Teenage Girl Sentenced in Triple Slaying

A 16-year-old Lancaster girl, convicted of prodding two men into slaughtering a family of three who gave them shelter, was sentenced Thursday to at least 32 years in prison.

Kimberly Lane, who was 14 at the time of the killings, was given four life sentences--three for each murder and one for conspiring to commit them--plus a seven-year term for stealing the family’s pickup truck.

The life terms will run concurrently. Under Arizona law, Lane would have been eligible for parole in 25 years. But Mohave County Superior Court Judge Steven Conn tacked the theft sentence on the end, to be served consecutively, adding seven years before she could appeal for freedom.

“I hope you would give me at least some part of my life,” Lane said, sobbing as she pleaded with the judge before he passed sentence.

“I didn’t hurt nobody. I never threatened anybody. I am not a murderer.”

But prosecutor Derek Carlisle argued that Lane “was in many respects the catalyst” for the slayings in August 1996.

“She was the first one to say, ‘Let’s kill them and take the truck,’ ” Carlisle said.

The prosecution contended that Lane wanted their pickup truck to flee the grubby trailer camp where she felt trapped after running away from her Lancaster home. She pushed two men--Frank Anderson, 50, also of Lancaster, and Robert Poyson, 21--into committing the slayings, authorities said.

Anderson, who is believed to be the father of a child Lane gave birth to last year in jail, was earlier sentenced to death by lethal injection for the killings. Poyson is to be sentenced in July, with the prosecution calling for his execution.

Lane, although she was tried as an adult, could not be sentenced to death because of her age.

“I’m sorry for what happened,” Lane told the judge Thursday. “I wish there could have been something I could have done. I wish I could have been smarter, not so stupid.”

But Conn said Lane “made extremely poor decisions and engaged in behavior which I believe properly resulted in a jury convicting her.”

Lane testified earlier that she thought talk of killing the family was “just joking around,” and that when the violence began she felt trapped with the two men, fearing they would kill her too.

She said she fled a miserable home life in Lancaster with Anderson, a trailer park neighbor, who she said was at first a father figure and protector but later became her boyfriend. He offered to take her to Chicago, she said, where he claimed to have gangster connections and could make her a “Mafia goddaughter.”

They had little money and wound up in the home of Leta Kagen, a woman with a reputation for providing food and shelter to the needy, in the desert settlement of Golden Valley, Ariz. Kagen lived in a collection of shabby trailers without electricity or running water, littered with cat feces and surrounded by junked cars.

The prosecution contended that Lane, unhappy with the depressing surroundings, hatched the plot to kill Kagen, 37; Kagen’s son, Robert Delahunt, 15, and Kagen’s boyfriend, Roland Wear, 50.

Lane and Anderson formed an alliance with Poyson, who was also staying with the Kagens. Three days after her arrival, Lane lured the shy, lonely Delahunt into a kissing session in a vacant trailer, where Anderson burst in and slit his throat with a knife that had been planted there earlier, the prosecution said.

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Delahunt fought for life for half an hour, asking “Why are you doing this to me?” as Poyson hammered a knife into his skull through his ear. Lane handed the men rocks to use as hammers, the prosecution alleged.

Poyson then shot Kagen and Wear in their bed. Kagen died instantly but Wear, despite a bullet in the face, battled the two killers inside Kagen’s trailer and outside, where Poyson finally killed him by crushing his skull with a cinder block.

Lane, Poyson and Anderson then fled in Wear’s pickup truck, and somewhere on the road, Lane left Anderson for Poyson. A few days later, police nabbed Anderson driving the truck, which had been reported stolen, in a routine traffic stop in Anna, Ill. Poyson and Lane were captured at a homeless shelter in Evanston, Ill., where they had registered as a married couple.