Child Killer Frank Receives Death Penalty

Convicted murderer and child molester Theodore Frank was given the death penalty by an Orange County jury Wednesday for the 1978 torture-murder of a 2-year-old Camarillo girl. In June, 1985, the state Supreme Court overturned an earlier death sentence against Frank, an act that was cited by opponents of then-California Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird in their emotional campaign against her retention last fall.

Frank was convicted in 1979 of the murder of Amy Sue Seitz and was sentenced to die in the gas chamber. But the high court overturned Frank’s death sentence while upholding his conviction, which forced a new penalty trial. Bird, who was ousted at the polls, had voted to overturn Frank’s conviction as well as his death sentence.

On Wednesday, the jury deliberated less than four hours before returning the death verdict. Jury foreman Richard Edes of Mission Viejo said the jurors were never close to voting for the only other choice before them: life without parole.

“It was the right penalty. The crime was so gruesome,” said Ventura County Deputy Dist. Atty. Thomas J. Hutchins. He prosecuted the case, which was moved to Orange County to avoid the effects of pretrial publicity in Ventura County, where the murder took place.

“You just can’t believe the relief that we feel,” the girl’s grandmother, Patricia A. Linebaugh, said afterward.

Grandmother’s Role

Bird’s opponents had repeatedly cited the Frank case as an example of how the Supreme Court was refusing to impose the death penalty. And Linebaugh, 51, was so upset by the high court ruling that she started a Thousand Oaks chapter of SLAM, the statewide group working against child molestation. Linebaugh also campaigned around the state against Bird.

Superior Court Judge John J. Ryan set formal sentencing for Feb. 11. While he has the authority to reduce Frank’s penalty to life without parole, no Orange County judge has done so since California’s new death penalty law was enacted in 1978.

The verdict came during the noon hour, and few people were in the courtroom. Frank, 51, appeared calm as the verdict was read.

Willard P. Wiksell, the Ventura attorney who represented Frank, was clearly disappointed.

“I put as much effort as possible to show he was mentally ill,” he said. “I think the jury realized he was not faking the mental illness. But they felt, ‘So what--that does not balance out what he did.’ ”

Wiksell said Frank was “scared” by the verdict and added that his client does not believe there is much chance he will win another reversal. In fact, the lawyer said, Frank believes that he received a “good trial.”

Under state law, every death sentence is automatically appealed to the Supreme Court.

Amy Sue was abducted from the home of relatives in Camarillo on March 14, 1978, and was raped, forced to drink beer, tortured with locking pliers and then strangled.

After Frank’s conviction, the Supreme Court ruled, 4 to 2, that his prison diaries had been illegally seized during a police search of his Woodland Hills apartment. But the majority of justices decided that the evidence against Frank was too overwhelming to let the seizure of the diaries interfere with his conviction.

They nevertheless held that the diaries had been a significant factor during the penalty phase of Frank’s trial. The diaries were barred as evidence during the two-month penalty trial that ended Tuesday.

In those diaries, Frank had written that he enjoyed torturing children.

Court records show that he had been a child molester most of his adult life. Hutchins brought in evidence of six other incidents of Frank’s molesting or assaulting children between the ages of 4 and 11. Frank was convicted in three of those cases. Two others were dismissed in a plea bargain, and the sixth one was not pursued by authorities in Missouri, where the alleged incident took place.

Frank was sent to Atascadero State Hospital in 1974. Amy Sue was murdered just six weeks after he was released.

While Ventura County authorities were still searching for the girl’s killer, Frank assaulted two other young girls, torturing one of them. He admitted those crimes after his arrest in July, 1978. But he still denies that he killed Amy Sue Seitz.