A Savage, Puzzling Murder by the Girls Next Door : Crime: The sisters were 12, 15 and 16 when they killed a neighbor who had befriended them. Two years later the motive is unclear.

On a pleasant autumn afternoon in Northridge, Froggy, Chunky and Nini killed the neighbor lady.

Chunky and Nini, who were 15 and 12, stabbed her 11 times. Their sister Froggy, 16, stayed at home and turned up the volume on the family’s two stereos to drown out the screams from next door.

The neighbor, 62-year-old librarian Meta Frances Murphy, had befriended the girls, often treating them to snacks or driving them to and from school. It was a crime that made no sense--and still doesn’t.

“For some reason,” said the judge who last month found Froggy guilty of first-degree murder in the Nov. 20, 1991, killing, “there exists in the hearts and minds of (the three sisters) a quantity of evil unknown and unseen.”

“This court,” said Judge Morton Rochman, a veteran on the bench, “has never seen such malice, such an exhibition of a lack of conscience.”

In the past few months, all three girls have been convicted in Sylmar Juvenile Court of murder. The older two, now 17 and 18, have been sentenced to the California Youth Authority. Nini, who will turn 14 next month, is due to be sentenced May 13. Under state law, all will walk free by age 25.

The crime went unsolved for seven months. The girls were not suspects until friends reported to police that the sisters had boasted about the crime.

Not once, not in any of dozens of court hearings, has any of the girls shown remorse--continuing a pattern that began minutes after the crime. Chunky came home with blood on her clothes, tossed them in the washer and told Froggy that Murphy was dead. Froggy walked up the street to McDonald’s and worked her regular 5-to-8-p.m. shift.

That sort of heartlessness, authorities say, is a puzzle--and the motive for the crime remains a maddening mystery. It’s a case that serves as a bitter reminder of a basic truth: Sometimes, the manifestation of evil remains beyond understanding.

“When you investigate homicides, you get gang-related killings, you get dope-related killings, you get spousal-related killings,” said Detective Mitch Robins of the Los Angeles Police Department, who investigated the Murphy slaying. “This particular case is different.”

The killing did not center on gangs or drugs, authorities said. It was not a robbery gone wrong. It did not involve differences in class or privilege--Murphy and the girls lived next to each other at an upscale west San Fernando Valley condominium complex complete with flowering courtyards, swimming pool and tennis courts.

There was a note of racial discord. It was common for the sisters, who are black, to refer to Murphy as “an evil old white lady,” according to two teen-agers, once friends of the girls, who testified against them.

Once, while Froggy was bragging about the killing, shouting out that phrase and yelling repeatedly, “We killed that old bitch,” one of the teen-agers said he noticed that Chunky was strangely quiet. He looked and saw her trying to set a cat afire with a butane lighter.

Froggy, the only one of the sisters to testify in her own defense, denied calling Murphy “an evil old white lady.” It remains unclear what role, if any, race played in the killing, according to police, prosecutors and defense attorneys.

The girls have been unavailable for interviews. Their names are being kept secret because they were tried in Juvenile Court; their nicknames are used by family and friends. Because the case involves minors, all court records are sealed.

“To understand why three juveniles, who have their whole lives ahead of them, would conspire to kill their next-door neighbor--well, it is unique because of the ages of the girls,” said the LAPD’s Robins. “It was a brutal killing. The depth of the knife wounds showed real hatred.

“It’s difficult to understand how a (teen-ager) could develop that much hatred for a lady who used to drive them to school.”

But according to experts who study juvenile homicides, it’s not uncommon for teen-age girls who kill to kill as the three sisters did--in a pack and in a particularly savage manner.

The sisters waited for a moment when neither their mother nor stepfather was home. Murphy, who was a woman of routine, had Wednesdays off and always spent that afternoon running errands--going to lunch, the hair stylist, the nail salon and the grocery store.

As police and prosecutors reconstructed events, Murphy was unloading groceries sometime between 4 and 5 p.m. when Nini and Chunky jumped her near the stairway of the two-story unit. The girls’ mother had just left to pick up their stepfather at work and would be gone for about an hour.

Froggy planned that she and Chunky would attack Murphy, one of the teen-age friends testified at Froggy’s trial. But at the last second, Froggy ordered 12-year-old Nini inside, the friend testified.

Nini and Chunky hit Murphy over the head with a globe-shaped glass lamp, essentially tearing away some of Murphy’s scalp and most of her left ear, police and coroner’s officials said.

Chunky screamed at Nini to hand her a knife, the friend testified. “Chunky said, from what I remember,” she testified, “that she stabbed the lady in the back and it felt like stabbing a pillow.”

Of the 11 stab wounds, nine were major and seven of those were to Murphy’s back, Dr. James Dibdin, a forensic pathologist with the Los Angeles County coroner’s office testified at Froggy’s trial.

One of the remaining two major wounds was to Murphy’s chest. The last was above her left eyebrow and into her eye, Dibdin said. An autopsy revealed so-called defensive wounds across her arms, meaning she was slashed while trying to protect herself, he said.

The attack spattered Murphy’s blood all over the lower floor of the condo--even on the television screen. Shirley Murphy, a cousin who cleaned up the condo to sell it, said blood soaked through the carpet, even through the pad to the concrete underneath.

When Meta Murphy didn’t show up for work the next day at the Panorama City branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, co-workers, aware of her penchant for routine, became alarmed.

Police found her body that afternoon, in the utility closet in her condo. She had been dragged in, face down, wearing only a bra and lavender pants, and had been buried under three coats. Only a hand was visible.

Police photos taken outside Murphy’s condo that afternoon show Nini and Chunky standing around, watching and laughing. “They played real innocent,” neighbor Gitta Ruivenkamp said. “Like they would ask the cops or the reporters, ‘What happened here?’ And someone would tell them, and they’d say, ‘Oh! Really?’ ”

“The brutality in these kinds of cases shocks even me,” said Charles Patrick Ewing, a professor of law and psychology at the State University of New York at Buffalo who has spent the past 10 years studying juvenile homicide.

Ewing said of Murphy’s slaying: “This fits what you would expect to see from girls, when they do kill. But it’s very hard to explain why.”

What experts have learned in recent years is that children who kill learn about--and become desensitized to--violence at home.

Several recent studies have dismissed the widespread belief that teen-age killers are usually psychotic or suffer from a bizarre mental disease. They conclude instead that a significant number of young murderers have been the victims of violence.

Typically, said Paul Mones, a Santa Monica attorney and author of the book “When a Child Kills,” teen-age killers were physically or sexually abused as young children.

But, Mones said, such violence does not necessarily have to be directed against the child for it to produce a lasting effect. Many children, he said, learn about violence by watching the important people in their lives--parents, aunts, uncles, brothers and sisters--fight.

There was “continuing” violence in the sisters’ home as they were growing up, a source said. It usually involved their father abusing their mother.

Another source, also speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed the abuse. Both, however, said that details remain sketchy.

“They saw a lot of violence in their early lives,” one of the sources said. “They grew up with it.”

When Nini was very young, the girls’ mother met another man. Later he became their stepfather.

But that change was not necessarily for the better. Two years ago, county authorities filed legal papers in Juvenile Court alleging abuse or neglect at the home, three sources said.

Sources would not disclose how that case was resolved. But in November, 1991, the three girls, an older brother, a younger brother, the mother and the stepfather were still living together in the 18500 block of Mayall Street, next door to Meta Murphy.

In interviews at the Sylmar courthouse, the mother declined to say whether there had been violence in the home. She said she had “fair and strict” rules for the children, but nothing unusual. The girls, she said, were well-behaved and did not even talk back to her.

“Mouthing off?” the mother asked. “No. No way.”

The father and stepfather could not be reached for comment.

In May, 1992, the older brother, then 18, was shot and seriously wounded by Los Angeles police after stealing a rifle from a Northridge gun shop and pointing the unloaded weapon at officers.

The brother has recovered. He pleaded guilty to a felony theft charge and was placed on three years probation and ordered to receive psychiatric treatment, according to Superior Court records.

“Just knowing that other family members were getting involved in violence--that has an effect,” said a source.

For some time, said the LAPD’s Robins, the older brother was viewed as a suspect in the Murphy killing. Neighbors told officers that he’d been seen taking a baseball bat to trash cans and hitting his head against a brick wall, Robins said.

But police turned their attention to the girls, the detective said, when a friend informed the police that the girls had boasted about the killing--and added that she wanted to know whether it was true.

In June, the girls were arrested.

It turned out, Robins said, that he and other detectives investigating the killing had been frequenting the McDonald’s at Reseda Boulevard and Devonshire Street, four blocks away from the condo complex--and had been served in the drive-through lane by Froggy.

A bloody palm print in Murphy’s home, police said, matched Chunky’s. Fingerprints matching Chunky’s and Froggy’s were in and on Murphy’s car, a white 1989 Nissan Stanza. Froggy testified that she took the car for a joy ride the morning after the killing.

Nini agreed to a plea bargain, confessing in February to second-degree murder. Chunky, who did not testify, was convicted in January of first-degree murder. Friends testified against both Chunky and Froggy.

Testifying in her own defense, Froggy said last month that she was innocent and insisted that her two younger sisters were the guilty ones. Chunky and Nini had gone to “spy” on Murphy and ended up killing her because, according to Chunky, “she went crazy,” Froggy testified.

“I didn’t really know the lady,” Froggy said of Murphy.

In sustaining the first-degree murder petition--the Juvenile Court equivalent of conviction--Rochman said Froggy’s testimony was not believable. Evidence of her guilt, primarily the testimony of her friends, sealed her fate beyond a reasonable doubt, he said.

Shirley Murphy, who came to court for all three cases, said she paid particular attention to each girl’s emotions.

“When I was sitting in the courtrooms, I was looking at their eyes,” she said. “A person’s eyes will tell you things. But their eyes were dead. There was no life there. There was a total lack of emotion or any sign of humanity.”

Ruivenkamp, the neighbor, said she recalls the look and that she still shudders at the darkness that descended two doors down, in Meta Murphy’s condominium.

“I’m trying to make sense of this,” Ruivenkamp said. “How can kids get together to hold a woman down, stab her 11 times and then put her in a closet? There must be hate in them to do that. There must be evil.”