Jury Calls for Death Penalty in Grisly 1991 Murder of Woman

SANTA ANA — John Joseph Famalaro should die for kidnapping, sodomizing and killing 23-year-old Denise Anette Huber and then hiding her nude body in a freezer for three years, a jury recommended Wednesday in one of Orange County’s most notorious murder cases.

Famalaro showed no reaction to the death penalty verdict reached by the jury of nine women and three men. Some of the jurors wept as their unanimous verdict was read after a day and a half of deliberations. The panel rejected a sentence of life imprisonment without parole.

Sitting in front row seats near the defendant, Huber’s parents, Dennis and Ione Huber, hugged each other and shed tears of relief as they were surrounded by photographers. Famalaro talked quietly with his two attorneys.

He will be formally sentenced by Superior Court John J. Ryan on Sept. 5.

After the proceedings, jurors said the decision was one of the hardest of their lives, but they believe it was right. Several said that an autopsy photo of Denise Huber, nude, handcuffed and bludgeoned to death, was tacked on to the wall of the jury room to remind the panel of the crime’s brutality. “The thought of such a nice girl having to go through what she did--many of us thought about what she must have gone through and put ourselves in that position,” said juror David Reyno of Aliso Viejo.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher Evans, who prosecuted the case, said he was grateful to the panel.

“I’m pleased that the jury saw the case the way we saw it,” Evans said. “It’s certainly not a happy occasion. But it’s certainly satisfying to see that justice was done.”

Defense attorney Leonard Gumlia said his client took the news relatively well.

“It wasn’t terribly emotional,” he said. “He’s been working on some spiritual things that take him well beyond this courtroom. He hasn’t been involved in this trial really at all in terms of the defense. It was probably harder on us than it was on him.”

Gumlia said he believed that Famalaro had a fighting chance during the trial but said the extensive pretrial publicity about Huber’s disappearance and the discovery of her body was always a concern.

“I did not expect death,” Gumlia said. “I was fearful of the case being [tried] in this county with the knowledge and the pressures. I still believe in my heart if this case had been tried somewhere else that we might have had a different result.”

In the end, jurors rejected pleas for compassion from Famalaro’s attorneys. The lawyers argued that Famalaro’s life should be spared because of his “dark and frightening childhood” at the hands of a “crazy” and “destructive” mother who emotionally abused her children.

Jurors took into consideration the viciousness of the crime, during which Huber was kidnapped, sodomized and killed by at least 31 blows to the head with a roofer’s nail puller. The victim--a recent UC Irvine graduate who worked as a waitress and cashier--was also handcuffed, blindfolded and gagged.

Another factor was the impact the crime had on the victim’s parents, who were kept desperately wondering for three years what happened to their only daughter.

Jury forewoman Bonnie Snethen, a Tustin executive assistant, said outside the courtroom the decision to execute Famalaro “was not without a lot of tears.”

“We felt sorry for him. We felt sorry for his family. This is not anything to be happy about. It was terribly difficult. We cried for most of the morning,” said Snethen. “We just felt that the aggravating circumstances of this far outreach the mitigation factors.”

The jury reached its decision on the first ballot, taken after a lunch break Wednesday, and “it was death penalty all the way,” said Snethen, who has a daughter only three years older than Huber was at the time she died.

Jurors said the penalty phase was more difficult than deciding whether Famalaro was guilty.

“I’m not a true advocate of the death penalty,” Snethen said. “But in this case, the crime, the brutality, the length of time the Hubers suffered. . . . There wasn’t enough mitigating factors to justify that.”

Huber encountered Famalaro, now 40, on the Corona del Mar Freeway on June 3, 1991, when she had a flat tire in the middle of the night on her way home from a rock concert. She was never seen alive again and became one of the county’s most famous missing persons as the result of a highly publicized search effort spearheaded by her parents.

The parents, who attended each day of the six-week trial, were pleased and relieved by the jury’s decision.

“I feel relieved,” Ione Huber said. “I feel it was just. It’s a long time coming.”

Still, the 53-year-old former resident of Newport Beach said there will never be closure for the family.

“Denise’s life is gone and we’ll never have it back and there’s nothing we can do to change that,” she said. “[The verdict] is the only real just thing that we have.”

Dennis Huber, 58, said, “That man did terrible, terrible things and he needs to pay.’

Times staff writers Davan Maharaj and Thao Hua contributed to this story.