Trial to Begin in Triple-Murder Case

He was a former Lancaster trailer park manager with a folksy sense of humor and a can-do attitude, nicknamed the “ice cream man” because he appeared to enjoy buying frozen treats and reselling them to neighborhood youngsters.

But in the summer of 1996, according to prosecutors, Frank Winfield Anderson became something else: a murderer, who after abandoning his invalid wife, ran away with a 14-year-old Lancaster girl, hooked up with a drifter and killed three people who were kind enough to take them in.

Beginning today, an Arizona court is scheduled to try Anderson, 49, on three counts of first-degree murder in the August 1996 slayings of Roland Wear, 50, Wear’s girlfriend Leta Kagen, 37, and Kagen’s 15-year-old son, Robert Delahunt. Anderson could be sentenced to death if convicted.

Wear and Kagen were found shot in the face in Kagen’s shabby, white trailer anchored on the outskirts of a remote desert community known as Golden Valley. Delahunt was found badly beaten with a slit throat and a knife protruding from his skull.

Although Anderson’s defense attorney has been reluctant to discuss the case, prosecutors and sheriff’s officials have aired their evidence--much of it gleaned from interviews with the defendants--during pretrial hearings.

Their findings paint the girl who ran away from Lancaster with Anderson--co-defendant Kimberly Lane, now 15--as the originator of a plot to kill Kagen, Wear and Delahunt in order to steal Wear’s late-model pickup truck.

Lane denies the allegation. “I didn’t plan to kill anybody,” Lane said in a jailhouse interview with The Times. “It’s something one of my co-defendants said I did.”

While in custody last year, Lane gave birth to a girl she says she thinks was fathered by Anderson. The child was given to her mother and stepfather, who live in Chino Valley, Ariz.

The bloodshed in Arizona capped a series of events that began back in the Antelope Valley in the summer of 1996, when Anderson and his wife moved into the Lancaster trailer park. There he met Lane, who shared a trailer with her younger brother and her father, an auto mechanic. Her father later described her to police in a missing-persons report as “a discipline problem.”

When Lane began spending a lot of time at the Andersons’ home, her father thought she was simply playing cards with Anderson’s wife, he said.

But after Lane disappeared on July 30, 1996, friends told her father that she had left with Anderson to visit acquaintances in Arizona. Anderson’s wife, Dorothy, reported her husband missing four days later.

At a pretrial hearing, Mohave County Sheriff’s Det. Eric Cooper testified that according to Lane, Anderson had lured her into joining him on a cross-country road trip by boasting that he had Mafia ties in Illinois.

“Mr. Anderson convinced her to go to Kentucky to be married and then to Chicago by telling her he was a member of the Mafia and she had been chosen to be [a Mafia] goddaughter,” Cooper testified.

The couple got as far as Nevada and met Robert Poyson, a 21-year-old drifter, in Laughlin, who guided them to Kagen’s trailer, where he was a short-term boarder, Cooper said, adding that Lane quickly grew disenchanted with the dreary accommodations.

Kagen’s trailer was littered with junk and cat feces and surrounded by wrecked cars and castoff tires. It lacked gas for heating, electricity and running water. Poyson and Anderson both said that Lane’s annoyance at having to live there prompted her to suggest the murders, according to Deputy Mohave County Atty. Derek Carlisle.

“She didn’t like it there,” Carlisle said. “She wanted to kill them and take the truck.”

Fifteen-year-old Robert Delahunt was the first to die, ending a life of hardship.

A stocky boy with a shy grin and home-cut hair, Robert walked five miles to the main highway to catch the school bus each day. Once there, class bullies teased him about his clothes and the body odor he carried because of the poor sanitary facilities in the crude trailer.

The teasing was so great that Robert spent recess indoors, where he escaped into a world of comic book characters, which he had an exceptional talent for drawing. He once confided to a school counselor that he didn’t like the way his mother, who survived on a $200-a-month welfare check, and her boyfriend, who worked as kitchen help for banquets at a Laughlin casino, let people stay at their place.

Sometimes the visitors stole his few belongings, he said. But Lane, Poyson and Anderson, according to Det. Cooper, planned to steal his life.

Lane was to use sex appeal to lure him to his death, Cooper testified at a pretrial hearing. “The plan was to get him into the small travel trailer and get him to start making out with Miss Lane, at which time Mr. Anderson would kill Mr. Delahunt,” Cooper said.

The ruse worked, Cooper said.

After Anderson slit Robert’s throat, Cooper said, Poyson joined Anderson in beating the boy with rocks. Two hours later, Poyson walked into Kagen and Wear’s bedroom and shot each of them in the face with a .22-caliber rifle the conspirators had found in the trailer and then used the rifle and a cinder block to beat the struggling Wear, Cooper said.

Following the killings, Cooper said, Lane, Poyson and Anderson loaded Wear’s pickup truck and fled with a stereo, some tools and a lantern. Kagen’s estranged husband discovered the decomposing bodies at least two days later.

During a routine traffic stop in Anna, Ill., a few days after the slayings, police nabbed Anderson driving the truck, which had been reported stolen. They later captured Poyson and Lane at a homeless shelter in Evanston, Ill., where they had registered as a married couple.

Anderson is the first of the three defendants to go on trial. Jury selection is scheduled to begin today, with opening statements expected Wednesday.

Trial dates have yet to be set for Lane and Poyson.

Though Anderson and Poyson could face the death penalty if convicted, Lane cannot be executed because of her age, though she will be tried as an adult.

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Tamaki is a Times staff writer and Hawkins a correspondent.