Judge Sentences Killer of Mall Shopper to Life Term

Ignoring Alan Brett Holland’s last-ditch plea for death, a Ventura judge sentenced the Hollywood drifter to life in prison Thursday for shooting a shopper through the heart in a Ventura parking lot.

Judge Vincent J. O’Neill could not impose a harsher sentence than that recommended by jurors.

But in a rambling 14-page letter to the judge, Holland pleaded for execution, saying he thought that jurors had condemned him to a fate worse than death.

“In my opinion I had in fact been given the worst of the two as far as punishment is concerned by rotting and dying a slow death in prison,” he wrote.

He wrote that his odd demeanor during the guilt phase of the trial, and even the remorseless letter he wrote to the prosecutor, were designed to encourage jurors to deliver a death sentence.

But his plan backfired, instead convincing jurors that he was not a carjacker but an extremely disturbed young man.

Holland also received an additional 21 years on various other counts that will kick in should his current conviction be overturned.

O’Neill said life in prison was a just punishment for the murder of 65-year-old Mildred Wilson.

“To think that a mile from here a woman who decides to go shopping pays for it with her life,” he said.

Holland, 31, approached Wilson in the parking lot of the Poinsettia mall in 1996 and asked her for change.

But Wilson began berating him for begging, Holland said, so he pulled out a gun and shot her.

As Wilson toppled into a flower bed, Holland jumped in her car and fled.

Under a new California law that makes a murder committed in the course of a carjacking punishable by death, the jury convicted Holland of first-degree murder in the first part of the trial.

Holland said he does not wish to appeal. He wants to die.

“I don’t ever want to see another courtroom again,” he wrote in his entreaty to the judge.