Woman Says Armed Killer Made Her Help Kidnap Girls

A woman accused of being the accomplice of a convicted murderer told jurors Wednesday that he threatened to “blow my brains out” if she did not help him kidnap two Chatsworth girls, one of whom he killed.

The woman, Marcia Lynn Ramos, 36, testified in her defense in San Fernando Superior Court, where she is being tried on murder, kidnaping and six other charges.

She said the killer, Roland Comtois, threatened her at gunpoint throughout the Sept. 18, 1987, kidnaping. She said he became “crazy, angry and agitated” and ordered her to lure the teen-agers into his motor home by asking them to help start it.

“There was a crazy man standing behind me,” Ramos told jurors. “He had a gun in his hand. It was cocked. He said he would kill me if I didn’t” ask the girls into the motor home.

Ramos testified that at one point during the kidnaping, she planned to inject Comtois with a lethal dose of cocaine after he told her to get a syringe out of a cabinet. But she said she secretly dumped half the injection when he ordered her to give the shot to one of the girls.

“I thought it was for him,” Ramos said. “I wanted to overdose him.”

Ramos, her voice at times choking with emotion, described how Comtois terrorized her and the two girls, one of whom he sexually assaulted. Ramos said the 90-minute kidnaping culminated in Comtois’ putting the girls into an abandoned station wagon and shooting them in the head. He killed Wendy Masuhara, 14. The other girl survived because her upraised hand deflected the bullet.

Ramos’ testimony contradicted the prosecution’s position that she voluntarily initiated the kidnaping, and supported statements made by the surviving victim shortly after the ordeal that Comtois threatened to kill Ramos.

Comtois was sentenced in July to die in the gas chamber.

Ramos said that after the shooting on remote Woolsey Canyon Road Comtois drove the motor home to a dead-end, turned around and drove past the station wagon a second time. He noticed that a door appeared to have been opened, Ramos said.

“That means somebody’s found them,” she said he told her. In fact the wounded girl had walked down the road and had been taken by a passing motorist to a hospital.