Convicted Killer, 66, Gets Life in Prison

After hearing emotional statements from surviving members of a shattered family, a Van Nuys judge sentenced a 66-year-old man Tuesday to life in prison without possibility of parole for a double slaying he committed two decades ago.

“Hopefully, the trial here is the last word on this saga,” said Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Sandy R. Kriegler, referring to Kenneth Crandell’s nearly 20 years’ worth of appeals that took him off death row, won him a new trial and nearly carried him to freedom.

Crandell was convicted on two counts of first-degree murder last month in his retrial for the 1980 fatal shootings of a North Hollywood man, Ernest Pruett, and his 14-year-old son, Edward. Crandell was also found guilty of the kidnapping and attempted rape of Pruett’s then 15-year-old daughter, Marie.

In imposing the maximum sentence, Kriegler cited “the extreme viciousness and cruelty” of Crandell’s attack on the teenage girl, whom he forced to lie on a sofa next to her brother’s corpse.

Members of the Pruett family said Crandell’s sentence offered some closure but little solace.

“Our family has been haunted for the last 20 years with the prospect of this killer’s release,” said Ernest Pruett’s son Vernon Pruett, 58, of Glendale.

“It was my father and little brother who were murdered,” said Pruett, his eyes glistening as he stood in court.

Crandell was a family friend and boarder living with Ernest Pruett, a financially struggling 69-year-old widower, and his three minor children in a one-bedroom North Hollywood house.

During the trial, Marie Pruett Tyler, now 35, testified she awoke in the early morning of July 6, 1980, to find the body of Edward, who had been shot once in the head.

Crandell told her he had also shot her father, whose body was in another room.

The two men had argued just hours before the shootings. Crandell testified he killed the elder Pruett in self-defense after Pruett shot his son during a drunken rage.

Sitting in a wheelchair because he is recovering from colon cancer surgery, Crandell showed no emotion Tuesday as he listened to the latest sentence imposed on him.

He then announced he would appeal.