People v. Charles
| Decision Date | 01 June 2015 |
| Docket Number | No. S076337.,S076337. |
| Citation | 61 Cal.4th 308,349 P.3d 990,188 Cal.Rptr.3d 282 |
| Court | California Supreme Court |
| Parties | The PEOPLE, Plaintiff and Respondent, v. Edward CHARLES III, Defendant and Appellant. |
R. Clayton Seaman, Jr., under appointment by the Supreme Court, for Defendant and Appellant.
Edmund G. Brown, Jr., and Kamala D. Harris, Attorneys General, Dane R. Gillette, Chief Assistant Attorney General, Gary W. Schons, Assistant Attorney General, Adrianne S. Denault and Peter Quon, Jr., Deputy Attorneys General, for Plaintiff and Respondent.
Defendant Edward Charles III was convicted at trial of one count of first degree murder and two counts of second degree murder (Pen.Code, § 187, subd. (a).)1 The jury also found true multiple-murder special-circumstance allegations. (§ 190.2, subd. (a)(3).) Following a fourth penalty trial, the jury returned a verdict of death. The trial court denied the automatic application to modify the verdict (§ 190.4, subd. (e) ) and sentenced defendant to death. This appeal is automatic. (§ 1239, subd. (b).) We affirm the judgment.
Defendant was charged with killing his father, Edward Charles II, his mother, Dolores Charles, and his 19–year–old younger brother, Daniel Charles.2 The prosecution showed that on the evening of November 6, 1994, defendant went to his parents' home around dinner time when his parents and brother were all present. Sometime later, defendant abducted Danny, stabbed him, and forced him into the trunk of Danny's car. He either choked or hit Danny in the neck with sufficient force to break his hyoid bone before killing him by striking him repeatedly in the head with a 16–inch crescent wrench. Defendant returned to his parents' house in the early morning hours of November 7, where he strangled his mother and beat his father to death with a blunt object. After cleaning up, he carried his parents' bodies to his mother's car, where he had placed Danny's body in the trunk, and went to his job at a service station, where he worked a full day. That night, he drove the car to a high school parking lot and set it on fire. He confessed his crime to his martial arts instructor, but he also attempted to persuade his 73–year–old grandfather to take the blame for the murders. In a conversation with one of his jailers and in a letter to a fellow inmate, defendant, while denying he had committed the murders, admitted he had cleaned up the murder scene at his parents' house, placed the victims' bodies in a car, and attempted to burn them.
The defense, in essence, was that defendant had neither the character nor the motive to kill his parents and brother.
Defendant is the elder son of Edward and Dolores. In November 1994, defendant was 22 years old and his brother Danny was 19. Defendant worked as a mechanic at the Sunny Hills Chevron station in Fullerton; Danny was a sophomore at the University of Southern California (USC). Neither lived at his parents' home on Terraza Place in Fullerton, but their maternal grandfather, Bernard Severino, did. His room was at the opposite end of the house from the master bedroom where Edward and Dolores slept. Danny lived at USC and defendant was living with the family of his fiancée, Tiffany Bowen, who was away at school.
On Sunday, November 6, all the members of the Charles family, except defendant, had dinner together. At some point, defendant arrived. There were no arguments among the family. Severino, the sole eyewitness to the events of that evening, told police Danny left first, at about 8:00 p.m., followed shortly by defendant. About 9:00 p.m., Dolores expressed concern to Severino that Danny had not called to report he had arrived safely at USC, as was his habit. Severino last spoke to his daughter at 11:30 that night. She was still awaiting Danny's call. Severino went to bed.
Gina Simms lived on Lakeside Drive in Fullerton around the corner from the Charleses' house. About 9:30 p.m. on November 6, she was accompanying her friend Susan Poladin and Poladin's daughter from her house to their car. As they walked down the driveway the two women heard someone calling for help. The call appeared to come from the trunk of a car parked across the street. They returned to Simms's house to call the police but by the time the police arrived, the car was gone. At trial, the women identified Danny's Honda as similar to the car they saw that evening.
About 9:50 p.m., Bryan Poor, defendant's coworker at the Chevron station, saw defendant arrive in a small, light-colored sedan he had never seen defendant drive before. Defendant told him the car belonged to Tiffany Bowen's mother, Jeanne, and he was testing the clutch or brakes. Defendant parked the car in a poorly lit area of the station. Ordinarily, he parked in front.
Jeanne Bowen testified that on November 6, she owned a gold Impala and a red Mustang, neither of which had a clutch. She also testified that, although defendant was living at her home in November 1994, he did not spend the night of November 6 there.
On Monday, November 7, 1994, Severino woke about 5:30 a.m. and went out to walk the family dog. He noticed a three-foot-long trail of blood drops in front of the steps to the house. He also observed that Dolores's car was not parked in its usual spot. About 6:10 a.m., Jerry Kuhn, who lived across the street, went out to pick up the newspaper and saw defendant using a towel or a rag to rub the Charleses' driveway. Defendant stopped when he saw Kuhn watching him. He resumed when Kuhn went back into his house, where Kuhn continued to watch defendant from a window. Defendant threw the towel or rag into the back of a truck parked in the driveway.
Defendant reported for work at the Chevron station about 8 a.m. James Burchit, the owner, said defendant was unshaven and looked like he had been up all night.
Defendant worked until 4:00 p.m. Sometime before 7:00 p.m., he returned to his parents' residence. By now Severino was concerned because his daughter and son-in-law had not been home all day. He asked defendant if he knew where they were. Defendant told him Danny had had a clutch problem with his car and his parents had gone to pick him up. Severino said he was going to call the police. Defendant left.
According to Jeanne Bowen, defendant arrived at the Bowen residence about 7:00 p.m. At around 9:00 p.m., he asked Ty Bowen, Jeanne's son, to give him a ride to the Chevron station. Defendant had been driving Tiffany Bowen's truck, and it was at the residence, but Ty Bowen drove him to the station. At about 10:00 p.m., Jeanne Bowen received a phone call from someone named “Rob” who asked for Ty. She gave the phone to her son. It was defendant, and he asked Ty to pick him up at a softball field. Ty again complied.
The softball field was about sixth-tenths of a mile from El Camino High School in La Mirada where, about 10:00 p.m., Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputy James Rifilato was dispatched to investigate a car fire. Rifilato found a gray Honda Civic smoldering in the school's parking lot. The vehicle was registered to Edward and Dolores. Rifilato looked inside the car and saw the nude, badly burned bodies of a man and a woman in the rear passenger seat. In the trunk, Rifilato found a clothed male body, less burnt than the other two. The bodies in the back seat were identified as Edward and Dolores. The body in the trunk was Danny. An arson investigator who arrived at the scene shortly after Rifilato determined the fire had been intentionally set in three locations, with gasoline used as the accelerant. Police also recovered a knife, a blue T-shirt, and a purple sweatshirt from the car.
An autopsy revealed that Danny had been stabbed twice in the back and was then either choked or struck in the neck with sufficient force to break his hyoid bone, which is located under the jaw. He was then struck in the head four times with sufficient force to fracture his skull. The cause of death was blunt force injury to the head.
Edward's autopsy revealed that his chest, back, neck, and head had been repeatedly struck, fracturing his ribs, spinal column, neck, jaw, cheek, and skull. The cause of his death was blunt force injuries to his head and neck.
The autopsy on Dolores's body revealed the cause of death was asphyxia due to neck compression. The medical examiner attributed this to strangulation or a blow to her neck. An examination of the victims' stomach contents indicated Danny was killed first and then his parents, several hours later.
Sometime between 3:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m., Leann Pollaccia was “dumpster diving” behind a business in an industrial area in Fullerton looking for items to sell. She found a 30–gallon garbage pail that held clothes and a towel soaked with blood. Pollaccia kept digging and found a wrench engraved with the yin-yang symbol.3 There was hair and blood on the wrench but she took it anyway, leaving the clothes except for a pair of jeans, which she washed. Later, when she read newspaper accounts about the murders that identified defendant as a mechanic, she concluded the wrench was probably the weapon police were looking for, so she turned it over to the police. Kimberly Speare, defendant's former girlfriend, testified she and defendant had engraved all of his tools with the yin-yang symbol and identified the wrench as part of the set of tools they had engraved. Steve Dowell, a criminalist with the Los Angeles coroner's office whose specialties included tool mark analysis, compared the wrench to Danny's and Edward's skull injuries. He concluded an injury to Danny's skull bore marks consistent with the class of wrenches to which defendant's wrench belonged. He could not exclude it as the object that produced the injuries to Edward's skull. Heidi Robbins, the prosecution's serologist, testified that blood found on the wrench was consistent only with Danny's blood.
Los Angeles County Sheriff's Sergeant Curt Royer, the lead...
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...People v. Chapple, 138 Cal. App. 4th 540, 41 Cal. Rptr. 3d 680, 31 A.L.R.6th 797 (1st Dist. 2006)—Ch. 2, §10.1.1(2) People v. Charles, 61 Cal. 4th 308, 188 Cal. Rptr. 3d 282, 349 P.3d 990 (2015)—Ch. 3-B, §6.2.2 People v. Chatman, 38 Cal. 4th 344, 42 Cal. Rptr. 3d 621, 133 P.3d 534 (2006)—Ch......