Spirited Woman Is Slain in Home She Wouldn’t Leave : Crime: South-Central neighbors mourn and complain about old values gone awry.

For 55 years--most of them as a widow living alone--Ruth Roberts resided in a tiny wooden bungalow on West 73rd Street. A woman of means who might have retreated to a mansion in her native North Dakota, she was also a person of mettle, a 78-year-old gentlewoman who on principle refused to abandon her increasingly crime-ridden South-Central neighborhood.

Miss Baby Ruth, people called her, because she often gave candy to children. Even gang members would salute her as they passed by. “Yo, Miss Baby Ruth!” they would say.

Then, as the white-haired Miss Baby Ruth sat at her desk figuring her taxes late Friday, some small-time robber apparently entered her house and stabbed her to death for a few dollars and a television set with a 13-inch screen.

Ruth Roberts was white; the neighbors mourning her are black. But less than half a mile from where riots broke out last year at Florence and Normandie avenues, no one was talking about race when they learned of the murder Saturday. Instead, they were talking about decent folks and criminals, about old values and young people gone awry.

“It’s real pitiful what’s happening these days,” said Pamela Wyley, who lives across the street and worries when she must leave her husband, who has no legs, alone. “They’re picking on the old people, picking on people who cannot defend themselves.”

For those who struggle in this neighborhood to live by the Golden Rule, tending by day to gardens and to drug dealers on the prowl by night, putting their children through college as teen-agers spray their curbs with graffiti, the murder of Roberts seems an attack on people everywhere who are put at risk simply because they are old. Or alone.

“I tried to get her to leave, especially last year when I saw the riots break out on TV,” said Eleanor Wisner, 60, a niece from Arizona who is her closest living relative. “But she was pigheaded. She loved California. She didn’t want to go.”

Ruth Isobel Roberts was, in many ways, the best of Middle America. A woman who paid her bills and wrote letters to her congressmen. A God-loving woman with guts who, come hell or high water or robbers at her door, wasn’t going to give up and leave the Southern California she loved.

“Just scares me to death--I didn’t sleep at all last night,” said a 90-year-old neighbor on his sixth pacemaker. “ ‘Twas somebody who knew her, all right, who knew she lived alone.”

He was lamenting her death with another neighbor, a woman who met Roberts 36 years ago when, she said, “the neighborhood was poor but the people in it had brains and dichondra lawns.”

“I’ll miss her,” said a gray-haired woman who was afraid to give her name. “She was almost the only one left you could talk to and learn something from.”

As they spoke, cars began driving down the street: a neighborhood pimp, an evangelist, an ice cream truck with its tinkling music, looky-loos with windows up and locks down, pointing at Miss Baby Ruth’s house as they drove by.

Roberts had stayed even though her bungalow had been broken into maybe a dozen times over the years. When a battery was stolen from her sedan the day after she bought it, she learned to park the car sideways on her front lawn with the hood against the fence so no one could open it. When a young thief burst through her kitchen window, she ordered him right back out the same way.

She coped, corrected and fought back with tools learned in civics classes.

In 1986, she wrote a letter to the late Councilman Gilbert Lindsay informing him that the alley behind her house was being used by drug dealers and transients. “We do not intend to stand by and see our neighborhood develop into a Skid Row,” she wrote on behalf of an ad hoc neighborhood committee.

She didn’t demand the vagrants’ arrest. A generous woman, she asked that they be provided “housing and sanitary facilities.” Then, when the alley was cleared and cleaned, she wrote a thank you note to Lindsay with copies to the mayor.

Still, Roberts learned to buy nothing “of value” that could be hocked at a pawn shop for a quick fix. Instead, she kept to her books, her correspondence, her tapes of Kate Smith and Luciano Pavarotti, and her garden.

“To older folks, all this had great value,” Wisner said Saturday afternoon as she and one of Robert’s neighbors, Ruth Talpert, tried to sort through Roberts’ things. “But to young people today. . . .”

“All this” was a 600-square-foot bungalow filled with books and magazines and keepsakes of a woman who considered herself a civil servant. For more than 30 years, Wisner said, Roberts worked as a clerk in Southern California Edison’s wage and salary division, not retiring until she was 70.

As news of her murder was broadcast on radios Saturday, former co-workers began calling her home.

“She was our institutional memory, the walking encyclopedia everyone in the company would call if they needed something,” Edison employee Ruth Iwasaki said. “She was also very kind, always giving to others. I’m very, very sad about this. We’re all just in absolute shock.”

Just last week, Roberts called to console her about her father’s death, Iwasaki said.

“I asked her: ‘Ruth, have you thought about going up to your home in North Dakota?’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’ll do that--someday.’ She loved her home and just didn’t want to leave.”

Among the hundreds of books in the tiny space Roberts occupied was a history of Edison. There were also histories of the Civil War and histories of railroads. She particularly loved the history of a pioneer America when railroads were not drains on U.S. taxpayers but a means of forging through the wilderness.

It was on a train known as the “Empire Builder” that Roberts came to Southern California 55 years ago from her home in Devil’s Lake, N.D., her niece, Eleanor Wisner, said. The grand-daughter of a Norwegian-born Civil War major who once managed a fort near Devil’s Lake, Roberts went to business college and got her pilot’s license in the 1930s--just because she wanted to learn to fly.

She came to California, married only to lose her husband early and have no children. In a later age, those who knew her say, she undoubtedly would have become an executive. Instead, she took back her maiden name and became a secretary with pride.

She farmed--by telephone and by letter--160 acres in North Dakota. Barley, wheat and sunflowers were her crops--the latter a cash crop for feed that bore the bonus of beauty. Her home was filled with flowers--paintings of sunflowers and poppies, hangers heavy with dried roses from the garden.

She owned a historic mansion on Devil’s Lake, where she and Wisner often spent summers. Yet, her own home was barely livable--the rain-soaked roof seemed ready to cave in Saturday, and walls had probably gone decades without paint. Yet, Wisner said, her aunt was “pigheaded” about staying.

Roberts’ aging refrigerator still bears yellowed political cartoons about five presidents. This week, she told a neighbor she thought poet Maya Angelou had upstaged President Clinton at his inauguration. She had been busily writing letters opposing the proposed free trade agreement with Mexico, yet she was the first to give clothes and money--and her English-Spanish dictionary--to illegal immigrants moving in down the block. She eschewed luxury, but had the finest facial cream delivered to her peeling door by Bullock’s Wilshire.

Roberts took computer classes by night but she could not bear to part with the standard Remington typewriter she kept dust-free on her desk by the front window. Out that window, she could see one of the things that kept her in Los Angeles--a fir tree, maybe 40 feet high, that she planted in her front yard decades ago.

It was at her desk that Miss Baby Ruth was sitting, apparently calculating her 1992 taxes, when someone killed her. Police and neighbors suspect that it was someone she knew because there was no sign of forced entry, and she always kept her doors locked to ensure her safety and that of her eight cats.

On Saturday, Talpert was helping Wisner sort through the things Roberts left behind. Wisner said police had warned her to leave before dark and take anything “of value” with her.

It was Talpert’s son, Hodges, who came looking for Miss Baby Ruth when Wisner called them from Arizona on Friday, saying that her aunt had not answered the telephone. Hodges Talpert found her on the floor beside her desk and gave her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It was too late. Her head was beaten and she was stabbed near the heart, he said.

Hanging on the wall above her desk was a cloth calendar that read: “Bless This House, Oh Lord, We Pray. Make It Safe by Night and Day.” Pinned to the curtain were the numbers of the three closest police stations.

“Color doesn’t make any difference to some guy who just needed a fix,” said Talpert, in tears. “Ruth was a . . . nice person to know. I’ll miss her.”