DATE: Sunday, March 9, 1997                 TAG: 9703080070

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY JON FRANK, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  112 lines

BEAUTY & THE BENCHTHE EX-BEAUTY QUEEN PROVED HERSELF AS A PROSECUTOR. NOW PAMELA HUTCHENS ALBERT IS HEADED FOR A JUDGESHIP.

IN 1981, at the Miss USA contest in Biloxi, Miss., master of ceremonies Bob Barker approached Pamela Hutchens Albert, Miss Virginia, and asked about the jacket she was wearing.

Barker, in his inimitable way of chattering with beauty contestants, wanted to know who owned the law school jacket she was wearing.

``Pepperdine Law'' was written across the back. Barker apparently assumed the jacket could not belong to Albert, that she couldn't have been a law student at Pepperdine University Law School in Malibu, Calif.

``He asked if it was my boyfriend's,'' Albert recalled recently, laughing at the memory while sitting in her office at the Virginia Beach Courthouse. ``I told him, `No. It's mine.' ''

Barker's gaffe is almost understandable. Even Albert admits that she was going against the grain 16 years ago by combining beauty pageants with law school.

``I think I was the only law student'' in the pageant, she said.

Miss Ohio won that pageant in Mississippi in 1981, and went on to the Miss Universe contest, where she did not win.

Albert, on the other hand, won a different kind of contest. Last month - with her pageant days long gone and 13 years of prosecuting hard-line criminals in Virginia Beach under her belt - Albert was named a judge in General District Court, filling a vacancy created when Judge John B. Preston retired Jan. 30.

Albert, who grew up in Newport News and received her undergraduate degree from Duke University, doesn't look any more like a judge now, at age 38, than Barker thought she looked like an aspiring lawyer in 1981. She has retained the pageant-quality beauty that allowed her to compete for Miss USA 16 years ago.

Albert has spent that last decade dealing with some of the toughest, nastiest, and most brutal people who've ever walked the streets of this mid-Atlantic resort city.

There was Fillipe L. Brown, who in 1989 assaulted three people - murdering one, raping two and robbing another during a nine-day, late summer crime spree. There was Kerri Charity - the North End Serial Rapist - who went on a sexual rampage during the early 1990s, terrorizing women at or near the Oceanfront by raping at least five after breaking into their homes and threatening them with knives or other sharp objects.

There was Eric Ferguson, the Navy enlistee who dug a grave in a remote wooded area and then waited for 10 weeks before filling it with the beaten, bloodied body of his 33-year-old wife.

A rough crowd by anyone's standards. And there were many more.

Like Mario B. Murphy, who led a hit squad that beat and stabbed a sleeping Navy man to death in exchange for $5,000.

Like Brad G. Gilchrist, who fondled and sexually assaulted women in 15 residences he broke into during the summer of 1993.

Like David Aaron Tolston, who used a belt to strangle a mentally retarded homeless man.

Albert successfully prosecuted them all, earning a reputation for courtroom strategy and thinking-on-her-feet organizational ability. She became one of the region's top prosecutors in the process, according to her boss of 13 years, Commonwealth's Attorney Robert J. Humphreys.

``She is absolutely unrelenting on cross-examination,'' Humphreys said. ``She will pound away until there is nothing left.''

Humphreys hired Albert when she was fresh out of Pepperdine in 1984. She had served as an intern at the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office. Back then, Humphreys remembers that Albert's blond-bombshell looks and beauty-pageant background actually worked against her in the super-serious world of Virginia law.

``People sold her short,'' Humphreys remembered. ``People thought of her as a ditzy blond. . . . And I got a lot of grief from people who thought she was hired only because she was Miss Virginia.''

It was something that Albert ``quickly had to deal with,'' Humphreys said.

She did it, in part, by developing a courtroom style that is professional and serious in the extreme.

``Her style is to be above it all,'' Humphreys said. ``She will not joke around with opposing counsel. . . . She constantly wears that absolutely professional demeanor in the courtroom.''

In addition, Humphreys said, she has a ``God-given talent'' for developing themes in court and communicating them so that juries can identify with them.

Humphreys remembers one instance during closing arguments in a rape case where Albert was communicating so thoroughly with the jurors that she elicited a response reminiscent of a revival meeting.

``One juror called out `` `Amen, sister,' '' Humphreys recalled. ``When that happens, you know you've got them.''

It is a style that should serve Albert well on the bench, Humphreys predicted. Attorneys can expect her to be attentive and considerate, but also to demand that they be ``on time and prepared.''

``She is going to hold the bar to a high standard,'' Humphreys said.

Albert, who is married to a lawyer and is the mother of a 2-and-a-half-year-old son, can expect to deal with as many as 200 traffic cases a day when she starts her judicial duties April 1. She will eventually handle civil and felony preliminary hearings at the General District Court level.

It will be a blizzard of legal dilemmas and tangles, in many ways dwarfing the caseload she handled as a prosecutor.

At least for now, Albert is undaunted, excited by the prospect of taking the first step onto the judicial ladder.

``I'm looking at doing this for a long time,'' Albert said. ``I hope people can say about me that even though I didn't always agree with her ruling, I feel I was treated fairly. That is a pretty big compliment.'' ILLUSTRATION: File photo

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Color photo

LAWRENCE JACKSON/The Virginian-Pilot

Pamela Hutchens Albert was Miss Virginia-USA in 1981. At right, she

jokes with William ``Buck'' Williamson, a former bailiff, at the

Virginia Beach Courthouse. KEYWORDS: PROFILE BIOGRAPHY JUDGESHIPS VIRGINIA

BEACH JUDGES

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu