LOS ANGELES -- Theodore Frank, 65, whose first death sentence for torturing and killing a 2-year-old girl was overturned by the California Supreme Court and led to the ouster of three justices, died Sept. 5 on death row.
Ventura County Assistant District Attorney Greg Totten said Mr. Frank died in San Quentin State Prison after an apparent heart attack.
Mr. Frank was twice sentenced to death for the rape and murder of toddler Amy Sue Seitz, of Camarillo, Calif. The first verdict was overturned in 1985. He was sentenced to death again in 1987 and was awaiting execution when he died.
"It gives us an inner peace to know that he can never hurt another child," said the girl's grandmother, Patti Linebaugh.
After the California Supreme Court overturned Frank's first death penalty verdict, outraged relatives worked to publicize the ruling. It eventually became a rallying point for opponents of the late Chief Justice Rose Bird, leader of the court's then-liberal majority.
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In 1986, Bird and Justices Cruz Reynoso and Joseph Grodin became the first members of California's Supreme Court to be removed by voters, who refused to reconfirm their appointments.
In overturning the death penalty verdict, the California Supreme Court ruled that jurors should not have seen diaries in which Mr. Frank wrote of molesting more than 100 children over 20 years.
He had been hospitalized as a mentally disturbed sex offender after a 1974 conviction and was released less than two months before abducting Amy Sue in 1978.
Mr. Frank kidnapped the girl from the front yard of her babysitter's Camarillo home. He raped and tortured her, mutilating her with a pair of pliers, before strangling her and dumping her body in a drainage ditch miles away in Los Angeles County's rugged Topanga Canyon.
He was arrested months later after molesting an 8-year-old girl in Los Angeles's Panorama City neighborhood.
Mr. Frank, who was still appealing his second death sentence, had argued, among other things, that the long time he spent on death row amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.
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