Seeking Death When Family Members Slain

Shortly after his family finished eating a pasta dinner, Edward Charles III bludgeoned and stabbed his father, strangled his mother, and stabbed and beat his kid brother to death, before setting their bodies afire in the family car.

Almost two years later, 35-year-old David Von Haden allegedly suffocated his young son and daughter to death, then shot and seriously wounded himself in the chest.

In Orange County’s first two capital murder trials of 1998, jurors will be asked to vote in favor of the death penalty for these two men, whose unrelated cases nonetheless have something in common: The accused murderers are on trial for slaying members of their own families.

Legal experts say that a prosecutor’s decision to seek the death penalty for someone accused of killing a family member is rare.

“Human emotions are so involved and complicated that it’s not the same as a stranger killing,” said Laurie Levenson, an associate dean at Loyola Law School. “I think that’s one of the reasons why they didn’t seek the death penalty against O.J. Simpson.”

And on the rare occasions when prosecutors do seek the death penalty in intra-family murders, they often encounter jury resistance, as they did in the cases of Lyle and Erik Menendez, convicted of killing their parents in Beverly Hills, and Susan Smith, a young mother convicted of drowning her two young sons in her car in a South Carolina lake.

But Levenson and others observe that this reluctance to seek the death penalty doesn’t seem quite so strong in Orange County, where capital murder cases have climbed steadily in recent years, and where a record eight death sentences were ordered in 1997.

(On Friday, Daniel Carl Frederickson became the first Orange County defendant condemned to die this year when he was sentenced for the 1996 murder of a store manager in Santa Ana.)

Even when juries that have convicted defendants of murder deadlock in the penalty phase of a trial, prosecutors in most cases have been able to convince a second jury to recommend death.

“Orange County runs a very high percentage of cases that come back with death [sentence recommendations], and it would be foolish to think that doesn’t go into the formula” of the prosecution’s decision to seek a death penalty, said Deputy Public Defender Michael P. Giannini, who is defending Von Haden.

“It is interesting that throughout the country, and in many places in California, when the crime is in the family, they are looking at it differently.”

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But in Orange County it is not viewed differently at all, said Assistant Dist. Atty. John D. Conley, who heads a committee that decides which defendants should face the ultimate punishment.

“We first look to see if the aggravating factors outweigh the mitigating, then whether we think a jury would return a death verdict,” Conley said. “ . . . But the process is no different for a crime that occurs within a family.”

Still, there are only a handful of California death row inmates facing execution for killing family members, none of them from Orange County, according to the state attorney general’s office.

The Charles case, which begins this week, is expected to be particularly emotional, because surviving family members want the life of the 24-year-old spared.

“They believe the victims themselves, if they could speak for themselves, would ask to spare his life,” said attorney Thomas M. Goethals, who is defending Charles. “That’s a very unusual aspect of this case.”

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This will be the third time that prosecutors have tried to win a jury recommendation for a death penalty. The jury that convicted Charles of the three slayings deadlocked 11 to 1 in favor of death during the penalty phase of the first trial. A second jury voted in favor of death, but a new trial was ordered due to juror misconduct.

Deputy Dist. Atty. David Brent, the prosecutor for all three of the penalty phases, declined to discuss the case last week, citing the upcoming trial. But during previous trials, Brent said the death penalty is an appropriate sentence for someone who showed no mercy to his own family.

Brent is expected to again argue that Charles was driven by hatred when he killed his closest family members one by one over the course of several hours on Nov. 6, 1994. The victims were his father, Edward Charles II, 55, a Hughes Aircraft engineer; his mother, Dolores, 47, a self-employed typist; and his brother Danny, 19, a promising opera singer in his second year at USC.

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The prosecutor has said that the defendant was jealous of his brother, faced parental disapproval of his girlfriend and argued with his parents over $50,000 he wanted them to loan him so he could buy a gas station.

The killings occurred in the Sunny Hills area of Fullerton. The nude bodies of the parents were found the night after the killings in a car ablaze at a La Mirada school. The body of Danny Charles was in the car’s trunk.

“We’re not going to debate the horrendous nature of the act,” said Goethals. “What we’re going to try and do is put one horrendous night into the context of Eddie’s entire life.”

Despite the expense and effort, Conley said there was no hesitation in deciding on a third attempt for the death penalty in the Charles case.

“Cost is always in the back of your mind, but you can’t let it rule the day,” Conley said. “Charles is a good example. Three people lost their lives. One juror saw if differently [in the first trial]. Does that mean Charles should get life without parole? We can’t let the cost be the primary thing.”

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In Von Haden’s case, neither defense attorney Giannini nor prosecutor Carolyn Kirkwood could discuss specifics, since screening of potential jurors will begin in about two weeks.

Those eventually selected for the panel will likely hear the full details of the events leading up to the Feb. 22, 1996, slayings of 4-year-old Cody Von Haden and 2-year-old Courtney Von Haden, allegedly at the hands of their father, a washer-dryer repairman.

The murders occurred less than two weeks before a divorce court hearing with Von Haden’s former wife on child custody and other matters. The children’s bodies were found lying on a bed with toys in the master bedroom, the girl clutching a stuffed animal, according to a detective’s testimony at a preliminary hearing.

Shortly before police found the bodies, Von Haden allegedly called his wife and made threats, prompting her to call authorities, the detective also said.

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Ironically, prosecutors decided not to seek death in a similar case in 1993, when Jeffrey Steven Gibson, a decorated ex-Marine, killed his ex-wife and 5-year-old daughter during a drunken rampage.

Conley said the Gibson case was a “close call” and a tough one for prosecutors, who ultimately believed that the defendant’s status as a Gulf War veteran would make it difficult to obtain a death sentence.

Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C., said he believes that the Charles and Von Haden trials should not be death penalty cases either.

“Family murders involve a lot of passion, emotion and a lack of rational thinking. which mitigates against imposing the death penalty,” said Dieter, whose group works to educate the public about problems related to capital punishment.

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Goethals, a former deputy district attorney, thinks that juries are now more willing to recommend death in Orange County.

As an example, he recalled the case of Rene Flores Dayco, whom he prosecuted in the early 1980s. Goethals had sought the death penalty for Dayco for breaking into his in-laws’ Huntington Beach home and stabbing and hacking his wife and mother-in-law to death. The jury, after deliberating for eight days, recommended life without possibility of parole instead of execution.

“It goes to show how people’s feelings have changed,” Goethals said.

Prosecutor Conley said that, ultimately, it is up to 12 citizens.

“Our job is to see which cases we should present to the jury,” he said. “The defense will make the arguments as to why this person’s life should be spared, and it’s a jury’s job, as the conscience of the community, to decide” the punishment.