California Court upholds death penalty for man convicted of killing two girls

SAN FRANCISCO - A man convicted of killing two young girls in the early 1980s still faces death after two trials and appeals.

The California Supreme Court upheld the death penalty Thursday for Philip Louis Lucero, in an automatic appeal of the sentence he received in a retrial of the original case.

The Supreme Court reversed the death penalty and ordered a retrial in 1988 at Lucero's first appeal, which a person is granted automatically if sentenced to death. At that time, the court found that the San Bernardino County Superior Court had excluded certain mitigating evidence during the penalty phase of the first trial.

At the second trial, the jury imposed the death penalty again, and at the second appeal Thursday, the Supreme Court upheld it. Judge Stanley Mosk dissented.

Lucero was convicted of murdering 7-year-old Linda Christine Hubbard and 10-year-old Teddy Engilman in Yucaipa, a town in Southern California, in April 1980.

Investigators found the bodies of the two girls in a dumpster later the same day they were reported missing. They also found blood on Lucero's clothes, in his house and in his car. Hubbard was strangled, and Engilman was bludgeoned and drowned in her own blood.

Investigators said Lucero then started a fire in a bedroom in his house.

The defense focused on Lucero's difficult childhood and claimed that he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder from the three tours he served in Vietnam.