Countywide : Defendant in Torture Case Is Convicted

An Anaheim man was convicted Tuesday of a series of attacks on women in a car authorities said became a rolling torture chamber.

Jurors deliberated for 2 1/2 days before finding David Lopez, 30, guilty on 32 charges, including attempted murder and torture, which will probably keep him behind bars until he dies.

Lopez, a former car-stereo installer arrested in 1993, shook his head and held his face as the verdicts were read in Orange County Superior Court in Santa Ana. The verdicts and jury’s findings on related allegations were so numerous that it took the court clerk 25 minutes to announce them all.

Lopez faces a maximum of three life terms plus nearly 200 years in prison when he is sentenced Oct. 27 by Judge Jean H. Rheinheimer.

“I’ve never seen one like this,” said the prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Jo Marie Escobar. “This is close to the kind of individual who picks up prostitutes and takes them out and kills them.”

Lopez was charged with attacks on five women in 1992 and early 1993. Authorities said he sought victims in areas known for prostitution, then raped and tortured them in his station wagon. He abandoned the women, tied up or taped, by the roadside in unpopulated areas of the county.

The jury foreman said the panel deliberated at length before deciding one of the most serious charges--that Lopez sought to kill a 17-year-old runaway when he dumped her, taped head to toe, in a rain-filled ditch after raping her in 1993.

“What happened to these women was a very horrible thing. Anyone would feel emotional about it. We tried not to feel emotional as jurors,” said jury foreman Doug Cook, 44, of Fullerton.

Jurors examined graphic photographs of wounds and viewed an assortment of bondage gear, wires and metal tools that Lopez was believed to have used on his victims. Lopez left a mountain of evidence in his home and car, ranging from victims’ clothing and jewelry to DNA evidence and mail he addressed to a victim but never sent.

During the trial, defense attorney William G. Morrissey called his client a “sick” fetishist who preyed on prostitutes but never intended to kill anyone.

“He’s the kind of person who should be in a mental hospital,” Morrissey said after the verdict.