The Los Angeles Superior Court jury deliberated about two days before rendering its verdict against James M. Fayed.
Judge Kathleen Kennedy ordered jurors to return to court Friday for the start of the trial's penalty phase, in which they will be asked to recommend whether the 48-year-old Ventura County man should be sentenced to death or life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Along with the murder and conspiracy charges, jurors found true the special circumstance allegations of murder while lying in wait and murder for financial gain.
Pamela Fayed, 44, was attacked from behind and stabbed 13 times as she approached her SUV in a parking garage at Watt Tower on July 28, 2008. She and her estranged husband had just met with their criminal attorneys as a result of a federal investigation into the couple's business.
Three other men charged in Pamela Fayed's killing are awaiting trial separately.
The alleged killer, Steven Vicente Simmons, 22; the alleged getaway driver, Jose Luis Moya, 51; and the alleged lookout, Gabriel Jay Marquez, 46; each face life in prison without the possibility of parole if convicted.
"This is a very sad and tragic day for the Fayed family," one of Fayed's attorneys, Mark Werksman, told reporters
outside court. "Now Jim Fayed stands convicted of a crime he insists he didn't commit."Pamela Fayed's brother, Scott Goudie, said outside court that "it has been a roller-coaster of emotion from day to day." The victim's family has been in court throughout the trial, with family members expected to be called to testify during the trial's next phase about the impact of her death.
Outside the jury's presence following the verdict, the judge denied a motion by Fayed's other attorney, Steve Meister, to dismiss the jury and empanel a new jury for the trial's penalty phase and to dismiss the alternates because they did not participate in the deliberations for the guilt phase of trial.
During the trial, Deputy District Attorney Eric Harmon told jurors that Fayed chose to "squander that good life" that he was living "because money and gold enslaved him."
"He gave it all up because he was greedy," the prosecutor told jurors.
The prosecution contended that Fayed contracted the hit on his estranged wife because he believed the mother of two would cooperate with federal investigators in the probe into their business and because he was involved in a bitter divorce in which she could have ended up getting half of the couple's marital assets.
Werksman told jurors at the start of the trial that Fayed is "an innocent man wrongly accused of a crime he didn't commit."
The defense lawyer said in his closing argument that prosecutors "have not met their burden of proof" and that there "are some substantial flaws in the prosecution's case."
Werksman told jurors that one of Fayed's sisters, Mary Mercedes, had the "motive" and "opportunity" to orchestrate her sister-in-law's killing. He noted that jurors had heard testimony from another of Fayed's siblings, Patricia Taboga, about a conversation in which Mercedes allegedly asked if Taboga's husband would murder Pamela Fayed for $200,000.
"You can't make stuff like that up," Werksman said of Taboga's account.
The prosecutor countered that Fayed had tried to "throw his own sister under the bus." At the end of the trial, jurors heard a tape-recorded conversation between a Los Angeles police detective, Deputy District Attorney Alan Jackson and Mercedes in
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