Jury Calls for Death for Woman’s Killer

After two days of deliberations, a jury decided Wednesday that Michael Schultz should be executed for raping and strangling a Port Hueneme woman during a burglary at her coastal condominium a decade ago.

Schultz, 34, a former mechanic and handyman, dropped his head in his hands and leaned over the table as Ventura County Superior Court Judge Donald Coleman read the verdict before a hushed courtroom.

Seated in the gallery, Schultz’s former fiancee, Therresa Mooney, buried her face in a handkerchief and sobbed. It was Mooney who provided the tip that helped investigators solve the killing of 44-year-old Cynthia Burger seven years after it occurred.

Burger’s family was not present when the panel’s six men and six women somberly filed into court Wednesday morning with their verdict. One juror wiped away tears.

Last month, the same panel found Schultz guilty of first-degree murder and special-circumstance allegations that he killed Burger, who lived alone, during a rape and burglary after entering her home through an unlocked garage door.

Jurors were forbidden from discussing the case until the penalty phase ended. Some stayed behind Wednesday to give attorneys their impressions, but the left the courthouse without talking to reporters.

“I think the jury has done the right thing,” Senior Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Simon said. “This was a completely innocent victim who did nothing other than keep her garage door open.”

“We have a death penalty not because we like it,” Simon said, “but because in some cases we have to have it. And this is that type of case.”

Deputy Public Defender Steve Lipson left the courthouse after the verdict and declined comment.

Lipson and co-counsel Brian Vogel pleaded with jurors last week to spare Schultz, arguing that life in prison was sufficient punishment. They urged jurors to look beyond the slaying and consider factors that led to Schultz’s conduct, including childhood drug abuse and a troubled, violent upbringing.

“We are not asking for forgiveness, but simply some understanding,” Vogel said.

But prosecutors argued Schultz’s abusive childhood did not doom him to kill Burger.

A car dealership customer-service manager, Burger was found dead Aug. 5, 1993, by firefighters responding to a blaze inside her two-story condominium. Authorities initially thought she had died from smoke inhalation, but an autopsy determined she had been sexually assaulted and strangled.

Semen was tested for DNA and stored at the county crime lab for years. It was matched to Schultz in 2000 after investigators received a tip from Mooney that Schultz had killed Burger.

Mooney testified that in 1999 Schultz confessed to the killing while she visited him at a High Sierra prison camp where he was serving a five-year sentence for assaulting a police officer. Mooney said Schultz feared a genetic test could link him to Burger’s killing and he asked her to help him escape.

Mooney refused but kept his secret for one year before calling police. “I couldn’t let him get out, no matter how much I cared about him,” she said.

Prosecutors argued that Schultz crept into Burger’s home, raped and strangled her, then placed her body face-down in a downstairs bathtub filled with bleach and other household chemicals to destroy semen. In another attempt to destroy DNA, they argued, Schultz set fire to Burger’s bed and disabled the smoke detectors.

During the trial, jurors viewed graphic autopsy photographs -- some projected on the courtroom wall. They also heard emotional testimony during the penalty phase from Burger’s relatives on the devastating effect that her death has had on their lives.

“They [the jurors] said that they looked at aggravating and mitigating factors, and they looked at the crime itself, and the fact that the victim was completely innocent and unknown to this guy was a big factor,” Simon said. “They felt the drugs didn’t have to lead to rape and murder.”

Coleman set a March 26 hearing to announce whether he will accept the verdict or reduce Schultz’s sentence to life in prison without parole.

Simon said he and prosecutor Michael Frawley will ask the judge to uphold the jury verdict and send Schultz to California’s death row.

For her part, Lois Bowden believes that is where Schultz belongs. Bowden, a former Ventura resident now living in Kansas, believes Schultz is also responsible for the death of her 15-year-old daughter, Jenniffer Vernals. The girl disappeared in March 1996. Her remains were found five months later in Santa Barbara County.

Authorities there have said Schultz remains their prime suspect in the unsolved homicide.

“I need to know the person who is believed to be her killer is not free,” said Bowden, who hopes the case will one day be solved. “My daughter deserves justice ... I don’t want her to be forgotten.”