VAN NUYS : Lye-Attack Witness Refuses to Testify

Former pimp Bobby Ray Savage, serving a life prison sentence in connection with a 1980 lye attack that killed a popular law student, refused to testify for the prosecution Tuesday in the retrial of a co-defendant.

Savage’s refusal stunned prosecutors, who will ask Superior Court Judge Michael Harwin today to allow the jury to hear a tape-recorded statement Savage gave before the trial began.

Appearing briefly before the jury, Savage seemed nervous and stuttered as he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, court observers said.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert L. Cohen said that because Savage already has been convicted in the case, he couldn’t incriminate himself. But Savage stepped down from the witness stand without saying another word.

In a written statement to the judge, Savage said he couldn’t testify “without placing the lives of my family and myself in danger.” He added that “further threats from the district attorney’s office and mistreatment from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department will not intimidate or pressure me” into testifying.

Cohen said Savage had not been threatened or mistreated. He added that Wednesday he will seek to play for the jury a statement in which Savage implicates himself and defendant Ricardo Robinson in the lye attack.

Previous witnesses have testified that Savage and Robinson knocked on the door of Sylmar law student Patricia Worrell and threw lye in her face in August, 1980. The attack allegedly was orchestrated by Worrell’s jilted fiance, a fellow law student named Richard Morton Gilman. Blinded and disfigured, Worrell died 10 days after the attack when lye she accidentally ingested during the attack burned through her esophagus and an artery.

According to testimony, the plot to disfigure Worrell unfolded after Gilman met prostitute Kim Bricker in a Las Vegas motel bar. She testified she introduced him to Savage, her pimp, when Gilman asked if she knew anyone who could beat up his former girlfriend.

Gilman paid Savage $750 in advance and promised more if the attack was carried out, Cohen said. Gilman, who also is serving a life sentence, is scheduled as a defense witness.

Robinson, whose murder conviction was overturned two years ago when an appeals court ruled his confession had been obtained illegally, is acting as his own lawyer.