CAMPBELL — A 59-year-old man was convicted Monday of savagely raping, stabbing and strangling a teenage girl, more than three decades after getting away with the sadistic crime.

The jury of six men and six women deliberated for less than two days before finding Christopher Holland guilty of killing Cynthia Munoz, 17. Holland now faces life in prison without parole. No sentencing date was set.

Monday, Holland refused to come out of his holding cell to hear the clerk read the verdict.

“He’s scared to death,” his lawyer Michael Ogul told the judge, adding that Holland was so anxious during the trial that he lost 25 pounds. “He can’t handle being out here.”

Superior Court Judge Arthur Bocanegra ordered the verdict read in Holland’s absence after giving Holland a chance to change his mind.

Holland was convicted of one felony count of first-degree murder with the special circumstance of murder during the commission of a rape for the Aug. 7, 1983 slaying. The jury rejected the option of convicting him of second-degree murder, which carries 15 years to life.

During the trial, which began in January, prosecutor Chris Walsh put four women on the stand who testified that Holland enjoyed hurting them during sexual intercourse in strikingly similar ways to what Munoz endured. Holland was never charged in connection with those incidents, which included punching his ex-wife in the face as Munoz was punched, choking another woman at knifepoint until she passed out, and pricking another woman with a knife.

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In contrast, Ogul argued that Munoz and Holland had consensual sex and that someone else killed her during a robbery, most likely a drug addict named Brian Mendes, who died of an overdose in the 1990s.

But Walsh in his closing argument scoffed at the notion that Munoz sexually betrayed her boyfriend, Jamie Lawson, who was quadriplegic and in the hospital that week with Holland, then in his late 20s.

Prosecutor said Munoz devotedly visited Lawson from midmorning on Aug. 6, 1983 until after midnight when the teenager returned home and was killed.

“Jamie was the love of her life,” Walsh said. “There was no one else.”

For years, the case went unsolved until 2007 when the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s cold case unit was able to match the semen found on Munoz’s body with Holland’s DNA.

The unit later was dissolved by former District Attorney Dolores Carr but revived by her successor Jeff Rosen, who took office in 2011.

Holland is also charged with killing 21-year-old Tara Marowski four months before slaughtering Munoz. His trial for that crime is set to begin later this year. Marowski was found slain and likely raped in the back seat of her car in unincorporated San Jose in April 1983.

The Munoz and Marowski cases were originally set to be tried together. But Superior Court Judge Arthur Bocanegra granted a defense request to sever the trials over the objection of Walsh. Ogul argued that the evidence in the Marowski case was weaker, and his client would be unfairly tainted by trying the cases together.

Contact Tracey Kaplan at 408-278-3482. Follow her at Twitter.com @tkaplanreport.