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.

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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.

A letter from Pruett Tyler, read aloud Tuesday by Deputy Dist. Atty. Lea Purwin D’Agostino, called Crandell “a sorry excuse for a member of society, a sorry excuse for a man.”

Because the crime occurred so long ago, the case was difficult to prosecute. At least three witnesses have died, and in the mid-1990s all the physical evidence was accidentally destroyed by a court clerk.

Defense attorney Michael V. White, who requested a new trial, challenged the testimony of law enforcement investigators who had to vouch for a gunshot residue test performed by another investigator who has since died. Kriegler denied the motion.

After the verdict was announced, jurors cited the test, which showed that Ernest Pruett’s hands had contained no gunshot residue, as compelling proof that the father did not shoot his own son as Crandell claimed.

Crandell was found guilty of first-degree murder and was sentenced to death in 1982. The state Supreme Court, however, reversed his death sentence in 1988. A federal district court in 1996 found the public defender Crandell had briefly used was incompetent, and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals remanded the case for retrial.

The man the family once regarded as a friend “managed to avoid justice all these years, eventually manipulating a disappointingly willing legal system,” Vernon Pruett said. “There’s as much peace and closure as we can get, with what the legal system allows.”

Crandell was not eligible for the death penalty this time because prosecutors are bound by the decision of another prosecutor a decade ago who chose not to seek capital punishment, and earlier this year the appellate division of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office missed a deadline for challenging that decision, D’Agostino said.

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.