For Family and Child’s Killer, Life Goes On

Another anniversary, another trip to the cemetery, another day ticked off in a long, anguished chronicle.

Next Wednesday, Amy Sue’s family will visit her grave again, 23 years to the day after her death.

“Year after year after year,” said Amy Sue’s mother, Sheryl Roberts. “Year after year, it’s the same thing.”

For the family, that means memories of a little girl who died brutally and constant reminders that the monster who killed her still lives.

“It’s so distressing,” said Patti Linebaugh, Amy Sue’s grandmother. “It never ends.”

By now, Amy Sue Seitz would be 25--old enough to have started a family, launched a career, or both.

But when she was 2 1/2, she was snatched from her baby-sitter’s Camarillo backyard. On March 14, 1978, a child molester named Theodore Frank drove away with her, forced beer down her throat, sexually assaulted her, tortured her with pliers and dumped her body like a broken toy.

At 2 1/2, Amy Sue died many deaths.

But Frank--at 66--has yet to die one.

He was sentenced to death in 1979, but the state Supreme Court overturned that sentence six years later. The diaries in which Frank rhapsodized about molesting children shouldn’t have been used as evidence, the justices ruled.

In a second sentencing hearing, Frank again received the death penalty--as well as fresh opportunity for additional appeals.

Both Linebaugh and Roberts work in the real estate escrow business. For years, Sheryl was her mother’s assistant, but Patti now is semiretired. Next month she’s getting married and taking some of her 14 grandchildren to Wisconsin for a family reunion. Life goes on--but with a cruel asterisk: It goes on as well for Theodore Frank.

On death row, he has taken up painting--mainly portraits of children, some of them semi-clothed. He suffered a heart attack and underwent a triple-bypass, but despite these flirtations with mortality, he never has expressed remorse over Amy Sue.

“He sat in the courtroom and smirked at us,” Patti Linebaugh said. “He sat there and snickered and smirked.”

To her credit, she took it personally. She made speeches and appeared on TV and started a national group called Society’s League Against Molesters. Her work for victims’ rights and tougher treatment of sex offenders peaked years ago; now she fields occasional calls for help from anguished families. Every so often a reporter calls to ask the obvious: How does it feel, after all these years? When will it end? Is it essential to see Theodore Frank die?

That would be the best outcome, mother and daughter agree.

Sheryl talks about how much she’d like to see fear flicker across Frank’s face.

“He hasn’t felt pain yet,” she said.

But the years have eroded Patti’s faith in the ultimate penalty.

“This has been a horrible, prolonged experience for us,” she said. “When there’s a life sentence without the possibility of parole, at least that’s that. The way it is now, it just keeps going--there’s no closure.”

Jeff Koch, the prosecutor now handling the Frank case, said he wouldn’t bet on when its odyssey through the judicial system finally will end.

“Even an educated guess is problematic,” said Koch, who has prosecuted Frank for 16 of his 17 years in the state attorney general’s office.

Meanwhile, reminders of Amy Sue’s death come up all the time.

In a high school class, Sheryl’s twin sons heard a lecture that touched on the Theodore Frank case, including details of the crime they had never before heard.

“The teacher didn’t know,” Sheryl said.

When Patti Linebaugh reads about a student taking a gun to his classmates, she thinks of all the families in grief without end.

When she sees a child wandering alone through the mall, she shudders.

And when she gets together with her kids and grandkids, she keeps taking pictures. Thousands are stored in boxes, waiting to be pasted into albums.

“In the end, all you have are memories and photos,” she said.

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at steve.chawkins@latimes.com or at 653-7561