Jurors Urged to Send Killer to Death Row

A Ventura County prosecutor urged jurors Monday to send convicted killer Kenneth McKinzie to death row, calling his statements of remorse the hollow words of a desperate criminal.

“He has told you a lie to save his neck,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Donald Glynn said in closing arguments of McKinzie’s penalty trial.

But defense attorneys Willard Wiksell and James Farley argued that their client’s sorrow is genuine, and asked the jury not to execute a man who has accepted responsibility for his actions.

“There is nothing weak about asking for sympathy for someone who has turned it around,” Wiksell argued. “And life without parole is a severe punishment.”

McKinzie, 39, was found guilty of murder and related charges in October for killing 73-year-old Ruth Avril in December 1995. But jurors could not agree on whether he should be executed or sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Prosecutors decided to retry the penalty phase, and McKinzie’s fate now rests in the hands of a second jury.

Closing arguments lasted the entire day Monday, and through most of it McKinzie, 39, sat quietly at the defense table. But late in the afternoon, the defendant erupted, leaping out of his seat and yelling at the prosecutor after Glynn suggested McKinzie had lied about finding religious redemption.

In closing arguments Monday, Glynn told the jury that McKinzie deserves a death sentence because he killed Avril brutally and then lied about it.

Avril lived alone in south Oxnard. She was beaten 12 times in the head, and numerous other times in the torso and limbs. McKinzie initially denied the killing. But on the witness stand last week he admitted attacking Avril in the garage behind her apartment during an attempted robbery.