Man faces execution in slaying
A former Long Beach man should be executed for the 1980 rape and murder of a 70-year-old Seal Beach woman, a jury decided Wednesday.
Benjamin Wayne Watta, 63, was convicted last month of murdering Simone Sharpe at her neighbors’ Seal Beach home. She had been entering the house through an unlocked garage door to feed her friends’ cats and collect their mail while they were on vacation. Her son discovered her body on Christmas Eve in a bedroom where she had been raped, strangled and suffocated, officials said.
Watta was not implicated until 2001, when an Orange County district attorney’s task force linked him to the crime through DNA evidence. He was serving a 10-year sentence in Florida for the attempted murder of his girlfriend.
During the trial, Watta’s defense attorneys argued that convicted Texas serial killer Henry Lee Lucas -- who confessed, and later recanted, to hundreds of unsolved murders before dying in prison in 2001 -- had in 1986 admitted killing Sharpe. Prosecutors, however, said the DNA evidence conclusively proved Watta’s guilt.
He is scheduled for formal sentencing July 31.
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