Bragging Led to Arrest of 3 Teen-Age Girls in Slaying, Court Told : Crime: Sisters suspected in librarian’s killing repeatedly told gruesome details to friends, authorities say.

Three teen-age sisters charged with killing a 62-year-old Northridge librarian lay in wait for her, then one stabbed her to death with the help of another as the oldest played a stereo loudly to drown out the victim’s screams, authorities said in court testimony Thursday.

The sisters boasted to a friend that they had “killed this evil old lady” and the friend kept their secret for seven months before going to police because she had grown weary of the girls’ bragging, Los Angeles Police Detective Mitch Robins told a juvenile court hearing Thursday.

The informant, also a juvenile, said she went to police because the girls had threatened to kill her sister and cousin “because they’d gotten away with it once and could get away with it again,” Robins said.

Asked during the hearing why the schoolmate kept her secret for so long, Robins said: “She didn’t want to snitch on her friends.”

Another schoolmate also came forward, saying the girls had bragged of the slaying, but she kept quiet for the same reason, Robins said.

Details of the killing were disclosed during a lengthy hearing Thursday in Sylmar Juvenile Court, at which judicial Referee Lloyd Jeffrey Wiatt said there was ample evidence to hold the sisters in custody at Juvenile Hall until a July 6 trial.

For more than an hour, police and prosecutors described how the girls killed Meta Frances Murphy, 62, and then dragged her bloody body upstairs so they could hide it in her bedroom closet. Police said they still have no motive for the slaying.

Lawyers for the sisters said that police are basing most of their case on the testimony of two unreliable witnesses.

“There’s not a fragment of forensic evidence to connect” the youngest sister to the crime, said her court-appointed lawyer, Jerome Posell.

During the hearing, the girls twiddled their thumbs and stared straight ahead. The oldest two, 16 and 17, appeared bored, while the 13-year-old occasionally smiled.

The sisters, arrested June 10, all have formally denied murdering Murphy, their next-door neighbor in the Peppertree condominium complex at Mayall Street and Reseda Boulevard. On Thursday, Deputy Dist. Atty. William Ryder said he had tentatively decided not to ask that the eldest girl be tried as an adult because authorities believe that the middle sister wielded the knife.

At the hearing, public defenders for the youngest and oldest girls argued that none of the bloody fingerprints found on walls and doors at the crime scene belonged to their clients.

Since November, neighbors in their quiet condominium complex have been perplexed by Murphy’s death, saying she was known for her friendliness and had no enemies. A quiet woman who lived by herself, Murphy had befriended the girls. She often took them to school and cared for their cats.

Neighbors have described the girls as bullies who liked to threaten and intimidate other children. On Thursday, authorities described them as coldblooded killers who were arrested because they loved to brag about what they did.

Robins said Murphy had “defense wounds,” or stab wounds on her hands and arms from trying to fend off attackers. In some of the first public comments on the case, he also said there were blood-spattered walls and other signs of struggle in the apartment, and bloody fingerprints left by the middle sister.

The sisters, he said, apparently sneaked into Murphy’s apartment while she was unloading groceries and then waited “until the opportunity presented itself.”

The youngest sister “handed the knife to” the middle sister, who then stabbed the victim, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Cecilia Barajas. The oldest girl “turned up the music to try to mute the screams as she was being beaten and stabbed,” Barajas said.

For months, authorities were stymied in their efforts to find Murphy’s killers. Although the girls apparently bragged about the murder to their friends at various San Fernando Valley schools, their secret was kept for months, authorities said.

Investigators’ big break came when the teen-age friend of the girls came to them “out of the blue” last week to report the girls’ responsibility for the slaying, a detective said.

The informant is now in hiding because she fears for her life, said Detective Carl Whiting. He said the girl came forward for another reason besides threats to her sister and cousin: She finally tired of hearing the gruesome details of the slaying after the sisters mentioned them on more than 20 occasions.

“These people committed a murder of an elderly, defenseless lady, for no reason,” said Whiting. “Then they kept bringing it up to her, reliving this experience over and over and over, reliving the high from the experience. I think she just realized this was it. She had to do something, to get it off her chest.”