Prosecutor Portrays Girl as Instigator of 3 Murders

On her daughter’s first birthday, 16-year-old Kimberly Lane of Lancaster got a haircut to “make her look young,” donned a white dress over an electric-shock control belt, and went on trial for three murders.

After a jury was selected Monday, the prosecution and defense delivered opening statements Tuesday in a trial that could lead to the teenager being sentenced to life in prison. Two men convicted earlier await the judge’s decision whether to sentence them to death or life imprisonment. Lane is being tried as an adult but cannot be sentenced to death because she was only 14 at the time of the killings.

The prosecution painted Lane as the instigator of the murders. After running away from home with the 48-year-old manager of the mobile home park where she lived in Lancaster, she didn’t like the shabby trailer camp in the Arizona desert where they were taken in by a woman with a boyfriend and 15-year-old son, Deputy Mohave County Atty. Derek Carlisle told the jury in his opening statement.

“Kimberly Lane didn’t like it there,” he said. “Kimberly Lane was the first person to say, ‘Let’s kill them and take the truck.’ ”

She was also motivated by bitterness at discovering that the trailer park manager, Frank Anderson, had lied when he told her he had connections to organized crime and if she went with him, she would become a “Mafia princess” in Chicago, the prosecutor said.

Anderson, 50, and Robert “Bobby” Poyson, 21, were previously convicted of first-degree murder, conspiracy and armed robbery for the deaths of the family that gave them shelter: Leta Kagen, 37, her son Robert Delahunt, 15, and her boyfriend, Roland Wear, 50.

Lane’s attorney Eric Engan claimed she was never aware of a murder plot until after the killings.

“This trial is about whether Kim Lane is a coldblooded murderer who participated in the killing of three people, or is Kim Lane--now 16, then 14--a scared girl in the middle of nowhere with nowhere else to turn but the company of two murderers caught in circumstances beyond her control,” he said.

Anderson’s false claims of Mafia affiliation and threats to have Lane killed intimidated her, Engan said. Engan told the jury Anderson began a “game of manipulation” before they left California when he pretended to make phone calls to the mob during a haphazard nomadic odyssey through Palmdale and nearby Mojave. “Anderson told her that the Mafia said he should eliminate her” because she was a reported runaway, Engan said. He said the verbal threats turned into physical abuse when they arrived in Bakersfield.

“At this time, also, he began to sexually molest her,” said Engan, contending Lane complied with Anderson’s desires because he had become her provider. “She didn’t want to, but had no choice.”

Lane has said that Anderson fathered her child, a girl who was born in jail and is being cared for by Lane’s mother and stepfather in Chino Valley, Ariz.

Monday was the child’s first birthday. Lane “said she couldn’t hardly sleep and that she cried most of the night,” said Raene Jones, a local hairdresser brought in before her crucial first appearance before the jury.

Defense attorneys said “to try to make her look young,” the hairdresser said.

Jones said she cut off 5 or 6 inches of Lane’s long, straight hair, added some curls and shortened her bangs to reveal her youthful facial features.

In pretrial hearings, Lane wore the standard orange jail jumpsuit, with handcuffs and leg shackles. For her trial, she was allowed to don a white flowered dress Monday and a blue dress Tuesday.

It was, however, hard to miss the bulky security apparatus she was required to wear under I it--an electric harness that a guard with a remote control could use to administer a 50,000-volt shock to immobilize her if need be. The chunky battery pack formed an obvious mound on her back.

Such restraints are required in all murder trials, a sheriff’s spokesman said, and the leg braces that would be concealed by male defendants’ trousers would be too conspicuous on a girl in a dress.

Carlisle told the jury that Lane’s role in the killings was to sexually lure the teenage Delahunt to a small camp trailer 150 feet from the main mobile home to set him up.

“While Kim Lane was kissing Robert Delahunt, Frank Anderson walked up behind him, grabbed his head and slashed his throat,” said Carlisle. Poyson then entered and beat the wounded Delahunt with fists and rocks, helped by Anderson, until Poyson used a rock to pound a knife through Delahunt’s head, Carlisle said.

Carlisle said Lane helped by handing rocks to the men during the half-hour it took to kill Delahunt and later by lighting matches and providing water so they could see and wash away blood.