In 3rd Trial, LAPD Officer Is Convicted of Store Robbery

After three trials, a Los Angeles police officer was found guilty Thursday of masterminding the robbery of a check cashing store in the South Bay, but a jury deadlocked on counts involving a second robbery in the same area.

The jury convicted Officer Bobby Rydell Marshall, 36, of three felonies--grand theft, second-degree robbery and second-degree burglary--in the September, 1989, robbery of an Anytime Check Cashing outlet in Lawndale.

The officer, who is suspended without pay and will probably be fired, could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison. He had been free on bail, but Superior Court Judge Paul Gutman sent him to county jail on Thursday to await sentencing.

Two previous juries had deadlocked on all the charges against Marshall, one in favor of acquittal and the other in favor of conviction.

On Thursday, the jury deadlocked on charges involving the November, 1989, robbery of an Anytime Check Cashing outlet in Torrance.

After the verdict, jurors would not say whether the majority favored conviction or acquittal on the three felony counts stemming from the Torrance incident. But Deputy Dist. Atty. Efrem Grail said they told him they had deadlocked 7 to 5 on one count in favor of conviction and 11 to 1 on the other two in favor of conviction.

Marshall’s attorney, Edward A. Esqueda, said his client “feels confident that we will prevail on an appeal and he still emphatically denies any wrongdoing.”

Marshall has maintained since his 1992 arrest that the charges are punishment for his public criticism of the Los Angeles Police Department after the Rodney G. King beating case, for his 1991 statements to the Christopher Commission about racism and misconduct in the LAPD, and because he wrote a memoir of his 11-year career titled “Inside the Blue Klux Klan.”

Throughout the trials, Grail has dismissed Marshall’s claims as an attempt to hide his wrongdoing.

One juror, however, a woman who declined to give her name, said it seemed to her that Grail was conducting a witch hunt and that other prosecutors who had observed the trial were “out to get Marshall.”

Nevertheless she said, some evidence against him was compelling.

She and other jurors cited evidence indicating that Marshall had used his patrol car computer on more than one occasion to get information on the victims before the robberies and had accepted more than 125 phone calls from a prison inmate who confessed to the robberies and is serving a 14-year sentence.

That witness, Gregory Sims, had been in prison two years when police interviewed him in June, 1991. Sims implicated Marshall and his wife, who at the time of the robberies was engaged to Bobby Marshall and worked at the Lawndale check cashing store.

Carolyn Marshall was at one time charged with being an accomplice in the Lawndale robbery, but was acquitted of all charges last year during her husband’s second trial.