Man Guilty of Murder in 1993 Strangulation

After 30 minutes of deliberation, a jury Friday found handyman Michael Schultz guilty of first-degree murder for strangling a Port Hueneme woman a decade ago so she could not identify him as the intruder who crept into her condominium and raped her.

The panel’s six men and six women also agreed the Aug. 5, 1993, slaying of 44-year-old Cynthia Burger occurred during a rape and burglary.

Those special circumstance findings automatically shift the trial into a second phase, scheduled to begin Feb. 10, in which prosecutors will ask the same jurors to demand the death penalty for Schultz.

Outside the courtroom, attorneys for the 33-year-old defendant said they were not surprised by how quickly a verdict was reached based on concessions they made in closing arguments.

“Both sides said he was guilty,” Deputy Public Defender Steve Lipson said. “It was just a matter of filling out a form.”

During his summation, Lipson did not dispute that his client raped and killed Burger. But he challenged the prosecution theory of the case, telling jurors there is no evidence Schultz singled out Burger, waited until dark and then entered her home to rape and kill her.

Instead, Lipson suggested that Schultz, under the influence of methamphetamine, saw Burger’s garage door open and entered the house to steal her belongings. Once inside, he said, the drug-induced defendant raped and strangled Burger.

“The evidence shows a random, senseless crime,” Lipson argued.

The attorney did not ask jurors to return a lesser verdict of second-degree murder. Lipson conceded that under the state felony-murder rule, Schultz could be found guilty of first-degree murder because the slaying occurred during commission of a burglary and rape.

But Lipson urged jurors not to be swayed by the prosecution’s portrayal of his client as an evil monster who raped Burger and then deliberately “executed” her.

“This is not the time to decide penalty or punishment,” Lipson argued. “That will come later.”

Burger, a car-dealership manager, was found dead inside her two-story condominium by firefighters responding to a blaze at the residence. They found her body in a bathtub and initially thought she had died of smoke inhalation.

An autopsy later revealed she had been sexually assaulted and strangled. Semen collected by the coroner was kept in storage for years while investigators waited for a break in the case.

It came in August 2000 when police received a call from an anonymous tipster who suggested a DNA test would link Schultz to Burger’s slaying. Authorities obtained a warrant to draw blood from Schultz, who was serving a five-year sentence in state prison for battering a police officer.

A genetic profile extracted from Schultz’s blood was compared to a profile taken from the stored semen, and it proved a match, according to court testimony.

At the same time, investigators learned the anonymous tipster was Schultz’s former fiancee, Therresa Mooney, who revealed that Schultz confessed to Burger’s killing during a conversation in 1999.

Schultz made the confession after trying to talk Mooney into helping him break out of prison, she testified. She said Schultz had told her he was worried that authorities would use his DNA to tie him to a rape and slaying before he was freed, and when pressed for details he confided that the victim’s name was Cynthia Burger.

Mooney testified she was told by Schultz that he had to kill Burger because she could identify him. Mooney initially agreed not to tell anybody about the confession, but broke her silence a year later because Schultz was months away from getting out of prison, she said.

In closing arguments Friday, Deputy Dist. Attys. Michael Frawley and Richard Simon told jurors there should be no question about who killed Burger based on the confession and the DNA evidence.

Simon said the odds of finding another DNA match are so remote it would require taking the earth’s population and multiplying it 4 billion times.

“This is easy,” Simon argued. “We got the right guy ... there is no doubt that he is guilty.”

Frawley told jurors in his summation that the evidence suggests Schultz was not high on drugs, but had carefully planned his attack on Burger. He argued that Schultz watched her residence, entered after midnight with a stashed house key and went upstairs to a bedroom to rape her.

Schultz then strangled her and tried to cover up the crime by placing her body in a bathtub filled with bleach and setting her bed on fire. “It was an execution, pure and simple,” Frawley argued.