Moments after Richard Ramirez's conviction in 13 serial murders, Los Angeles Homicide Detective Frank Salerno, who led the Night Stalker task force, mused: "We'll just never know" what drove Ramirez to commit the gruesome killings.
But at least some tenuous clues as to what drove Ramirez may begin to emerge when the trial's penalty phase starts Wednesday.
It is during this stage of a death penalty trial when defense lawyers usually call sympathetic witnesses, whose testimony is intended to persuade a jury to spare the convicted person's life. Whether that testimony includes claims of a bad childhood, a tearful family or a plea from the defendant himself, it is all meant to show what is known in legal jargon as "mitigating" circumstances.
"Unlike the guilt phase, the jury can consider pure sympathy in recommending a sentence," said Los Angeles County Assistant Dist. Atty. Curt Livesay, who decides in which cases a death penalty is sought. "The defense has wide latitude and hardly anything is inadmissible."
Livesay said juries recommend the gas chamber in only about a third of the cases in which the death penalty is sought here. No one has been executed in California, however, for a quarter of a century, although there are 262 inmates on San Quentin's Death Row, 85 of them from Los Angeles County.
The more heinous the crime, the more likely the death sentence. But if recent cases are any indication, juries are unpredictable and the outcome of even highly publicized multiple murder convictions is by no means certain.
For example, Hillside Strangler Angelo Buono, convicted in 1983 of murdering nine young women and girls in the Northeast Los Angeles-Glendale area, was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Jurors, who voted after only an hour's deliberation, refused to say why they rejected the death penalty.
However, the judge and attorneys on both sides speculated that it was because Buono's cousin and accomplice, Kenneth Bianchi, received a life sentence through a plea bargain.
Likewise, another jury took only an hour to decide to spare the life of Brandon Tholmer, a mentally disordered sex offender convicted in 1986 of raping and killing four elderly women in the Hollywood-Silver Lake area and a prime suspect in a score of similar slayings.
Defense attorneys argued that Tholmer was borderline mentally retarded and had spent most of his life in prisons or mental institutions. Even the brother of one of his victims testified that his murdered sister would not have wanted Tholmer to be executed.
