Wendy would be slain.
“If things had worked right,” Baker said, “Erickson would have been sitting in jail when that took place.”
Police explain the September abduction and murder as a crime of opportunity, an act of violent impulse. So far, police say, it appears that Comtois’ motor home was parked that night on Lurline Avenue near Devonshire Street by coincidence. It might have simply been the spot where Comtois stopped to fix a mechanical problem in the motor home.
“Your guess is as good as mine as to why they did it,” said Harold Lynn, the deputy district attorney who will prosecute Comtois and Erickson. “We don’t believe they marked these particular victims for this. They just happened to be the ones that were there.”
Wendy and her friend had just finished an evening of watching television at her family’s home on Lurline when Wendy decided to walk her friend to her home about a block away. But, parked in their path, police said, they found Roland Comtois’ motor home. Police said the girls were lured inside it when Erickson asked them for help.
Comtois, who police say shot the girls, was shot by officers and captured four days after the abduction. He is recovering but was arraigned last week on several charges in connection with the Chatsworth abduction and slaying, including murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, forcing sex acts on the surviving girl and injecting her with cocaine. He pleaded not guilty. Erickson is still at large.
The suspects could receive life imprisonment or the death penalty if convicted. But, prosecutors say, the fact that Comtois was even in a position to block the path of Wendy and her friend raised questions that some in the criminal justice system find disturbing.
Lynn, the prosecutor, said the reality of the criminal justice system is that it is not rehabilitative.
‘Evil Until He Dies’
“The theory of rehabilitation is a pie-in-the-sky dream,” he said. “You take a guy like Comtois, and he is evil from day one, and he is going to be evil until he dies. His record speaks for itself.”
Prof. Ernest Kamm, chairman of the Department of Criminal Justice at California State University, Los Angeles, said a flaw in the way society tries to deal with someone like Comtois is in the presumption “that at one time the person was habilitated.”
In fact, he said, “we find a great number of people have never adopted the mores of society in the first place. And they can’t or don’t want to once they return from prison.”
Kamm said that, although the answer to that might be the warehousing of career criminals to keep them from society, California laws aimed at enhancing sentences for repeat offenders and putting habitual criminals permanently in prison are often circumvented.
“The reality is that there are too many holes in those laws,” he said. “People can get through them.”
Lynn said Comtois had to commit an aggravated crime such as he is now accused of before he could be considered under the habitual crime law. He said Comtois’ previous convictions for robbery, burglary and drugs would not have applied.
Coming and Going
“Under our system, you don’t do life until you do something it considers serious,” Lynn said. “As long as he stayed below that line, he was one of the guys who kept coming in and going out.”
Although guidelines allow longer sentences for criminals with previous convictions, it appears Comtois reduced his time in prison by pleading guilty in almost all of his convictions. When he faced the drug and weapon charges in 1974, records show that, in exchange for his guilty plea, his previous convictions were not considered at sentencing.
Finally, authorities suggest, the system is too crowded and has too few resources to give individuals the attention required for true rehabilitation or for the protection of society.
“The system cannot accommodate the intense flow of individuals,” Kamm said. “Too frequently, individuals never get out of the cycle. They may wind up doing intense damage to somebody.”
Roland Comtois’ Criminal Record
April 1941: At age 11, he is charged with petty theft and diagnosed as an incorrigible delinquent. He is committed to reform school in Attleboro, Mass.
March 1947: Charged with breaking and entering in West Concord, Mass. He is given an indeterminate sentence limited to two years.
May 1952: Charged with assault with intent to commit rape in New Bedford, Mass. He is sentenced to three to five years in prison.
August 1955: Charged in Massachusetts in Peeping Tom incident. His parole is revoked.
February 1960: Charged with attempted bank robbery in Los Angeles. He