On November 21, 1985, Bruce was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to 16 years to life. In 1986, Mike Ryan was convicted of armed robbery in San Francisco for threatening a woman with a knife and sentenced to 6 years in prison. In 1988, the California Court of Appeals upheld Lisker’s conviction.
Lisker went to trial in November 1984. On December 4, at the urging of the Lisker family lawyer, Robert Johnson, who assured him that he would be sentenced as a juvenile if he pled guilty to second degree murder, Bruce withdrew his claims of innocence and admitted that he had murdered his adopted mother.
Zarefsky wrote that Lisker’s conviction had been “effectively dismantled,” that he had “no confidence” in the guilty verdict, and that “no reasonable juror” would convict Lisker in light of the new evidence. In October, Phillips adopted Zarefsky’s findings.
He said he had gone to the Lisker home on March 9, asking to use the phone and do some chores. He said Dorka invited him in and gave him a drink of water. But she didn’t hire him to do chores, so he left. He said on March 10 he checked into a motel in Hollywood at 11:00 a.m. He took a bus back to Gulfport on March 11.
On March 10, 1983, 66-year-old Dorka Lisker was beaten with a Little League trophy and then stabbed in the back with a pair of steak knives in her home in Sherman Oaks, California.
Bruce had seven small drops and some smears of blood on his clothing. On March 23, Monsue and Landgren returned to the Lisker house with Wilson, who took photographs at around 11:00 a.m. with a model in the position where Dorka’s body was found. The detectives’ notes state that Wilson “concurred that susp [ect] could not have seen mother [sic] ...
In 1988, the California Court of Appeals upheld Lisker’s conviction. Among other things, the court said that Linhart, the blood spatter expert, had testified that the blood drops had been deposited on Lisker’s shoes and shirt cuffs “at the moment when his mother suffered a bluntforce injury.”.
CBS News · October 16, 2010. "Seventeen-year old Bruce Lisker is convicted of murdering his mother, and spends 26 years in prison. Now, he's fought to prove his innocence, exposing lies and cover-ups by the LAPD. Erin Moriarty reports.".
Audio slide show: THE TASTE OF FREEDOM. Bruce Lisker spent 26 years in prison for the murder of his mother in 1983. A federal judge overturned the conviction ruling that Lisker was prosecuted on 'false evidence' and was poorly represented by his attorney.
"The Los Angeles City Council agreed today to pay a total of $24.3 million to settle a pair of wrongful conviction cases filed by two men who each served more than two dozen years in prison for murders they did not commit."
In one of the most intense episodes of LDYK Bruce re-lives the day, 10th March 1983 , when he found his mother brutally attacked and left for dead, then his arrest for the crime, and his gradual realization that one policeman in particular was fabricating evidence in order to ensure a conviction.
He had a drug problem and a history of fighting with his mother. Rabichow, then a deputy district attorney, convinced a jury that Bruce was guilty. As the years rolled by and Lisker reached middle age in prison, Rabichow rarely gave the case a second thought.
A Lisker family Christmas photo. Bob and Dorka were unable to have children of their own. Bruce, an adoptee, was 3 days old when they brought him home in June 1965. () 4 / 13. In a snapshot from 1973, Bruce, then 8, displays the Little League trophy he won with the San Fernando Valley Pirates.
Last July, Lisker found in his prison mail a letter on LAPD stationery . It was the department’s response to his complaint. An investigation had found no merit to his allegation that Monsue lied to the parole board, wrote Capt. James A. Rubert, the detective’s immediate superior.
Rabichow depicted the murder of Dorka Lisker as an act of spontaneous rage, followed by cold calculation.
Lisker would be released at age 25.
He replayed the trial in his head obsessively, trying to reassure himself that he had not put an innocent man away for life. In his distress, he clung to one element of his case, a piece of evidence he still believed was irrefutable proof of Lisker’s guilt.
By the time Det. Andrew R. Monsue arrived at the scene of the murder, Dorka Lisker had been taken to Encino Hospital, where she died that afternoon. A former Marine who had served in Vietnam, Monsue wore his brown hair short and had a gruff military bearing.
Zarefsky criticized Lisker’s attorney, Dennis E. Mulcahy, for not conducting a more thorough investigation into the evidence or more vigorously pursuing a theory that one of Lisker’s friends committed the crime. That alternative suspect was Mike Ryan.
Retired Deputy Dist. Atty. Phillip Rabichow, the prosecutor who won Lisker’s conviction, said in an interview Tuesday that he was not convinced of Lisker’s innocence but that he believed there was insufficient evidence to retry the case.