Killer Given Death Penalty in Torture-Slaying Case

Convicted killer Spencer Brasure was sentenced to death Monday after the victim’s mother urged the judge to impose the most severe sentence possible for the torture-murder of her only son--a crime that the defendant bragged and laughed about after committing.

“He enjoyed it, he wanted him to suffer,” Lee Anderson, mother of victim Anthony Guest, cried out in court. “There is only one just decision in this case--only one.”

On Sept. 7, 1996, Brasure, 28, and co-defendant Billy Davis, 21, kidnapped Guest, tied him to a makeshift electric chair and tortured him for several hours.

Prosecutors said the two Hawthorne men undertook the kidnapping as a favor to a female friend. She had briefly dated Guest and wanted Brasure to beat him up after the pair broke up. During the trial, the woman testified that she had no idea what Brasure would ultimately do to the 20-year-old Redondo Beach resident.

Evidence presented at Brasure’s trial showed that he burned Guest with a propane torch and shocked him with electric current.

The next morning, Brasure and Davis drove Guest to a remote campground near Gorman where they doused him with gasoline and set him on fire with a road flare, prosecutors said.

Brasure later bragged about the murder to his friends.

Brasure was found guilty of first-degree murder, torture and related offenses last month. After a weeklong penalty proceeding, the same jury decided Brasure should be executed.

Davis, also charged with murder, has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity and is due to stand trial later this year.

Although many of the crimes occurred in Los Angeles County, the case was tried in Ventura County because that is where the murder occurred.

At the sentencing hearing, defense attorneys asked Superior Court Judge James P. Cloninger to reduce Brasure’s sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole. But prosecutor Robert Calvert argued that the circumstances of the crime warrant a death sentence.

“The defendant’s treatment of Anthony Guest was savage, barbarous, merciless and cruel,” Cloninger said. “Mr. Brasure displays a depth of depravity which is, fortunately, quite rare.”

In addition to murder and torture, prosecutors presented evidence at trial that Brasure tried to have witnesses in his case killed before a preliminary hearing more than a year ago. The panel found Brasure guilty on three counts of witness intimidation.

At the court hearing, Anderson stood before Cloninger dressed in her son’s red hockey jersey.

“This is the only thing that I have left of my son,” she said, crying and grabbing the folds of his shirt.

She wept as she recalled the fights she had with her son over his drug use. Anderson kicked Guest out of her house, hoping that it would force him to get sober. Now, she said, she regrets that decision.

“Now I have to live with the fact that I put my son out on the street so that he could kill him,” she said, turning and pointing at Brasure.

“The fact is, Tony was a human being. He made mistakes,” she continued. The biggest mistake, she said, was getting mixed up with Brasure. It was a mistake that left him dead.

“I am on permanent disability and I am not expected to get much better,” Anderson said. “However, I am alive. My son is not.”