Jury Recommends Death in Slaying of Fullerton Family

Several jurors wept Tuesday as they recommended death for a 23-year-old Fullerton mechanic who murdered his parents and kid brother and then set their bodies afire in the family car.

Edward Charles III, a college dropout and aspiring boxer, shook his head slightly and rested his chin on clasped hands as the death verdict was announced in Orange County Superior Court.

Charles would become the 32nd Orange County inmate on death row if Judge Everett W. Dickey follows the recommendation of the panel, the second jury to weigh the punishment.

Jurors, several red-eyed from crying, said the horror of the family’s slaying in 1994 outweighed appeals by surviving relatives to spare Charles’ life.

“There’s a certain amount of trust that goes along with being family. . . . You don’t look your son in the face and think your son is going to kill you,” said forewoman Susan Lansdon, a 39-year-old paralegal from Santa Ana.

Jeannine Hubbard, 33, a juror from Anaheim Hills, said Charles showed “evil” by killing his family members one by one over the course of several hours on Nov. 6, 1994. “He kept making those decisions,” she said. “He had so many opportunities to stop and he didn’t.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. David Brent said the death penalty was an appropriate sentence for someone who showed no mercy to his own family.

Brent argued during the trial that Charles was driven by hatred when he bludgeoned and stabbed his father, Edward Charles II, 55, a Hughes Aircraft engineer; strangled his mother, Dolores, 47, a self-employed typist; and stabbed and beat his brother Danny, 19, a promising opera singer in his second year at USC.

The prosecutor said Eddie Charles was jealous of his brother, faced parental disapproval over his girlfriend and argued with them over $50,000 he wanted to borrow to buy a gas station. Neither side could explain what triggered the killings that night.

One of Charles’ defense lawyers expressed dismay that pleas by relatives did not persuade the jury to spare the defendant’s life. The panel could have recommended life in prison without possibility of parole.

“For a jury to go against the wishes of immediate family members is very nonsensical,” said Deputy Public Defender Ronald Klar.

Klar said his client was “holding up” after the verdict. “He’s just disappointed,” Klar said.

The verdict followed a retrial of the trial’s penalty phase after a previous jury deadlocked 11-1 in favor of execution. The first jury found Charles guilty of first-degree murder for killing his father and second-degree murder for the slayings of his mother and brother.

All three victims were killed after a Sunday pasta dinner in the family’s home in the affluent Sunny Hills area of Fullerton. The parents’ nude bodies were found on top of each other the next night in a car ablaze at a La Mirada school. Danny Charles had been stuffed in the trunk.

Lansdon, the jury forewoman, and several other jurors cried and dabbed their eyes with tissues as their verdict was read following three days of deliberations. Jurors said the strain of their life-or-death decision made for emotional days and sleepless nights.

“No matter what you did--if you were vacuuming or washing the car--it went back to it,” said juror Armando Bolanos, of Irvine, a 28-year-old Federal Express employee and one of three men on the panel.

Bolanos said at least half of the jurors were undecided when the panel took its first vote. The brutal nature of the crime was a key factor in gaining the unanimous death verdict, he said.

“We always think of murders being people you don’t know. He knew these people,” Bolanos said. “That was a big part.”

Other jurors said they were angered by testimony that Charles had sought to shift blame for the murders to his own 74-year-old grandfather, who lived with the family and slept through the killings. And Brent told jurors that Charles also had written an incriminating letter outlining a plan for a cover-up that would make the killings look like a robbery.

“It showed what kind of person he was,” Hubbard said.

Jurors heard emotional appeals during the penalty phase from Charles’ relatives, who testified that they had already lost three loved ones and could not endure losing another.

Defense attorneys said the killings were an “act of derailment” in Charles’ character and life in prison without parole would be harsh enough for someone who had never been in trouble with the law.

Defense lawyers argued during trial that Charles had no motive to kill his family and attacked the prosecution’s evidence as too weak. They acknowledged it was “cold” of Charles to ask his grandfather, Bernard Severino, to take the blame but told jurors the young man was confused and desperate at being jailed on a capital charge.

Surviving family members, most of whom live on the East Coast, were not in court Tuesday. Severino, who still lives in the family home, could not be reached for comment. Severino has said he had no opinion on how his grandson should be punished, but hoped for an end to the ordeal. Sentencing is set for July 12.

The retrial was nearly thrown off track when an allegation surfaced that, before the first trial, Charles had plotted an escape by taking a member of his defense team hostage in the courthouse. His defense lawyers said a witness told them Charles was only joking and they never feared for their safety. Prosecutors hoped to raise the allegation in the new trial but dropped that when defense lawyers insisted they would have to be removed from the case--a move that would have delayed proceedings for months.