Jury, Out 10 Days, Finds Man Guilty of Murder

After the longest period of deliberation by an Orange County jury in nine years, an Anaheim man was found guilty Monday of first-degree murder in the slaying of a young woman last summer.

The jury, which found that the murder occurred during a rape attempt, reached the verdict in its 10th day of deliberation.

Carlos Enrique Ovando, 25, was so upset with the verdict that he immediately pleaded guilty, over the objections of his attorney, to a rape in a separate incident.

A conviction in that case, however, was just insurance for prosecutors. Because jurors in the murder trial found special circumstances of attempted rape, Ovando will automatically face a sentence of life without parole when he appears before Superior Court Judge Phillip E. Cox on Sept. 8.

A day after 24-year-old Rosario Arevalo was found dead on Aug. 27, 1986, in a garage just a block from Ovando’s house, he went to the Anaheim police station, accompanied by his minister, the Rev. Joaquin Rodriguez, and told police he had beaten the woman to death.

But Ovando said that he did not beat her until she assaulted him and challenged his manhood and that he did not find out until later that the beating had resulted in her death. His attorney, Deputy Public Defender William G. Kelley, argued that the slaying was not premeditated and therefore not murder in the first degree.

The jury deliberations in Ovando’s murder trial took almost a record amount of time. No Orange County jury had been out longer in a criminal case since Dr. William B. Waddill’s first trial on murder charges in a patient’s abortion nine years ago. The first of two hung juries in that case deliberated into the 11th day.

Lawyers involved in Ovando’s trial had expressed concern over the jurors’ lengthy deliberations.

“I don’t know what’s worse, having your wife in labor or waiting for a jury this long,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard M. King on the sixth day of deliberation.

Defense attorney Kelley said no one in his office could recall ever having a jury out so long. On the ninth day, he was somewhat optimistic.

“It shows that they are not agreeing about something,” he said.

But the long deliberations, it turned out, resulted from disagreement on a relatively insignificant legal point.

“We agreed very early that he was guilty of first-degree murder and at least attempted rape,” said juror Gary Thompson of El Toro.

Judge Had Been Away

“What took so long was deciding whether he was guilty of rape. We had a lot of heated arguments over that one.”

In fact, Thompson got so upset at one point he tried to walk out of the jury room for “some air” but was stopped by a bailiff.

Even if Ovando had been found guilty of raping Arevalo, he could not have gotten a longer sentence from the judge. The attempted rape was enough for the life-without-parole sentence.

When the jury was not ready with a verdict on Friday, after nine days of deliberation, the lawyers quipped that, “Boy, is Judge Cox going to be surprised.”

Cox had been away at his 40th high school reunion in Virginia for a week and had asked Judge Luis B. Cardenas to sit in for him when the jury was ready.

“When I got back and heard the jury was still out, I couldn’t believe it,” Cox said later.

Jury foreman Leslie Fischetti of Fullerton later joked that the deliberations were so long and so heated that three jurors took up smoking.

By noon last Friday, she said, there were eight votes in favor of a rape conviction, one vote against and three undecided. But early Monday morning, the eight finally agreed that rape had not been proven. Ovando was acquitted on that charge and the “during a rape” special circumstance was thrown out.

Second Rape Case

Cox, in a statement rarely heard from the bench, told the jurors that he strongly agreed with their verdict.

“This is the first case that Mr. Kelley has ever lost in my courtroom,” Cox told the jurors. “But the evidence was so overwhelming there was no way he could get a foot in the door.”

Prosecutors decided against seeking the death penalty, partly because of Ovando’s willing confession to police in a case where they had no suspects.

Ovando was accused of raping a pregnant woman just two days before the Arevalo slaying. Kelley told the judge he was not ready to go to trial on that charge until after Ovando’s sentencing in September. But after prosecutor King objected, Ovando, his head bent and his voice shaking, told the court through an interpreter that he wanted to plead guilty.

When Kelley objected, Cox permitted Ovando to substitute another attorney. Prosecutor King was elated at that turn of events, because he had been hoping to spare the victim in that case from having to testify again. She had already appeared at a hearing.