The California Supreme Court Monday upheld the death sentence of one of three men convicted of the rape and murder of a woman whose nude body was found on a freeway embankment in Long Beach more than two decades ago.
The state’s highest court unanimously rejected an appeal filed on behalf of Kevin Darnell Pearson, finding that there was “significant evidence of his active participation, including his own admissions.”
“Defendant himself ultimately made statements conceding that, when the victim attempted to flee, he helped pull her down, strip off her clothes and throw her over a fence,” Associate Justice Carol A. Corrigan wrote on behalf of the panel, with the other six justices concurring. “He acknowledged that he raped the victim while a companion held her down, repeatedly kicked her in the head and face with steel-toed boots, left her nude body by the side of the freeway, and subsequently disposed of evidence.”
Penny Keprta, a 43-year-old married mother of three, was kidnapped from a sidewalk around 11 p.m. on Dec. 29, 1998. She had been walking from her nearby home to a store to pick up food for her roommate — who was in a wheelchair — and was robbed of $6 worth of food stamps, raped and beaten to death with a wooden stake.
Keprta’s body was found by Caltrans workers — one of whom thought the body was a mannequin — on a freeway embankment on the northbound 405 near Wardlow Road and Long Beach Boulevard.
Pearson, now 49, was convicted along with co-defendants Warren Justin Hardy, now 49, and Hardy’s half-brother, Jamelle Edward Armstrong, now 46.
Pearson’s initial death sentence was reversed in 2012 after the state Supreme Court cited “the trial court’s improper excusal of a prospective juror because of her views on capital punishment.”
He was sentenced again to death in 2012 after the second jury to hear the penalty phase against him recommended the death penalty, with then-Superior Court Judge Tomson T. Ong saying that the weight of the evidence supports the jury’s verdict of death.
The woman’s son, Teddy, who was a teenager when his mother was killed, said at Pearson’s re-sentencing there isn’t a day where he doesn’t wake up to the realization that he doesn’t have his mother with him. He said Pearson “should get the full punishment,” adding that the defendant’s death would be “quick and painless,” unlike his mother’s violent end.
The attack “started out as a crime of opportunity” against a woman who was dragged into a dark area and attacked after walking alone late at night, the judge said.
The noise of the nearby San Diego (405) Freeway precluded anyone from hearing her screams during the attack, Ong said. The judge added that the 5-foot-2-inch, 110-pound woman was “outnumbered three to one” by Pearson, who was over 6 feet tall and weighed about 180 pounds, with two companions about the same size as him.
“It was a very heinous crime …,” the judge said, noting that testimony showed the victim had suffered 90 external wounds and two dozen internal injuries.
The California Supreme Court upheld Hardy’s death sentence in a 6-1 ruling in 2018.
The state’s highest court, meanwhile, reversed Armstrong’s death sentence, finding in a 2019 ruling that the trial court erroneously excluded at least four prospective jurors.
Armstrong was re-sentenced in 2021 to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Superior Court Judge Laura Laesecke said then that the maximum possible sentence was “warranted” against Armstrong, noting that she felt he had already benefited from a directive issued by then-District Attorney George Gascón that advised that “a sentence of death is never an appropriate resolution in any case.”