‘You murdered my friend’: Phillip Lee Wilson gets life without parole for 1980 slaying
Phillip Lee Wilson will spend his remaining years in a California state prison, sentenced nearly 42 years to the day that he raped and murdered Robin Brooks in her Rosemont apartment.
“Your advanced age and poor health make it likely that you will die in prison. You know that better than I do,” Sacramento Superior Court Judge James McFetridge told Wilson, now 73, at the Friday morning hearing. McFetridge sentenced Wilson to life without parole in Brooks’ 1980 murder.
“You have had a full life for the last 42 years. Robin Brooks’ life was cut short at 20 years old,” McFetridge said.
DNA evidence helped investigators track down and arrest the now-73-year-old Wilson in April 2020, cracking the decades-old cold case that led to Wilson’s March conviction at trial in Sacramento Superior Court.
Wilson’s sentencing was justice long overdue for Brooks’ sister, Maria Arrick.
An infirm Wilson watched on from a wheelchair next to his attorney Thomas Clinkenbeard as Arrick relived the moment three police officers arrived at the family’s doorstep with the news that sister Robin was dead.
“My life and my family’s lives were altered forever.... What grotesque creature could commit such heinous acts against my sister?” Arrick told McFetridge, reading from her victim’s impact statement.
Arrick remembered her sister’s love for her family and friends. She recalled her sister’s talent for photography and the joy she had in capturing the images of her native New York. Finally, Arrick imagined the horror her sister must have felt in her final moments.
“Our grief is profound, but nothing compares to hearing what her last moments were,” Arrick said. “There is no punishment in this Earthly life that will allow you to atone for your actions.”
Robin Brooks was 20 years old in 1980, moving to the Sacramento area from New York just six months prior to her killing. She found work at a doughnut shop on Kiefer Boulevard and Tally Ho drives, The Bee reported. Wilson lived in a rented home near what was then Mather Air Force Base less than two miles away.
Brooks left the shop for home midnight April 24, 1980. A co-worker discovered her body the following day when she didn’t show for work. Brooks had been stabbed multiple times and had been sexually assaulted, investigators said.
No leads pointed to her killer, but Brooks’ friends and the woman who came forward at trial with the story of her own attack at Wilson’s hands long knew who brutalized and murdered their friend.
“How do I describe the impact of terror, of being tossed around like a rag doll?” the woman, identified only as Sharon P., said from the courtroom’s lectern.
Wilson’s attack left her afraid to fall asleep years after the assault. In the courtroom, Sharon said she had written her remarks from an upstairs hotel room. She never sleeps in a ground floor room, she said.
“Sleep is the only time I’m vulnerable. The peaceful act of falling asleep has been taken from me,” Sharon said. “That night, peace was taken from me. Fear was given to me. With this man’s evil, there’s another trauma, because I survived and Robin did not.”
The women recalled Wilson’s constant harassment of Brooks; his anger at her repeated rejections; behavior that had Wilson banished from the doughnut shop, Donut Time, and the Wizards arcade next door.
Sisters Cis and Deanna Forrester’s family owned the arcade. Their mother worked with Brooks next door at the doughnut shop.
“My mom worked with her. She knew it was him. My mom always knew it was him,” Cis Forrester said outside the courtroom before the hearing. “He would come in and harass her and my mom saw it.”
In the courtroom, Deanna Forrester recalled the April day she and her family learned Robin Brooks had been killed. Forrester was 9 years old, dressed and waiting for Brooks to take her to the Sacramento Zoo.
“I was just a little girl. I couldn’t wait because my friend was going to take me to the zoo,” Forrester told the court before addressing Wilson in searing terms.
“He was obsessed with Robin. You thought you had the right to take her life. You couldn’t stand Robin’s rejections,” Forrester said. “You sick coward. You murdered my friend. You will spend eternity in the lake of fire. My whole life my grandmother knew it was you.”
Decades later in 2004, blood samples left behind at the Rosemont apartment would allow forensic technicians to build a profile of the person who killed Brooks. Detectives’ pursuit gathered steam in 2016, with the public’s help and the advent of investigative genetic genealogy.
Similar technology would bring serial rapists and killers who long evaded capture, from East Area Rapist/Golden State Killer Joseph James DeAngelo; to Mark Manteuffel to NorCal Rapist Roy Waller, to justice.
Sacramento County Sheriff’s investigators ultimately arrested Wilson at his home in April 2020 on suspicion of killing Brooks. Wilson repeatedly denied killing Brooks, despite the trove of blood and DNA evidence left behind at Brooks’ apartment.
“It’s been a long time coming,” Cis Forrester said Friday. “Thank God for genealogy.”
On Friday, as Wilson faced his fate and a life behind prison walls, McFetridge offered him two options:
“You can die in prison, vainly professing your innocence until the day you die, or you can admit to yourself what you did to Robin Brooks and Sharon P.,” McFetridge said. “Your deeds cut short a young woman’s bright future and robbed her of her dreams “
This story was originally published April 22, 2022 at 2:01 PM.
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