Competing arguments at trial over who raped and killed Robin Brooks 42 years ago

Nearly 42 years after Robin Brooks was raped and stabbed to death in her Sacramento apartment, a prosecutor urged a jury Thursday to convict her former neighbor, Phillip Lee Wilson, of murder, calling him a “predator” who had raped another woman three weeks earlier and got away with the crimes for decades.

“Phillip Wilson was and is a charismatic man,” Deputy District Attorney Timothy Carr told the jury in closing arguments in Sacramento Superior Court. “He is eloquent. He is a raconteur. He has friends.

“But he is also, as the evidence in this case shows, a man with a proclivity to commit monstrous acts. He is broken and has always been broken. He killed her in the most painful, grotesque way imaginable. He killed her likely both to fulfill a sick fantasy but also to get away with it, to eliminate the one witness who could have stood there and told what he did that night.”

Wilson, who has been in custody since his April 2020 arrest and whose 73rd birthday is next Wednesday, sat silently in a wheelchair as Carr outlined the evidence that he says proves Wilson’s guilt: his blood on the walls of the 20-year-old Brooks’ Rosemont apartment, his DNA inside her, his fingerprints on her apartment windowsill and his initial claims to detectives after his arrest that he never went inside her apartment and never had sex with her.

Carr argued that Wilson as a “predator” was “on the hunt” for victims in 1980, when he raped but did not kill another woman identified as Sharon Doe, a woman who said later that she talked to her assailant in bed after the rape in hopes of escaping being killed.

Unlike Sharon Doe, Carr argued, Brooks had no chance at escape. There was evidence her wrists may have been bound when she was found naked and dead of five stab wounds — one to her heart — in April 1980, he said.

And despite Wilson’s insistence on the witness stand that he merely had a dating background with Brooks that led to the two having sex the night of the murder and him leaving her alive, Carr said, the evidence clearly shows he killed her.

“The defendant raped and killed Robin Brooks,” Carr said in his hourlong closing after 10 days of trial. “Please listen to the evidence that was left behind.”

Wilson’s lawyer, Assistant Public Defender Thomas Clinkenbeard, followed Carr’s argument with a simple one of his own: Wilson didn’t kill Brooks — another man who was dating Brooks’ sister, Maria, did.

“Norbert Holston killed Robin Brooks,” Clinkenbeard told the jury, adding that a week before the slaying Maria Brooks and Holston had an argument and Holston threatened to kill both women and Maria Brooks’ dog.

Holston, who died before the case came to trial, was described at the time by Maria Brooks as a “wacko” who had confessed to breaking into Robin Brooks’ apartment at one point and admitted to wiping away his fingerprints, Clinkenbeard said.

Maria Brooks was the first witness called in the case when it began last month, and told the jury that Holston was in bed with her the night of her sister’s slaying and that she is a “light sleeper” who would have known if Holston slipped out and went to her sister’s apartment.

Clinkenbeard told jurors such testimony was “understandable.”

“It would be a terrible thing to think that your boyfriend killed your sister, but that is what she thought at the time,” he said.

He described Wilson as a friendly, charismatic man who at the time was 6-foot-4 inches and 380 pounds, a stature that earned him the nickname “Tiny.”

“He had numerous female friends, and they would go to the clubs and they felt safe with him,” Clinkenbeard said. “He didn’t make unwanted sexual advances toward them.

“He was always respectful.”

Clinkenbeard said Wilson and Brooks knew each other from living in the same apartment complex, using the pool there and from the Donut Time shop in Rosemont where Brooks worked and Wilson often went after smoking marijuana and getting the “munchies.”

Wilson and Brooks both smoked marijuana, he said, and they were together the night of April 24, 1980, in her apartment, where Wilson left behind “a few tiny drops of blood” from a workplace injury he had suffered earlier.

But, Clinkenbeard said, Wilson left the apartment before she was killed.

“It was dark, they were romantic, they had smoked pot,” he said. “It had been a long day.”

This story was originally published March 3, 2022 at 12:15 PM.