Prosecutor Takes No-Nonsense Tack Against Criminals : Courts: Deputy Dist. Atty. Peter Kossoris combines his insight for people with intense trial preparation and strategy.

When Theodore Francis Frank raped, tortured and murdered 2-year-old Amy Sue Seitz of Camarillo in 1978, Peter D. Kossoris persuaded a jury to punish him with a date with the gas chamber.

In 1990, when Gregory Scott Smith set 8-year-old Paul Bailly’s body on fire near Simi Valley after raping and killing the boy, Kossoris helped send him to Death Row too.

And the following year, when Edward (Tony) Throop killed two Saticoy men in a drive-by shooting, the prosecutor saw to it that Throop received life in prison without parole.

Those are only three of the many cases in which Ventura County’s leading criminal prosecutor obtained the maximum sentences possible.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Kossoris usually prosecutes the county’s most heinous crimes, and he now leads the prosecution of Mark Scott Thornton, who is charged in last month’s slaying of Westlake nurse Kellie O’Sullivan.

Kossoris’ admirers credit his successes to a unique ability to combine an understanding of people with intense trial preparation and strategy.

“He’s the No. 1 trial attorney in the office,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard E. Holmes, who also prosecutes homicide cases. “Clearly, the highest-profile, most important cases go to him, and they always have.”

The 56-year-old Kossoris is an example of Ventura County’s hard-nosed, no-nonsense approach against crime. Some supporters say he is one of the reasons the county ranks as the West’s second-safest urban area.

Statistics from the state Judicial Council show that prosecutors in Ventura County, who had an overall 92% conviction rate last year, took 10% of their felony cases to trial. Their counterparts in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles counties, where plea-bargaining is more common, tried just 3%.

And Kossoris takes a higher percentage of his cases to trial than most other attorneys in his office.

Since joining the district attorney’s office in 1966, Kossoris has won 95% of his jury trials, the district attorney’s office said. In the last 15 years, he has triumphed in 23 of the 24 major cases he has taken to trial.

His last defeat came in the 1987 murder trial of a Los Angeles man accused of strangling a Utah woman in a Ventura motel room. Kossoris went up against Los Angeles attorney Clay Jack Sr., who told Kossoris that he never puts a client on the stand if he knows the defendant is guilty.

“He didn’t put him on the stand, either,” recalled Kossoris. As for the acquittal, Kossoris said, “Anybody who has never lost is someone who has ducked the good cases.”

Kossoris was free to handle the prosecution for O’Sullivan’s killing only because he had obtained a voluntary manslaughter plea in another murder case three days earlier.

“Pete is recognized as the quote-unquote top gun,” said Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury, a onetime assistant to Kossoris early in their prosecutorial careers. “I have a lot of top guns, but Pete is just the dean of them.”

While prosecutors rave about Kossoris, some defense attorneys criticize what they see as his singled-minded focus on winning. In all, Kossoris has won convictions that paved the way to Death Row for three of the seven Ventura County men awaiting the death penalty, causing some defense attorneys to dub him “Dr. Death.”

“As a prosecutor, it’s your job to see that justice is done, not to hang someone,” one attorney said. “But once Pete makes up his mind, you better watch out.”

Others said Kossoris sometimes pushes the law to its boundaries, although he is careful not to cross them. “Pete will probably publicly admit that he will play things as close to the ethical line as possible without stepping over it,” attorney Louis B. Samonsky Jr. said.

Kossoris said he only tries to present evidence as any quality trial attorney would. “I would be doing a disservice to the victims of these crimes if I didn’t do everything I could,” he said. During Throop’s trial for killing the two Saticoy men in 1991 Kossoris obtained a tape of a jail conversation Throop had with his mother and played it for the jury.

On the tape, the 17-year-old Throop complained to his mother that, because of his arrest, he would miss his senior prom. Kossoris hammered home to the jury that the comments showed that Throop lacked remorse.

Not so, according to Christina Briles, a deputy public defender. She said Kossoris took the comments out of context.

Another example of Kossoris’ tactics comes from a story he tells about his personal favorite case, a misdemeanor conviction of a man accused of molesting his daughter in the early 1970s.

The man called his estranged wife after charges were leveled against him and offered to come over and discuss the case before the trial. The woman quickly phoned Kossoris, who arranged for deputies to hide a tape recorder in the house. The man admitted to sexually abusing his daughter, and Kossoris had it all on tape.

When the man denied molesting his daughter in court, Kossoris--in dramatic, Perry Mason fashion--unveiled the tape and played it for the jury. “I really enjoyed that, seeing someone exposed as the consummate liar and criminal that he was,” Kossoris remembered.

Kossoris acknowledged that he pushes hard for whatever resources he believes are necessary to get the job done. That sometimes includes extra investigative and law-clerk help, the kind of assistance most other prosecutors lack the clout to demand.

“I’d certainly concede that I will push hard,” Kossoris said.

In court, he pushes judges, witnesses, defendants and opposing counsel just as hard, some say.

It is not unusual for him to ask the same question over and over again, even after a judge instructs him to move on to a different subject, they say.

In the murder trial of a woman accused of fatally shaking her baby, Deputy Public Defender Douglas W. Daily said, Kossoris kept asking the same questions in different ways.

“If he couldn’t get it in one way,” Daily said, “he would try another.”

And prosecutor Holmes said Kossoris has spent four hours or more on closing arguments.

Kossoris keeps the jury’s attention during such soliloquies, Holmes speculated, “because he does bring out every detail in relation to the facts. I’ve learned from him that my arguments have been too short.”

He learned something else from Kossoris: It is all right to make fun of yourself in court. Juries like that, and relate to you better, Holmes said.

“He cracks jokes about his squeaky voice and not having the most mesomorphic frame, things like that,” Holmes said.

But Kossoris does not let humor detract from his case, others said. Vern Markley, a Superior Court bailiff, has watched Kossoris’ courtroom performances for 15 years. It “kind of reminds me of a bulldog,” he said.

Bradbury likes it best when Kossoris is opposing Los Angeles attorneys: “They come up against this skinny, squeaky-voice guy, and they say, ‘Cow-town attorney. We’re going to walk all over him,’ and Mr. Kossoris feeds them their lunch.”

Kossoris lectures throughout California and Arizona, mostly on the death penalty, and has published several articles in legal journals. In 1987, he was named California’s prosecutor of the year by the state District Attorneys Assn.

An avid sports fan and sports-trivia buff, Kossoris’ goal was to be a professional sportswriter. As a senior at Palo Alto High School, he won a statewide award for a story he wrote on a prep football game.

But he decided journalism didn’t pay enough, so he got an MBA at Stanford in 1961. He immediately went to work in community relations at Ford Motor Co., but didn’t like sugarcoating the giant auto maker’s image, so he left.

From there, he enrolled in Boalt Hall law school at UC Berkeley, where he met his wife-to-be, Ellen. On their first date, he took her to a football game. She didn’t complain, so he asked her to marry him.

“He watched the whole game and didn’t talk to me,” recalled Ellen Kossoris, a special-education teacher in Thousand Oaks. “I thought we didn’t hit it off. Later I got to know that that was just the way he is.”

He started his law career in the Ventura County district attorney’s office in 1966, and carved his niche by displaying a flair for taking on the tough cases.

But all that did was get him a series of promotions, including one in 1984 that put him in charge of the felony division. It did not last long.

Bradbury said Kossoris asked to return to trying cases. “His love is the courtroom,” Bradbury said.

Kossoris said he was demoted. He agreed that he loves the courtroom, but said he still believes he could make a good manager.

Adopted at birth by a Russian-born economist and his wife, Kossoris started looking for his natural parents in 1981. In 1987, an investigator he hired located his mother, who was 16 years old when he was born in 1937.

She lived in another state, but had never told her husband or other children about the baby she had given up for adoption when she was a teen-ager. She told Kossoris she wasn’t willing to meet him.

Still, Kossoris and his family--which includes daughters Amy, 23, and Mandy, 22, and son Rick, 21--met with the woman’s other children three years ago.

Kossoris said he still hopes to reunite with his mother and locate his natural father.

Meanwhile, he plans to continue working in the prosecutor’s office until he is 65, another nine years. But he said that after about five years he hopes to give up trial work.

“I doubt if I would want to do it when I’m 64 or 65,” Kossoris said.

Some attorneys--like Gregory D. Totten, the newly appointed executive director of the California District Attorneys Assn.--say Kossoris hasn’t lost any zeal for prosecuting criminals as he has gotten older. Totten worked with Kossoris on the Bailly murder case.

“He cares a great deal about what he’s doing, so he’s personally and emotionally wrapped up in a case,” Totten said.

Jacquelyn Thetford, whose 90-year-old mother was fatally stabbed in her Ventura home by a mentally ill drifter last year, is happy Kossoris was selected to prosecute her mother’s killer. Kevin Jon Kolodziej got 16 years to life.

“He’s just a caring, sympathetic, concerned man,” Thetford said of Kossoris. She said Kossoris has promised to accompany her to all Kolodziej’s parole hearings.

To relieve some of the stress of the job, Kossoris arrives home about 5:30 every evening and goes straight to the swimming pool in his Thousand Oaks back yard. He swims for about a half hour, then he and Ellen walk their two dogs before dinner.

On most days, Kossoris also tunes in to his favorite television network: the Court Channel. Ellen Kossoris said he frequently second-guesses the attorneys.

“He will say, ‘Oh, that was a bad question.’ Or he will say, ‘He should have asked this question next.’ ”