Opinion ID: 2594735
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Rape, Robbery, Arson Causing Great Bodily Injury, and Murder of Mary Frances Litovich

Text: On February 7, around 1:30 p.m., Philip DiPrima, the father of Ann DiPrima, defendant's girlfriend, confronted defendant, who was in Ann's bedroom, about the recent theft of three guns from the DiPrima's home. DiPrima told Ann to call the police. When DiPrima asked defendant, Why are you stealing from me? defendant answered that he needed money to support his cocaine habit. When DiPrima asked if there was a gun in the case defendant was holding, defendant told him there was. DiPrima then told defendant he had a choice between going out the window with the gun and taking his chances with the police or letting DiPrima help him get into a drug rehabilitation program. By that time, Officer Stephen Perry of the Alhambra Police Department had arrived outside the house. DiPrima convinced defendant to follow him through the house and out the front door. As they came out of the front door, Officer Perry told defendant to put his hands up. Defendant dropped the gun case, ran back into the house, went out a side door, and climbed over a fence. Officer Perry radioed for assistance and gave the police dispatcher a description of defendant. Officer Richard Hinds and Officer Brace Nyquist helped Officer Perry search the neighborhood for defendant. Officer Nyquist saw a man matching Officer Perry's description climb a fence on Stockbridge Avenue. Between 1:30 and 2:00 p.m., defendant came through the back door of his friend Patricia Saldivar's house on Poplar Street near Stockbridge Avenue. When he left, defendant asked Saldivar to water down the cement in the back of her house so that dogs could not smell his scent. During the search for defendant, Officer Hinds was checking the 3600 block of Stockbridge Avenue when Mary Frances Litovich came out of her home and told him that her dog and several other dogs in the neighborhood had been barking. Officer Hinds told her to go back into the house. When Philip DiPrima told Officer Perry that he did not want to press charges against defendant, Officer Perry called off the search at 2:02 p.m. and the police left the area. Between 2:00 and 3:00 p.m., Richard Davila and Rudy Alarcon were in front of Litovich's house on Stockbridge Avenue when they heard an explosion and a woman scream help me three or four times. When the men saw smoke streaming out of a window on the side of the house, they went to the house to try to fight the fire. Through a window, Davila saw Mary Frances Litovich lying on a bed nude and struggling unsuccessfully to get up. The mattress, curtain, and walls were on fire; the flames around the bed were about a foot high. Davila found a hose in the backyard and aimed it through the window in an attempt to soak down the bed. After his efforts to reach Litovich inside the house were unsuccessful, Alarcon helped Davila in hosing down the fire. They were then joined by Jaime Villanueva, James Zito, and a neighborhood boy. Soon after the fire was reported at 2:40 p.m. firefighters arrived and put out the fire. Arson investigator Anthony Jakubowski determined that a water-soluble flammable liquid, such as rubbing alcohol or cooking sherry, had been poured over the bed and distributed throughout the room and then ignited with an open flame. Around 3:30 p.m., homicide detective Raymond Dance of the Los Angeles Police Department arrived at the crime scene. In the living room Dance saw a television, a VCR, and other items stacked in the middle of the floor. A Polaroid camera and a camera box were on the chair in the dining room. In an unoccupied bedroom, jewelry and watches were scattered across the floor. In the bedroom containing Litovich's body, dresser drawers had been pulled out and items of jewelry and clothing were on the floor. Detective Dance examined Litovich's badly burned body. She was lying on her back on a twin bed, with her blouse and bra pulled above her breasts. Her right wrist was tied to one bedpost with the electrical cord from a lamp, while her left wrist was tied to the other bedpost with the electrical cord from a clothes iron. The electrical cord from a clock was looped around her neck. The cords were still attached to the appliances. Elizabeth Morales, who resided on Sheffield near Stockbridge Avenue, testified that at 2:40 p.m. on the day of the fire she saw defendant walk down her driveway carrying a camera case and Polaroid camera film. Between 2:00 p.m. and 3:30 p.m., Luz Castellanos arrived at her home on Winchester. When she opened the door of a bathroom attached to the garage, she saw a person lying facedown on the floor; she asked a neighbor to call the police. When Luz Castellanos's sister, Beatrice, came home between 3:30 and 4:00 p.m., she looked in the bathroom; no one was there, but the shower was muddy and the floor was wet. The cover was off the toilet tank, and two boxes of Polaroid film were floating inside the tank. At approximately 3:50 p.m., Robert Espinosa, his brother Mike, and Richard Quezada were in a car at the corner of Poplar Street and Stockbridge Avenue, when they saw defendant run by them with a camera case. Defendant was wet from the waist up and the camera case he was carrying was wet. He appeared nervous and scared. The three men immediately drove to the scene of the fire at Stockbridge Avenue and reported their observations to Officer Bruce Spalding. Defendant was arrested shortly afterwards. When arrested, defendant was clutching a wet camera case full of jewelry, and bills totaling $20 to $25 were found on the ground nearby. Margaret Catalano later identified the jewelry as belonging to her mother, Mary Frances Litovich, the murder victim in this case. Defendant was taken to the Hollenbeck police station and placed in a holding cell. When Officer Milton Hernandez stopped by the cell, defendant said I burned up your momma. Did you find my boots under her bed? A week after his arrest, defendant telephoned his friend Rene Cardozo from jail and asked Cardozo to tell the police that Cardozo had given him the jewelry found in his possession at the time of his arrest. Cardozo refused to do so. The autopsy established that the victim's death was caused by smoke inhalation, burns, and compression of the neck. She had suffered a blunt injury to her chest. She was alive when the fire was started. Allison Ochiae, a criminalist with City of Los Angeles, detected spermatozoa on two slides containing vaginal samples apparently taken from the victim during the autopsy, shortly after her death. The semen had been deposited 12 to 24 hours before the samples were taken. Ochiae was unable to determine whether the semen was defendant's. Fingerprints lifted from the Buick car belonging to kidnap and robbery victim Saiz, from the house of murder victim Mary Francis Litovich, and from the bathroom in the Castellanos's garage did not match defendant's.