Pearce Receives Life in Prison Without Parole : Courts: Two jurors had favored death in the gas chamber. But, after hammering it out, sympathy for the former teacher’s aide, who was convicted of hiring two teen-agers to kill her estranged husband, won out.

A Vista Superior Court jury decided Friday that Roberta Pearce deserved sympathy and spared her from the gas chamber for hiring two teen-age boys to murder her estranged husband.

Instead of death, the 42-year-old former Escondido teacher’s aide was sentenced to life behind bars without parole for the crime that involved sex, drugs, a kitchen knife and a carpenter’s hand ax.

After an hour of deliberations, the jury was deadlocked, 10-2 in favor of life in prison, but after Judge Franklin Mitchell Jr. ordered them to try again, jurors debated for two more hours and emerged to announce a unanimous decision.

Juror Harold Pinaire of Oceanside said afterward that it took some convincing to sway the two women jurors who wanted Pearce’s death.

“They didn’t see the good in Roberta Pearce, we had to keep hammering away,” he said.

Despite the brutal death of Wayne Pearce, who was stabbed and hacked 23 times on Jan. 31, 1989, Pinaire said the jury was moved to compassion by the sad events in Pearce’s life leading up to her husband’s killing.

“It was horrendous,” Pinaire said. “He walked out on her for another woman. She wasn’t going to have any children. She thought she might have had breast cancer. I know it had to play something on her mind.”

Pearce was expressionless as the sentence was read to the court, just as she was on March 12 when she was convicted of first-degree murder. She showed no sign of relief that the death penalty wasn’t imposed.

Her brother, Haskell Meadows, later said “she cannot understand how she was found guilty” to begin with.

Though he said she was bearing up under the strain, “She’s scared because she’s going to be going to prison. She said she’s heard there’s a lot of fights in jail.”

However, the legal saga of Roberta Pearce might not be finished.

She is scheduled to appear again before Mitchell for formal sentencing May 11, and her co-defense counsel, Brad Patton, indicated that he will probably file motions for a new trial. He declined to say on what basis.

Superior Court Department G, so humid that a small floor fan was pointed toward the jury box, is a place far from the reality of most of Pearce’s 42 years.

She was raised in a middle-class, devout Christian family in a tiny Tennessee town, married at age 16, and bore two daughters before a divorce from her first husband in 1974.

Eventually, she married Wayne Pearce and wound up in North County, where she was a teacher’s aide at Orange Glen High School in Escondido. There, she made some devoted friends among the faculty, who remembered her in courtroom testimony as caring for difficult students, loving her pets, and desperately wanting a baby with Wayne Pearce.

After 41 years of an ordinary life and 14 1/2 years of marriage to Pearce, her world crumbled. He left her for a younger woman and she lapsed into a tawdry life. A 16-year-old girl, Mandy Gardiser, became her housemate, and soon, Pearce’s ranch house in Valley Center attracted other youths.

In testimony, she admitted smoking marijuana with the youths and to having sexual relations with one teen-age boy, Frank Rodriguez. The prosecution claimed she hatched a scheme for two other boys, Isaac Hill and Anthony Pilato, then 15, to kill her husband in exchange for each receiving a car and part of Pearce’s benefits from her husband’s $200,000 life insurance policy.

Hill and Pilato ambushed and mortally wounded Pearce with a knife from Roberta Pearce’s kitchen and a carpenter’s hand ax as he left for work. They were found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to the California Youth Authority until they reach age 25. Rodriguez pleaded guilty to conspiracy to murder for his role.

Pearce’s murder conviction carried special circumstances--murder for financial gain and lying in wait--which set her penalty at either death or life in prison without parole.

All this week, jurors heard testimony. They heard sometimes emotional pleas to spare Pearce because she had led a good life until she crumbled when her husband destroyed their marriage and her chance for a child. The defense also claimed the murder plot was invented and perpetrated by the youths.

The prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Tim Casserly, argued that her crime was so cold and calculated--hiring teen-agers and being angry with them when Wayne Pearce didn’t die immediately--that only death was the right penalty.

Even after jurors decided on life in prison for Pearce, Casserly insisted the crime merited the ultimate penalty.

“We wouldn’t be advocating a position we didn’t think was appropriate,” he said. “They voted for life and we accept that.” He wasn’t certain in which state prison Pearce would serve her sentence.

But juror Pinaire said the panel felt that despite the crime, her teaching skills could still be useful to society, which helped make her worth saving.

“I believe Roberta Pearce can do something for the prisoners or even society itself, even though she’s confined,” he said.

He said the two jurors who initially voted for the death penalty are women, “which was a surprise to me. I kind of figured they’d be more sympathetic.”

The jury was composed of seven women and five men, most of whom declined to be interviewed after sentencing. Said one woman, “It’s done, it’s over with. That’s it.”

For Pearce’s family, that may not be it.

Her father, Herbert Meadows, said, “We kept telling her don’t give up hope, we’ll have an appeal.”