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37 years later, Barbara Ballman’s killer is brought to justice and now faces the death penalty

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In the dozen or so years after her younger sister was brutally raped and murdered in Glendale in 1979, Linda Benjamin filled 14 journals with notes to her.

Sometimes, thoughts came to her in the middle of the night, after a bad dream. Other times, she’d write to remember a special occasion, like her sister’s birthday or Christmas.

In one letter, Benjamin wished for five more minutes to hug her sister, who’d eat dessert before dinner when she was really hungry and loved her Frye boots. Gladly, she wrote, she’d trade places with her sister.

“I woke up in the middle of the night and thought everyone was dead except me,” Benjamin scribbled on what would have been Barbara Ballman’s 24th birthday, about a month after her death. “I don’t know how to do this, Barb. I just miss you so much.”

I don’t know how to do this, Barb. I just miss you so much.

— From the journal of Linda Benjamin

Benjamin on Monday read excerpts of some of her oldest entries to jurors who last week convicted her sister’s killer of murder, launching the penalty phase of his trial. Those same jurors will decide whether Darrell Gurule, now 56, should be sentenced to death.

“He took away her life, her future, her ability to walk around this planet, her dignity, and left her there to die alone,” Benjamin said outside a Los Angeles courtroom on Monday, just before prosecutors showed the jury a photo taken during Ballman’s last Christmas with her now 93-year-old father, as well as a shot of her with the young girls she mentored at Penny Lane. “There’s a place she should’ve been that she isn’t, and that can never be filled by anyone else.”

Gurule’s criminal history, meanwhile, stretches back to 1973, when, according to Glendale police, he was arrested for larceny and assault.

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In 1977, at 17 years old, Gurule forced a woman to have oral sex after approaching her, while armed with a shotgun, as she was leaving work. After she distracted him and escaped, Gurule drove off in her car, said Deputy District Atty. Jonathan Chung. Los Angeles police later caught him driving the car, with the woman’s belongings in his pockets.

Gurule spent less than two years in a California Youth Authority facility before he was released. That agency is now known as the Division of Juvenile Justice.

Five months later, on Sept. 21, 1979, school children found Ballman’s body, lying naked on the front seat of her Volkswagen Beetle, across the street from Thomas Edison Elementary School in Glendale. She’d been raped and killed by single shotgun wound to her abdomen.

Ballman left Benjamin’s home around 11 p.m. the night before, rushing to her own home to pick up her laundry from a neighbor and thank him for removing her clothes from the dryer. Ballman, an Indiana-native, had followed Benjamin to California several years earlier.

Ballman’s case went cold for decades, until breakthroughs in DNA analysis led Glendale detectives to Gurule in 2004, Chung said. By that time, he was serving a life sentence for kidnapping and fatally shooting a man in 1987.

In asking the jury to “choose life,” Gurule’s attorney pointed to the man’s troubled youth and violent upbringing, as well as his clean prison record.

“Childhood matters,” said Philip Peng, an alternate public defender representing Gurule.

On the Fourth of July in 1973, he said, Glendale police found Gurule’s seven siblings in a home alone, among rotting food, feces and overflowing toilets. At the time, Gurule was actually in juvenile hall. His mother, meanwhile, was on a date.

Among the 14 witnesses Peng may call during the trial is a former prison warden, who he said can testify about Gurule’s time in prison.

“In the 10,582 days our client’s been locked up, he’s never harmed anybody,” Peng said.

For Benjamin, Gurule’s conviction has brought relief.

“It’s worth going back to that painful place to go ahead and get that outcome,” she said.

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Alene Tchekmedyian, alene.tchekmedyian@latimes.com

Twitter: @atchek

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