AMC Theater Horror Movie Attacker Gets The Slammer

Steven Walter Robinson, the 26-year-old Anaheim man who was convicted earlier this year for stabbing two people during a 2008 horror movie inside the AMC Fullerton, received a 22 years to life sentence today.

Robinson's crime, featured here in the Weekly, gained national headline because he entered a movie theater armed with a knife, a hammer, a bottle of liquor, a condom and a baggie of cookies mixed with illegal mushrooms. As a defense to his unprovoked attacks, he claimed that he was drunk and high and that bizarre sounds and images from the film The Signal ordered him to kill. As characters in the movie were screaming, Robinson approached his popcorn-munching victims in the dark and began swinging his knife and hammer. Two men were hospitalized for their serious wounds but, thankfully, lived.

At trial, Erica Gambale, Robinson's public defender, argued that hallucinations caused the attack. But Deputy District Attorney Andrew Katz described Robinson as a freak obsessed with knives, murder and serial killers. A jury quickly sided with Katz.

–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly

R. Scott Moxley

CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.

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