sentence.

Roybal is hopeful that he may still be spared the death sentence, Cannon said.