PART THREE: DEATH ROW USA

 

 

Ray Krone

 

Ray Krone was the one hundredth American to be exonerated from death row since the 1973 decision by the United States Supreme Court that the moratorium on executions could end. Sentenced to death in 1992, he was found guilty again at a retrial in 1994 and sentenced to forty-six years in prison. Then, in 2002, his innocence was proved by DNA testing and he was free to walk out of prison. His story is remarkable, especially as throughout he maintained an astonishing amount of dignity even when he had lost all trust in the justice system that had let him down so abominably. He was an innocent man who could well have been executed.

On the morning of 29 December 1991 the bloody, nude body of thirty-six-year-old Kimberly Ancona was found in the washroom of the CBS Lounge and Restaurant on 16th Street and Camelback Road in Phoenix of which she was the manager. She had been sexually molested and stabbed in the back several times. She had been viciously stabbed from behind and raped as her assailant held the knife to her throat to keep her quiet. It is likely that as the sexual assault was being carried out, she bled to death. There were fourteen size nine-and-a-half bloody shoe prints in the kitchen area leading to and from the place where her killer had found the knife. Apart from a drop of blood on Kimberly’s underwear, the blood all belonged to the victim and saliva found on her body suggested the perpetrator had the most common blood type. Investigators found no semen but, crucially, no DNA tests were performed. Kimberly had been bitten on the breast and the neck and it was on these bite-marks that police concentrated their efforts.

It emerged that Kimberly had told a friend that a man called Ray Krone, a regular at the bar who was a member of its darts and volleyball teams was going to help her close up that night. Officers visited Krone, an employee of the US Postal Service who had been born in 1974 and was a former US Air Force sergeant. He told them he had been at home in bed at the time of the murder, but they asked him to make an impression with his teeth on a piece of styrofoam so that they could compare his bite with the distinctive bite-marks on Kimberly Ancona’s body. He did as they asked and went home, expecting that to be the last he heard about it. But he had been injured in a car accident when younger and had undergone extensive jaw and dental surgery. Now one of his top front teeth protruded a little. He had a distinctive bite-mark and, according to the police, it was a match for the ones of Kimberly Ancona’s body.

They also found his telephone number in Ancona’s address book and it emerged that Krone had given her a lift to a party the previous Christmas. Ray Krone insisted, however, that there was nothing between them.

He was arrested and, to his stunned disbelief, charged with first-degree murder, in spite of the facts that his roommate told police that Krone was at home during the time the murder was committed; his shoe size was ten-and-a-half while bloody footprints in the bar were a size smaller; fingerprints found at the crime scene did not belong to him and body hair found on Kimberly Ancona was not his.

Unable to afford a private defence team, Krone relied on the public prosecutor. Consequently awarded $5,000 for his defence, their case, when it came to court early in 1992, was hurried and unprepared. Experts testified that the bite-marks were a perfect match for Ray Krone’s and just three- and-a-half days into the proceedings, the man the press had dubbed the ‘Snaggletooth Killer’ was found guilty of murder and kidnapping. Standing before the judge, he showed no remorse, as he said, ‘How can you show remorse for something you’re not guilty of?’ This lack of remorse contributed to him being sentenced to death, even though the trial judge noted there were lingering doubts about his guilt.

After three years on death row, watching fellow inmates being led away to their executions, Krone was granted a new trial on the grounds that some of the evidence about the bite-marks had only been disclosed to the defence by the prosecution a day before the trial started, breaching the rules regarding disclosure. The court should have granted a continu-ance or should have excluded the evidence.

Krone had learned his lesson first time round and this time his family remortgaged their house and cashed in their retirement funds while friends and family raised money in any way they could in order to enable him to hire a good private attorney and put up a proper defence. They found a man who believed in the case and took it on merely for expenses.

In February, 1996, the trial started. It lasted six-and-a-half weeks, introduced more than five hundred exhibits, and heard the testimony of more than thirty expert witnesses. Each day Ray felt more confident that his attorney was doing a good job and each day he felt he was a day closer to freedom. Finally, as the jury was sent out, he felt sure justice was going to be done. Three-and-a-half days later they filed back in and delivered a shocking verdict. They had found him guilty again. Ray Krone was outraged and broken-hearted. He had still retained his faith in the system until that point but as he heard sobs coming from his mother and sister behind him in the courtroom and watched as the prosecution pumped the air and jumped up and down, ‘like they just won the big game,’ as he put it, his belief in justice oozed out of him.

His attorney spent the next three hours arguing for mitigation, bringing forward every single dubious element of the prosecution case and afterwards the judge did admit there remained residual and lingering doubt about Ray Krone’s guilt. Nonetheless, he had been found guilty and was sentenced to twenty-five years to life for the murder of Kimberly Ancona and twenty-one years to run consecutively for kidnap. It was a sentence of forty-six years in total, which meant Ray Krone would be eighty-one years old by the time he was released; it was as good as a death sentence. Few lived that long in America’s increasingly violent and harsh prison system.

In 2001, the Arizona State Legislature passed a new law making it easier for prisoners to request DNA testing if there were appropriate materials available, if it had never been tested before and could have a bearing on a case. In Krone’s case Kimberly Ancona’s trousers and underwear had never been tested and they were still available. The judge overruled objections by the prosecution and gave permission for DNA testing to be carried out.

It had also been learned that prior to the second trial, two of the country’s leading dental forensic experts had told the prosecuting attorney that there was no way that the teeth marks on the victim’s body had been made by Ray Krone. The attorney neglected to inform the defence about this and continued in spite of such evidence to seek the death penalty.

The DNA found on Kimberly Ancona’s clothing was entered into the national DNA database that contained the DNA of everyone who had been found guilty of a crime in the United States. It came up with the name of Kenneth Phillips, a man in prison at the time for sexual assault. It emerged that when Kimberly Ancona was murdered, he was out of prison on parole. He had the same blood type as that found at the crime scene.

That night, Kenneth Phillips, a Native American had got very drunk and Ancona had exercised her right to refuse to serve him any more alcohol. Later when the bar emptied, he wanted to use the men’s toilets, but Ancona was cleaning it and she told him he should go home. He lost his temper, took a knife from behind the bar and viciously stabbed her to death and raped her. He then replaced the knife back after washing it. He later said that he was subject to blackouts and could remember nothing of the incident; the first he knew of it was when he woke up the following morning covered in blood. No one ever linked him with the murder and just three weeks later, he was arrested for sexually assaulting and attempting to strangle a seven-year-old girl.

On 8 April 2002, Ray Krone at last walked through the gates of Arizona State Prison at Yuma, a free man. Sixteen days later the District Attorney’s office officially dismissed all charges against him.

He had served 3,769 days in prison for a crime he did not commit. Unsurprisingly he now campaigns for the abolition of the death penalty in the United States, saying, ‘There is a serious problem with the death penalty and there are serious mistakes made. The punishment is irreversible, irrevocable. We can’t bring back someone when we execute them; it is no longer right for a punishment like that to be in a society like ours.’

 

 

Nick Yarris

 

His is a story of astonishing deceit, double cross and obfuscation, a Kafkaesque legal maze in which was trapped for twenty-one years, being let down by his lawyers and treated with disdain and downright dishonesty by the United States justice system.

It began early in December 1981 when thirty-seven-year-old Linda Mae Craig mentioned to her fellow workers at the Tri-State Mall in Delaware that she thought a man had been watching her. Tragically, she did nothing about it, because on 15 December she left work and never completed her ten-minute drive home. Her husband phoned the police whose search located her shoes in the car park at the mall and at 7 pm her car, a 1977 Chrysler Cordoba, was found abandoned a mile and a half from a church in Chichester Township, Delaware County, Pennsylvania.

Next morning, they found Linda Craig’s body in a car park at the church. She had been raped before being murdered.

Nick Yarris entered the story on 20 December when he was stopped in the city of Chester, Pennsylvania by patrolman Benjamin Wright. Yarris was no angel, a methamphetamine addict, an escapee from prison, a car thief, a drug dealer and an armed robber. As Yarris himself puts it, he was a criminal, but was no murderer. Therefore, when Officer Wright placed a restraining hand on his shoulder as Yarris tried to get out of his car, he did not take kindly to it. When the officer grabbed him by the arm, a scuffle followed. The officer’s revolver went off accidentally, firing a bullet into the ground. Yarris was subdued and taken into custody where he was charged with attempted murder and the kidnapping of a police officer. It would later take a jury less than an hour to find him innocent of all charges, but for the moment it looked bad to the frightened twenty-year-old.

As a drug-user, he was placed in solitary confine-ment while he underwent ‘cold turkey’ from his methamphetamine habit. While there, he read about Linda Craig’s murder and devised a plan that he hoped would obtain his release. He decided to tell the police that he knew the identity of her murderer and would tell them everything he knew in return for his release. He gave them the name of a friend that he thought had recently died of a drug overdose. When it transpired, however, that the friend was alive and that he had a rock-solid alibi for the night in question, Yarris was really in trouble, especially as the police now believed that he knew so much about the murder that he must have done it. They threw him back into solitary, at the same time letting it be known to other prisoners that he was a snitch who had tried to inform on a friend. After being constantly attacked for a week, he could stand no more and tried to hang himself.

After a stay in hospital, he was returned to a cell, allowed to wear only boxer shorts, even though it was a freezing cold January. Further attacks by fellow inmates followed – urine was thrown over him and he was subjected to verbal attacks. Yarris spoke to a prison guard, hoping to at least be given some clothing if he seemed to be helping. He asked him what would happen if he admitted that he had been part of the crime but had not committed the murder. The story was taken to the officers investigating Linda Craig’s murder and Yarris was arrested. He received clothes and a blanket and, having now achieved the status of a murderer, the attacks from other inmates stopped.

One inmate, however, Charles Cataleno – serving time for burglary – offered the District Attorney handling the Yarris case a deal. In exchange for a dismissal of the twenty-year sentence he expected to receive, he would share a cell with Yarris and try to get a confession from him. Ironically, around this time, on 17 April 1982, Nick Yarris would have walked free after the jury in the case for which he had originally been arrested reached a verdict of not guilty. Instead, a couple of months later, on 5 June 1982, proceedings began on the murder charges. Yarris learned that District Attorney Barry Goss who had taken over the case, was seeking the death penalty, instead of a charge of second-degree murder. Yarris was horrified, but his descent into hell had only just begun.

At the trial, it did not look good for Yarris from the outset when the judge opened by saying, ‘In light of the 4th of July Holiday coming on Friday, I intend to make sure you all get to go home and enjoy yourselves in time.’ He was not going to waste much time on this trial, it seemed.

The prosecution presented its only evidence – semen left by the killer both in and on the victim. The tests that had been run on it, however, were incomplete and it could even have belonged to Linda Craig’s husband who said they had sex the night before the attack. When he learned, however, that there was a suspect he had said that he had worn a condom. No one thought it strange that the couple were unable to have children. Wearing a condom was, therefore, a pretty pointless exercise.

The real deceitfulness began almost immediately when the prosecution refused to hand over to the defence team more than twenty pages of homicide files. In those that were handed over, paragraphs had been deleted, as if they wanted to hide certain elements of the investigation. What they were hiding were conflicting witness statements and inaccurate identifications. They also hid the fact that the murderer wore gloves. Charles Cataleno testified against Yarris, claiming that he had confessed to him and denying that he had been offered a deal for his evidence.

After one of the briefest murder trials in US legal history – three days – Nick Yarris, a totally innocent man, was found guilty of the murder of Linda Mae Craig. On 24 January 1983, he was sentenced to death as well as being sentenced to an additional thirty to sixty years in prison. He was sent to one of the most notorious prisons in the United States – Huntington Prison, high in the mountains of Pennsylvania.

Needless to say, Yarris sacked his defence team and hired a new one, which launched an appeal on the basis of the files that had been withheld by the prosecution and evidence that had been destroyed. At one point before the appeal, Yarris was offered a commutation to a life sentence, but he declined. He was after justice, not compromise.

In February 1985, when he was being taken to his appeal hearing, Nick Yarris did a second stupid thing – he escaped from custody, becoming the most hunted man in the USA. It enabled the prosecution to dismiss his appeal on the destruction of files. twenty-five days after the escape, Yarris handed himself in to the authorities in Florida. A few days later, his conviction and sentence were upheld.

In 1988, Yarris read about DNA testing in a newspaper and when he asked his lawyer to investigate whether it would be possible in his case, he became the first death row prisoner in America to seek DNA testing to prove his innocence. To their dismay, however, they learned that the evidence in the case had been disposed of. All that remained were two slides of material that were in no condition to provide accurate test results. Yarris found out, however, that some material had been sent to another laboratory and had never been returned. He ordered his attorney not to tell the prosecutors about it, fearful it would be lost or tampered with, but the lawyer ignored him. The material was collected by two detectives and never arrived at the testing facility. One of the detectives transporting it refused to hand it over, keeping it for two years in unsuitable conditions while the court refused to force him to hand it over.

Once again, Yarris fired his counsel.

In 1989, Yarris tried to get a retrial on the basis of the gloves about which the prosecution had kept him in the dark at his trial. He was refused and protested about the judge making the denial, Justice Toal, to the Judicial Review Board. He got nowhere again.

Between 1989 and 1991, the authorities did everything they could to prevent DNA testing but finally they allowed it, on the condition that it was carried out in a police lab in Alabama, a lab that had never before carried out the type of testing necessary. They came back with inconclusive results, but with no detail about how they had tested or what the results actually were. It had been a sham.

In 1994, he was once again, after a review of the evidence in court, denied a new trial. He was denied again in 1999.

The legal quagmire in which he had floundered for so many years took its toll, and in 1993 he had been struck by hepatitis C and by 2000 he was very ill. Staff at Greene County Prison where he was now being held, made his condition worse by giving him the wrong doses of the drugs being used to treat him.

As he lost the will to live, his latest attorney asked a lab in California to make one last effort to prove Nick Yarris’s innocence by testing some untested DNA evidence from the pair of men’s gloves found in Linda Craig’s car. Yarris agreed to accept his verdict once and for all if this evidence did not exonerate him.

Two samples of DNA were found, but sensa-tionally, neither of them was a match for Yarris’s DNA. Although they made every effort to block the proceedings, the prosecution had no alternative but to drop the case against Nick Yarris and he walked out of prison a free man, having had his sentence reduced to the time he had already served. He was the 140th US prisoner to be exonerated by DNA testing, the thirteenth to be exonerated on death row.

Even then, however, they would not leave him alone. The case had been dropped in such a way that if new evidence was found of his involvement, Yarris could be thrown back in prison. His family were hounded for DNA samples as late as June 2004, as they pursued him. Yarris responded by going public. For weeks he protested outside Delaware County Courthouse, addressing people entering and leaving the building through a megaphone and distributing thousands of leaflets. He was protesting about the fact that the authorities were refusing to put the DNA found on the gloves onto the FBI national DNA database.

Eventually, for Nick Yarris, incarcerated for more than half his life for a crime he did not commit, everything turned out fine. He was aware he could still be in serious trouble in the United States due to the ‘three strikes’ law – if he committed the slightest misdemeanour, he stood a chance of returning to prison for the rest of his life. He moved to Britain, the land of his forefathers, married and started a new life.

He had been in prison for twenty-one years. Admittedly, at the start of it all he had been stupid, but you cannot execute a man for stupidity.

 

 

Richard Allen Davis

 

Richard Allen Davis has languished for the last ten years on death row in California’s San Quentin State Prison, a pariah to his fellow inmates. Not only is he the lowest of the low in criminal circles, a child-killer, he is also the reason that the California State Government introduced its ‘three strikes and you’re out’ legislation that enables courts to impose lengthy periods of incarceration on criminals who have committed serious offences three times.

In 1996, he was convicted of the first-degree murder of twelve-year-old Polly Klaas who he had abducted from her bedroom on 1 October 1993.

That night, Polly Klaas was fearful of the dark as ever, terrified that a mysterious bogeyman was going to come into her bedroom and kidnap her. Tragically, that is exactly what happened.

On that first day of October, Polly was having a sleepover at her house with her two best friends, Kate McLean and Gillian Pelham. As they did the usual things little girls do when together, playing with make-up and putting on funny clothes, a thick-set man with a beard and bushy grey hair was hanging about on the pavement outside the house which was situated in Petaluma, a quiet, affluent town about forty miles from San Francisco. Polly lived there with her mother, Eve, who was at the time separated from her second husband, and her younger sister, Annie. A number of people recall seeing the figure outside the house, but Petaluma was a town unfamiliar with crime and they surmised that he was just a local resident out for a walk.

As it was getting late, Polly decided to fetch the girls’ sleeping bags from the living room. When she opened the door, however, her heart was almost stopped by the sight of a middle-aged man she had never set eyes on before. In his hand was a knife. He hissed at her, ‘Don’t scream or I’ll cut your throats!’ The terrified girls’ chatter stopped at once. ‘Who lives here?’ he asked. ‘I do,’ Polly answered, her voice trembling with terror. ‘I’m just doing this for money,’ the man added. Polly immediately fetched a box with $50 in it. But he refused it, ordering the three girls to lie on the floor. He tied their hands behind their backs and covered their heads. ‘I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just doing this for the money,’ he reiterated, as if trying to convince himself. As he tied Polly up, she pleaded with him not to hurt her mum and sister. He picked Polly up and snarled at her friends to count to a thousand before they did anything. He then carried the little girl out of her house.

As soon as he was gone, Gillian and Kate began to tug at their bonds and succeeded in freeing themselves. They ran to Polly’s mother’s bedroom and blurted out what had happened. It was around 10.45 p.m. when she called 911.

As soon as the officers arrived, a description of the abductor was broadcast to patrol cars throughout Sonoma County but they failed, critically, to send it to every station which would probably prove fatal for Polly Klaas. This was because the abductor’s truck had broken down around midnight, twenty-five miles from the Klaas house. Dana Jaffe phoned the police to report a trespasser on her property. Her nineteen-year-old babysitter, Shannon Lynch, had seen a stranger standing by a Ford Pinto that had become stuck in a ditch. When she stopped and lowered her window a few inches, the man had told her he was stuck and needed a rope. Lynch did not like the look of him, however, and sped off. At the first payphone she found she phoned Dana Jaffe to warn her.

Jaffe became frightened, piled her child into her Toyota and drove away from her house, passing the stricken Pinto. She called the police from a petrol station.

Two police officers in a patrol car pulled up behind the Pinto. When they asked the man what he was doing in the area, he calmly told them he was ‘sightseeing’. He then pulled out a can of beer from his car and began drinking it. When one of the officers told him he should not be doing that, he tossed the can into nearby bushes. They ordered him to pick it up.

Meanwhile, a check was being run for outstanding warrants on him after he told them his name was Richard Allen Davis. Sadly, if they had checked further, they would have found that Davis had a an extensive and worrying rap sheet that included robbery, burglary, assault and kidnapping, and numerous convictions for violence against women. At that time, he was on parole and was in violation of it.

The officers told him to leave the property and helped him to get the Pinto out of the ditch. He drove off, Polly Klaas possibly in the boot of the car and, it has been speculated, still alive at that time.

The following morning Davis was identified as the abductor from a palm print in Polly’s room, but the information was not yet made public. A citizens’ group was assembled by a local printer, Bill Rhodes, who also printed thousands of leaflets carrying Polly’s photograph and a description of her. He organised the Polly Klaas Centre which coordinated search efforts. The case was feature on the television show, America’s Most Wanted, and Polly’s face and a sketch of her abductor’s face, stared out from posters in malls and supermarkets.

A massive search was launched with bloodhounds, hundreds of police officers and local people. Thousands of tips were received by telephone and the movie star Winona Ryder, who grew up in Petaluma, donated a $200,000 reward. A benefit concert featuring stars of the San Francisco music scene and hosted by the comedian and actor Robin Williams, raised $12,000 to help in the search. As the days turned into weeks, however, she had still not been found. There was a sad, but growing certainty that she was dead.

The police had another chance to catch Davis on 19 October when he was picked up for driving under the influence of alcohol. None of the officers involved spotted his resemblance to the sketches of Polly’s abductor, nor did they connect his white Pinto with that night as he drove off in it five hours later after sobering up.

Strangely, stories about Bill Rhodes who had organised so much to help the search, began to emerge. It transpired that he was in fact a registered sex-offender, convicted of masturbating in front of a group of children in 1967. In 1968, he had forced four young girls to undress at knife-point. He resigned, but many began to wonder just how involved he was. Was he the abductor? The police thought not. He was eliminated as a suspect.

On 28 November, while out walking on her property, Dana Jaffe discovered some strange items – a dark sweatshirt, knotted red tights, a condom wrapper and an unwrapped condom. There were also strips of tape and a hood-like piece of white cloth. Police immediately made the link to the trespasser in the Pinto who had been allowed to leave that night.

Two days later, they arrested Richard Allen Davies and Polly’s two friends immediately picked him out in an identity parade. On 4 December, he confessed to the kidnapping and murder of Polly Klaas and led investigators to the body.

But who was Richard Allen Davis and how did he become a child-killer?

He had been born in 1954 to parents who were both alcoholics and who divorced when he was eleven. His father Bob won custody of Richard and his four siblings because of what was described in a probation report as his mother’s alleged immoral conduct in front of her children. Davis developed a pathological hatred of women from the three stepmothers his father inflicted on him and his brothers and sisters. But his home life was generally unstable. Bob Davis suffered from hallucinations and was known to take a gun outside and shoot at things only he could see.

Richard Davis was torturing and killing animals from an early age and by his early teens he was carrying a knife and was already settling into a life of crime. He dropped out of high school in his second year, but at seventeen was told by a judge as he appeared in court yet again, that he had a choice – either join the army or be locked up. He chose the army and was posted to Germany where he worked as a driver. He was unable to resist stealing, however, and after just thirteen months, was dishonorably discharged.

Back in California, there were suspicions that he killed eighteen-year-old Marlene Voris in October 1973. He was at a party celebrating her acceptance into the US Navy and at the end of the evening, as he was leaving, Davis told some friends he had to go back into the house. Shortly after, a shot rang out. Marlene was found dead with no fewer than seven suicide notes around her. Many believed Davis had become jealous of her success, where he had failed, had forced her to write the notes and had then killed her. He claimed she had shot herself and the authorities belived him.

For the next couple of years he was in and out of prison for petty crimes, but in September 1976, he attacked a twenty-six-year-old secretary, Frances Mays in a car park. He bundled her into her car at knife-point and drove off. When they stopped and Davis was preparing to rape her, she managed to escape and flag down a car that happened to be driven by an off-duty policeman. He arrested Davis who claimed that he had heard Frances Mays’ voice telling him to rape her. He was transferred to a psychiatric hospital for evaluation, but on 16 December, he escaped.

That night he broke into the home of a nurse. Thirty-two-year-old Marjorie Arlington was beaten with a poker. He kidnapped a bartender, Hazel Frost, as she got into her car. She grabbed a gun she kept under the seat, however, and fired at Davis as he ran off into the night. Finally, he was apprehended and in June 1977, was sentenced to one to twenty-five years in prison for the kidnapping of Frances Mays.

Paroled in 1982, Davis continued to offend, robbing banks with his new girlfriend, Sue Edwards. Arrested again in 1985, he went to prison until 1993, serving half of a sixteen-year sentence.

He went to Petaluma, he claimed, to visit his mother who was living there. Unfortunately, he was unable to find her. He recalled nothing about going to the Klaas house, saying that he had smoked a joint that he thought must have been spiked with PCP. He found himself driving around, wondering what to do with Polly and said he had arrived at the conclusion that he had no option but to kill her. He insisted, however, that he did not rape or molest her. However, when Polly’s body was at last found two months after her murder, her skirt was up around her waist and her legs were spread open. He had strangled her from behind with a piece of cloth.

Richard Allen Davis was found guilty and sentenced to death. Defiantly evil to the end, he raised two fingers to the court after the verdict was announced.

He remains on death row in San Quentin State Prison, hated by everyone.

 

 

Kenny Richey

 

Amnesty International, the organization that fights for human rights and justice around the world, described the case of Kenny Richey as ‘one of the most compelling cases of apparent innocence that human rights campaigners have ever seen’. Richey, himself, resolutely insisted on his innocence throughout his incarceration, declining a plea bargain before his trial that would send him to prison for eleven years and four months in return for pleading guilty to involuntary manslaughter. In the late 1990s, he also turned down the opportunity to be transferred to a Scottish prison from which he would eventually be released under the Scottish probation law. Instead he spent twenty-one years on death row and, on one occasion, in 1994, was just one hour away from being executed when a stay of execution was phoned through.

Richey came from a chaotic and troubled background and by the age of thirteen had been subjected to his first mental health evaluation, being treated in various mental institutions. He had an obsessive fascination with death and violence and his acts of self-harming and attempts at suicide had resulted in his body being covered with more than six-hundred scars. He was a severely maladjusted and dangerously anti-social young man.

Was he, however, an arsonist whose acts led to the murder of a young girl, or a victim of an incompetent and vengeful justice system?

At about 4.15 a.m., 30 June 1986, a fire broke out in a second floor apartment at the Old Farm Village apartment complex in Columbus Grove, Ohio. It was the home of Hope Collins and her two-year-old daughter, Cynthia and Cynthia was, at the time, the only one in the apartment. Hope had gone to spend the night with a boyfriend following a party in a neighbouring apartment, having invited Kenny Richey to sleep in the apartment in return for babysitting her daughter. When firefighters finally fought their way into the apartment, they found Cynthia dead from smoke inhalation.

The fire was initially believed to have been started by a faulty electric fan but when further investigations were carried out, it was concluded that it had been caused by arson and the chief suspect was Kenny Richey. It was alleged that Richey was furious with a former girlfriend, Candy Barchet, who had dumped him for a new man. Her apartment was directly below Hope Collins’ and it was alleged that Richey had set the fire in the apartment above hoping it would burn through the floor and into Candy’s. He was accused of stealing petrol and paint thinner from a nearby greenhouse, which he splashed throughout the apartment, setting fire to it before escaping, taking the empty containers with him. Very quickly the apartment turned into an inferno.

Numerous witnesses were found to support this series of events. Many knew that Richey had lost his temper when Candy had started sleeping with John Butler. He had threatened Butler with a knife one night and Butler and he had fought. Richey later broke his hand when he punched a door violently in frustration.

By 29 June, Candy had a new boyfriend and she took him to the party, kissing him and making Richey very jealous. However, he was calmed by Candy and she went home with her new man. Richey remained angry, however, and was also very drunk, telling anyone who would listen that if he could not have her, no one could. Some witnesses also said that he had threatened to start a fire. According to Peggy Price, in whose apartment the party was taking place, he said to her, ‘Before the night is over, part of A Building is going to burn.’

Around 2 a.m. as the party was winding down, he had made his arrangement with Hope Collins and she had driven off with her boyfriend.

As the fire raged, Richey arrived on the scene, becoming aggressive and argumentative when he was restrained from going into the apartment by the police. Later, as he looked at the wreckage of the apartment, he drank a beer and is alleged to have laughed, saying, ‘Looks like I did a helluva good job, don’t it?’

He admitted he had broken into the greenhouse across the street and had stolen two plants, which he had offered to get for Peggy Price. She had told him she did not want them and they were found outside Candy’s apartment. The owner of the greenhouse told police that he also kept thinners and petrol in there, but he could not confirm whether any was missing.

A good deal of the fire-damaged contents of the apartment had been disposed of by the time investigators decided that they were evidence. Six pieces of material were retrieved, some of them pieces of carpet that had been thrown on a rubbish dump. They were brought back two days after the fire and left outside on the sheriff’s car park – not the best way to store vital evidence. They remained there for three weeks before being taken away for testing. The spot in which they lay was about forty feet away from petrol pumps and the risk of contamination was huge. Other samples, such as chips of wood were removed from the apartment weeks after the fire, also providing ample scope for contamination.

Nonetheless, the samples provided conclusive evidence, to the prosecution’s mind, at any rate, that an accelerant had been used to start the fire.

Kenny Richey was arrested on July 1 after being interviewed and making a statement in which he admitted being drunk on the night of the fire and unable to recall very much. However, he denied any involvement in the fire and also denied that Hope had asked him to babysit Cynthia. His alibi was that he had been at his father’s apartment when the fire broke out.

A dangerously aggressive individual, Richey did not help his case by claiming that he would cut the prosecutor’s throat. He also added threatening comments directed at anyone who testified against him. Neither did a letter he wrote to a friend in Scotland while in custody help his cause. ‘If they just give me prison time’ he wrote, ‘they better hope to hell I die in there, cause when I get out I won’t stop hunting them all down until everyone who is involved in this case is dead!’

Psychological examinations highlighted the problems he had been found to have when he was younger. One doctor attributed to him the emotional level of a ten or eleven-year-old. Another pointed to his troubled family, his early history of drug abuse and violence and diagnosed him as suffering from antisocial personality disorder. Nonetheless, he was declared able to understand the difference between right and wrong as well as the consequences of his actions and, therefore, fit to stand trial.

Richey’s defence was that there never was any arson; therefore, no crime had taken place. Cynthia Collins’ death was no more than a tragic accident. But tragically for him, his defence team proved not to be up to the job. One of their expert witnesses gave evidence that supported the prosecution case and the man was, in fact, called to give evidence for the prosecution later in the trial.

The waters were clouded by witnesses recanting their original testimonies. One of the neighbours who claimed to have heard Richie threaten to burn down the apartment block withdrew the testimony she gave during the trial. She also revealed that the dead little girl, Cynthia Collins like to play with matches and had twice set fire to her bed. This never came up during the trial. Nor did the fact that firefighters had been called to the flat on three occasions in the weeks before the fire when smoke had been found.

Those campaigning for Kenny Richey’s release pointed out that there was no trace of flammable materials on his clothing or his boots, even though the accelerants were said to have been liberally splashed around the apartment.

One witness reported, in addition, that Richey had been so drunk that he had collapsed in bushes on the night in question. This coupled with a broken hand would have made it difficult for him to climb noiselessly up into the second-floor apartment, carrying cans of petrol and thinners.

A fire alarm in the apartment had been dis-connected, but there was absolutely no evidence that Richey had done this, even though the judge used it as one of the reasons he should be subjected to the death penalty. If Richey’s defence attorney had been on the ball, he would have learned that those who lived in the apartments regularly disconnected their alarms.

In 1992, an appeal lodged with the Ohio Supreme Court, was defeated by four votes to three. Another appeal, in 1997, to the judge who had originally sentenced him to death was inevitably rejected. The following year another appeal to the Ohio Supreme Court was similarly dismissed. Meanwhile, Richey constantly requested that what appeared to be unsafe forensic evidence, be reexamined, but the prosecution constantly objected to this.

In June 1998, his thirteenth execution date was stayed and the case was moved to the federal courts.

In the meantime, the clamour for Kenny Richey’s release had reached astonishing proportions from international figures and celebrities such as Irvine Welsh, Robbie Coltrane, members of the Scottish Parliament, Pope John Paul II, Jack Straw, Tony Blair, actress Susan Sarandon, the European Parliament and, of course, Amnesty International.

It was taking its toll on forty-three-year-old Richey, however. In August 2006, he suffered a series of heart attacks in his cell – not his first – and was operated on, making a full recovery.

On 10 August 2007, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld its 2005 overturning of Kenny Richey’s conviction and death penalty due to ineffective counsel. They ordered that he be retried within ninety days or released. The retrial was set for 2 October. It was announced, however, that Richey had agreed to a plea bargain. The arson and murder charges were dropped and he pleaded ‘no contest’ to involuntary manslaughter, child endangering and breaking and entering. He was sentenced to the amount of time he had already served and was released on condition that he leave the United States immediately.

Many were disappointed that he did not remain in the United States to fight the retrial, a trial that his defence team were confident he would win. However, one leader of the ‘Kenny Richey Campaign’ wisely counseled, ‘What Kenny always said was that he would never plead to starting the fire or trying to kill anyone. And he hasn’t. The State has caved in and dropped those claims because it can’t prove them. What he is pleading ‘no contest’ to is failure to babysit and stealing a plant. After twenty-one years in prison for an unconstitutional conviction on charges the State has now dropped, what sense did it make to spend six more months in prison to fight about a failure to babysit and stealing a plant?’

On 19 January 2010, Kenny Richey, back in the USA, appeared in court in Minnesota charged with beating his son Sean with a baseball bat. He could be sentenced to seventeen years in prison.

 

 

Michael Morales

 

It is a fascinating legal conundrum. In 2006, a California court declared that intravenous lethal injections can only be carried out by a licensed medical professional. The lethal injection, if administered incorrectly by an insufficiently trained person could lead to suffering of the condemned person, constituting cruel and unusual punishment. As medical professionals are, of course, prevented by the ethics of their profession from taking or contributing to the taking of life, that presented a problem.

In 2006, as Michael Angelo Morales, convicted in 1981 of murdering seventeen-year-old Terri Lynn Winchell, waited to walk to San Quentin State Prison’s death chamber where he would be strapped onto a gurney on which he would receive a lethal injection, two anaesthesiologists refused to participate in the execution due to the ethical issues that had been raised. The anaesthesiologists issued a statement through the prison saying that they were concerned about a requirement that they intervene in the event that Morales woke up or seemed to be in pain during the execution process. Such an intervention, they claimed, would be unethical. The American Medical Association, the American Society of Anaesthesiologists and the California Medical Association agreed.

The execution was rescheduled – the third re-scheduling – for 21 February 2006. They said they would use a different method, a fatal overdose of barbiturates, rather than the three-drug cocktail that was normally used in lethal injection executions. It was this latter method that Morales’s attorneys had claimed provided a risk of excruciating pain, if the condemned man were not properly sedated.

Still, no medical professional would agree to take part and at 11.59 p.m. on that Tuesday, Michael Morales’ death warrant ran out. California’s six hundred and fifty condemned men, including Michael Morales, woke up on Wednesday 22 February to what amounted to a moratorium on capital punishment and the impasse continues to this day.

Morales has never denied the murder for which he was sentenced to death, but says that he was high on the drug PCP when he committed it. He was already a felon, having been convicted of burglary on 4 October 1979 and sent to prison. Shortly after killing Terri Winchell, he was convicted on two counts of robbery for which he was sentenced to a term of imprisonment. He had gone into a store to buy beer but when the assistant refused to serve him, he left, returning later with two companions. They grabbed the assistant, put a knife to his face, hit him with a milk crate and kicked him. Another shop assistant, a pregnant woman, was viciously knocked to the ground, suffering cuts to her head and face.

It began in early 1980, when twenty-one-year-old Michael Morales’s nineteen-year-old cousin, Rick Ortega, had a homosexual relationship with seventeen-year-old Randy Blythe. At the same time as he was seeing Ortega, however, Blythe was also dating Terri Winchell. Terri had no idea about her boyfriend’s relationship with Ortega but, to her cost, Ortega found out that she was seeing his boyfriend and became insanely jealous.

When Randy Blythe tried to end what was an already stormy relationship with Rick Ortega, Ortega reacted violently, becoming openly hostile towards Terri whenever he was in her company. With his cousin, Michael Morales, he concocted a plan to murder Terri.

On the day of the murder, 8 January 1981, Morales told his girlfriend he was going to strangle and ‘hurt someone’. That day, Ortega tricked Terri into travelling with him in his car to a remote area close to the city of Lodi, California. When they arrived at the designated spot Morales leapt out from his hiding place in the back of the car, attacking Terri from behind. He tried to strangle her with his belt but the belt snapped as Terri struggled to break free. He began smashing her on the head with a hammer and she screamed for Ortega to help her, not realizing that the attack was happening at his instigation. As she tried to escape, her hair was ripped from her scalp in the struggle. He continued to beat her with the hammer, leaving her with twenty-three wounds and her skull smashed. As she lay unconscious and near death, Morales dragged her face-down across the road and into a vineyard where he raped her. He started to leave, but returning moments later to make sure she was dead, stabbed her viciously four times in the chest. She was left in the vineyard, naked from the waist down, her sweater and bra pulled up above her exposed breasts.

The following day, Rick Ortega was brought in for questioning about her disappearance. His open hostility towards her in the weeks before her disappearance made him a prime suspect. Morales was also brought in and while in a cell, confessed his part in Terri’s disappearance and murder to a police informant, Bruce Samuelson, who was also in custody. Morales had already confessed to Raquel Cardenas, his girlfriend, and his housemate, Patricia Flores, but had threatened them not to testify against him at his trial.

When Morales was arrested on 10 January, police found the broken belt, covered in Terri’s blood, concealed under a mattress. They also found three knives, and hidden in his refrigerator, a hammer on which analysis revealed were traces of blood. In the dustbin were found the blood-stained floor mats from Ortega’s car. They also found Terri Winchell’s purse and credit cards.

At Morales’ trial, the story of the love triangle emerged. His defence was based on a claim that the murder was not premeditated, although this was hard to believe as Morales had already told Ortega that he would help him and had informed his girlfriend on the day of the murder that he was going to ‘hurt someone’. The prosecution leapt on the fact that Morales had put together the tools he was going to use on the day, the belt, the hammer and the knife. Damningly, it emerged that he had actually practiced for the murder, trying out his strangulation method on two women friends.

Michael Morales was sentenced to death and the appeal process was launched immediately, one of his lawyers being Kenneth Starr, later known for his tenure as independent counsel while Bill Clinton was president of the United States. His Starr Report into the Monica Lewinsky affair led the way to the attempt to impeach President Clinton. In February 2006, towards the end of the process, the defence team filed papers that claimed that five out of the twelve jurors had doubts about sentencing Michael Morales to death. Prosecutors, however, alleged that these documents were false and the case was damaged when one juror appeared on a radio show expressing surprise that she had been named in this context. Starr and his team withdrew the documents a week later. Eventually one of the defence investigators, Kathleen Culhane, would be sentenced to five years in prison for forging the documents.

Clemency for Michael Morales was, unsurpris-ingly, denied and the execution date was set for 21 February.

That night, as Morales prepared to walk to the death chamber and be strapped down on the gurney on which he would die, the court made its decision and the lack of a medical professional willing to carry out the execution meant that the execution could not take place. The state of California had no option but to allow the death warrant to lapse.

Interestingly, if they ever find a way to make the death penalty work again, the new death warrant may only be issued by the original trial judge. That judge, Charles McGrath, has since announced that he has reservations about the testimony of the police informant Bruce Samuelson in the case. No wonder – the informant testified that Morales confessed to him in Spanish. Although of Hispanic origin, Michael Morales does not speak a word of Spanish. As a result, McGrath has asked California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to grant clemency to Morales.

Meanwhile, Michael Morales, now fifty-one years old, claims to have found God in prison and has expressed remorse for his terrible crime.

 

 

Richard Ramirez the ‘Night Stalker’

 

The bride was elegant in a white wedding dress with lacey chiffon sleeves. The groom was less elegant, dressed in ill-fitting standard-issue starched prison blues. The ceremony was simple and tasteful (they removed the groom’s restraints) and took place in main visiting room of San Quentin Prison. Present were two attorneys, Ramirez’s brother, sister and seventeen-year-old niece.

It was 3 October 1996, and forty-one-year-old Doreen Lioy, a freelance editor who worked part-time for teenage magazines and lived on a houseboat, was the bride. The groom was thirty-six-year-old serial killer, Richard Ramirez, known as the ‘Night Stalker’, the murderer of thirteen people, the man who struck terror into the hearts of the inhabitants of Los Angeles between 28 June 1984 and 24 August 1985.

He had been born Ricardo Leyva in El Paso, Texas in 1960, youngest of a family of five. Outwardly, his family seemed decent and hard-working but behind closed doors, they lived in fear of their father’s terrible temper. When he blew it usually meant a beating for one of them. The young Ricardo would often spend the night in the local cemetery in order to avoid one of those explosions and the inevitable beating that followed. At school, things were not much better and he was set apart by epileptic seizures from which he suffered. He was a loner who found it hard to make friends.

The person he liked best and looked up to most was his cousin Mike, a Vietnam vet who could talk about what it was like to kill and torture. He had gruesome photographs that were a testimony to his wicked acts during that conflict. He explained to Ricardo as they sat smoking weed and drinking beer that killing made you feel good, it gave you power, made you feel like a god. Ricardo drank it all in, listening wide-eyed to his cousin’s stories.

Mike also had a bad temper and it got the better of him one day when, tired of his wife’s nagging about getting a job, he pulled a gun and shot her in the face, killing her. Ricardo watched him do it and was sprayed with blood from the dead woman’s wounds. Mike was found to be insane and was consigned to a secure hospital.

Ramirez was already getting out of control. He dropped out of school at fourteen, smoked too much marijuana and stole to pay for his habit. His diet of junk food rotted his teeth and left him with dreadful halitosis; it would be recalled with horror by many of the women he later attacked and raped. He also had an unhealthy fascination with Satanism, which his father blamed on too much dope. Satanic rock music was his preference as personified by Australian rock band AC/DC’s anthem Night Prowler:

 

Was that a noise outside your window?

What’s that shadow on the blind?

As you lie there naked like a body in a tomb

Suspended animation as I slip into your room…

 

It was like a blueprint for his future life.

In 1978, aged eighteen, Ricardo, now calling himself Richard Ramirez, moved to Los Angeles where in his first few years he came into contact with the law a few times, mostly for car theft and drug possession. He began to burgle houses, stealing valuables and sometimes, it is claimed, hanging around a little longer than was necessary, perhaps even photographing their sleeping owners.

He graduated to murder on 28 June 1984, following a night spent doing cocaine. After removing a screen from a window of an apartment in Glassel Park, he clambered in and found seventy-nine-year-old Jennie Vincow. He slashed her throat so viciously that he almost decapitated her. He then stabbed her repeatedly before rampaging through the apartment searching for valuables. Her son discovered her body the following day and investigators discovered signs of sexual assault. They also found fingerprints on the window screen.

Eight months later, twenty-two-year-old Angela Barrios arrived home at the condominium she shared with thirty-four-year-old Dayle Okazaki in Rosemead, to the north of Los Angeles. As she got out of her car, she thought she heard a man behind her. She turned to find Ramirez, dressed entirely in black, a baseball cap pulled down low over his face. In his hand was a gun that he fired at her face. She raised her hands in self-defence and remarkably the bullet ricocheted off her key ring. She fell to the ground and pretended to be dead while he went into the condo. As soon as he had gone, she left the garage and went round to the front door, but she encountered her attacker on his way out. As she ducked down behind a car, he again levelled his gun at her. When she begged him not to shoot, he suddenly lowered the weapon and ran away. She ran inside to find her housemate dead on the kitchen floor with her blouse pulled up and a bullet through her forehead. Police found a baseball cap outside with the AC/DC logo on it. He was not finished yet, however. A patrolling police officer came upon a car near Monterey Park in which he found thirty-year-old Tsian-Lian Yu, shot several times. She died at the scene.

He returned to Monterey Park on the night of 26 March, breaking into the home of Vincent and Maxine Zazzara. Sixty-four-year-old Vincent, who owned a pizzeria, was found shot in the left temple on the sofa in his den. Forty-four-year-old Maxine was lying in bed naked. Horrifically, her eyes were gouged out and she was subjected to a frenzied knife attack, although she had also been shot in the head and it is probable that she died instantly before he started stabbing and mutilating her. He had pillaged the house for valuables afterwards.

Two weeks later, he broke into the house owned by sixty-six-year-old William and sixty-three-year-old Lillian Doi. Mr Doi was shot in the mouth and then savagely beaten. Mrs Doi was warned not to scream, tied and, after he had searched for valuables, raped. Mr Doi, however, was still alive and managed to crawl to a phone and dial 911. He died in hospital, but Lillian Doi lived and was able to provide the first description of the killer.

On 29 May, eighty-three-year-old Malvia Keller and her invalid eighty-year-old sister, Blancha Wolfe were found in their Monrovia home, both having been beaten viciously with a hammer. An inverted pentagram was found scrawled in lipstick on Ms Keller’s inner thigh and a second pentagram was drawn on the bedroom wall above Ms Wolfe’s bed. They had been there for two days when they were found and only Blancha Wolfe survived.

Eight people had now been killed and Los Angeles was in a panic. Sales of handguns and alarms went through the roof as Los Angelenos sought to protect themselves against the killer the press were now calling the Night Stalker. The attacks were unprecedented. It seemed that the man just liked breaking in and exercising control. He did not seem to be interested in robbery or murder although valuables were being taken and people were dying. Gender and age seemed to be irrelevant to him; his victims were male and female, old and young. He was described as a thin Hispanic male, with black greasy hair and very bad breath as a result of his seriously decayed teeth. Police stopped anyone who looked remotely like him, but he continued to kill.

On 30 May, forty-one-year-old Ruth Wilson was awakened by a flashlight being shone in her face in the bedroom of her Burbank home. Holding a gun to her head, Ramirez ordered her to the bedroom of her twelve-year-old son, who he handcuffed and locked in a cupboard. She gave him all the valuables she could find and he took her back to the bedroom where he raped and sodomised her. But he did not kill her and the boy managed to escape from the locked cupboard and call 911. By the time they got there, however, he had fled.

On 27 June, he raped a six-year-old girl in Arcadia and the following day, in the same area, the body of thirty-two-year-old Patty Higgins was found with her throat brutally cut. The 2 July was the day they found seventy-five-year-old Mary Louise Cannon in Arcadia, beaten and with her throat slit. On 5 July, Whitney Bennett, also of Arcadia, was savagely beaten with a crowbar. She needed four hundred and seventy-eight stitches but survived. Two days later, Joyce Nelson did not. She was beaten to death with a blunt object at home in Monterey Park. The same night he turned up in the house of sixty-three-year-old registered nurse, Sophie Dickman. Pointing a gun at her, he ordered her into the bathroom while he ransacked the house. He tried to rape her, but was unable to maintain an erection. Frustrated and humiliated, he grabbed the valuables he had found, shouting angrily at her as he fled.

On 20 July, he broke into the home of Lela and Max Kneiding, both aged sixty-six and shot and killed them before butchering their bodies with his new toy, a machete. That same day, he entered the house of thirty-two-year-old Chitat Assawahem whom he shot dead before raping his wife Sakima and forcing her to perform oral sex on him. He then horrifically sodomised their eight-year-old son before leaving with $30,000 of jewellery. On 6 August, he shot a couple, thirty-eight-year-old Christopher and twenty-seven-year-old Virginia Petersen in Northridge. She was hit under the left eye and he was shot in the temple, although, amazingly, the bullet failed to pierce his skull. As Christopher leapt up at Ramirez, he was shot at two more times but both bullets missed The two men wrestled on the floor before Ramirez fled through the sliding doors through which he had initially gained entry. The Petersens both survived.

Thirty-five-year-old Elyas Abowath was not so lucky. Ramirez shot him in the head while he slept and he then raped and sodomised his thirty-five-year-old wife Sakina before forcing her to perform oral sex on him.

He was killing increasingly frequently and the violence appeared to be escalating, but as Los Angeles awaited the next horrific attack he headed north to San Francisco where he killed Peter and Barbara Pan in Lake Merced. Sixty-four-year-old Mrs Pan survived but would be an invalid for the remainder of her life. Scrawled on a wall in their house was an inverted pentagram and the words ‘Jack the Knife’. A bullet found at the scene provided a perfect match for one fired by the Night Stalker in Los Angeles. The San Francisco Police Department’s worst nightmare had happened. The Night Stalker had relocated.

A man who ran a boarding-house in San Francisco came forward to tell police about a young Hispanic man with halitosis and bad body odour who had stayed at his place several times in the past year and a half. In the room he used, a pentagram had been scrawled on the bathroom door. He had vacated the room the day the Pans were attacked.

Ramirez returned to Los Angeles and attacked a couple in Mission Viejo, fifty miles south of the city, shooting and seriously wounding the man before dragging his fiancé into the next room where he informed her that he was the Night Stalker. He raped her twice but was furious that there was nothing of value in the house. He made her say over and over that she loved Satan and then made her perform oral sex on him before he stepped back, laughed at her and left.

She crawled to the window and watched as he drove off in an old orange Toyota. Coincidentally, a teenager had earlier become suspicious when he saw the vehicle in the neighbourhood and had scribbled down its licence number. He called the police with it the next morning when he heard about the attack. The car which had been stolen from Chinatown, was found in the Rampart area. Although he never returned to it, there was a fingerprint in it which matched up with one Ricardo ‘Richard’ Leyva Ramirez. Now, at last, they knew who they were looking for.

They got him seven days later. Looking for another car to steal, he climbed into an unlocked Mustang owned by fifty-six-year-old Faustino Pinon. Unfortunately for Ramirez, he failed to notice that Pinon was actually under the car at the time, working on it. When Ramirez turned the key, Faustino leapt up from beneath the vehicle, reached inside and grabbed him by the throat. Ramirez put his foot down in an attempt to speed away but lost control of the vehicle and crashed into a fence. Pinon dragged him out of the car and threw him to the ground but Ramirez clambered up and took to his heels, trying to steal another car along the road. Angelina Torres, the car’s owner screamed for help and her husband Manuel came out to see what the fuss was. He picked up a metal post and went after Ramirez. By now there was a posse after him and when one said that he looked like the description of the Night Stalker, the cry went up. Eventually, Manuel caught up with him, poleaxing him with the metal post. The Night Stalker had at last been brought to the ground.

It took four years to finally get Richard Ramirez into court and when he did finall arrive, the gallery was filled by his groupies, a bunch of women who had become ghoulish fans of the Night Stalker. He played to them in the same way that Charles Manson had done decades previously to members of his Family. Ramirez unfailingly dressed in black and sunglasses and occasionally shouted out ‘Hail to Satan!’ during court proceedings. He had tattooed a pentagram on his palm.

Needless to say, the bad-breathed, malodorous murderer was found guilty of all of the forty-three charges he faced and was given nineteen death sentences.

Richard Ramirez remains on death row in San Quentin to this day. He is held in the prison’s Adjustment Centre where the so-called ‘worst of the worst’ are kept under heavy guard and always in isolation. His appeals are almost exhausted but he doesn’t care.

‘Dying doesn’t scare me,’ he said. ‘I’ll be in hell, with Satan’

 

 

Krishna Maharaj

 

In 2001, an astonishing array of thirty British politicians, of every political persuasion, wrote a letter to Governor Jeb Bush of Florida. Martin Bell, Sir Menzies Campbell, former Attorney General Lord Goldsmith, Ken Livingstone, Charles Kennedy and twenty-four others pointed out to Governor Bush that there were ‘astonishing flaws’ in the murder conviction of Trinidadian born British businessman Krishna Maharaj. They insisted that the governor should call for a retrial. So far, however, it has not been forthcoming.

It is a strange case.

At 7 a.m. on Thursday 16 October 1986, security guard Jorge Aparicio arrived at the DuPont Plaza Hotel in downtown Miami. It was still dark outside and inside all seemed quiet.

On the twelfth floor, a maid was doing her cleaning round, wheeling a trolley from room to room, changing linen, making beds and tidying up. She went into room 1215 and saw nothing untoward. The curtains were pulled shut but the twin beds at the top of the suite’s wooden staircase were undisturbed and had not been slept in. The towels had not been used and the soap remained in its wrapper, unused beside the sink.

Throughout that morning no one can remember anyone entering or leaving that room and there were no unusual noises or bangs. Just after noon, however, a passing maid noticed a red stain appeared on the carpet outside the door to 1215. She could not help feeling it looked like blood and, hoping there was some other explanation, immediately contacted hotel security.

Jorge Aparicio, halfway through his day’s work, came upstairs and knocked on the door to the suite, calling out to ask if there was a problem. A voice from the other side of the door replied that there was no problem. ‘Everything is fine,’ he assured the security guard. Aparicio went away but, still curious, returned to the door ten minutes later. When he knocked this time, there was no reply. He took out his pass key, slipped it into the lock and slowly pushed the door open.

The room was a mess. The tiled floor was streaked with blood and on the floor lay a body, that of fifty-three-year-old Derek Moo Young. He lay on his back, his feet facing the door. There were six bullet holes in him. In the upstairs bedroom, Aparicio discovered another body. Derek Moo Young’s twenty-three-year-old son Duane lay at the foot of one of the beds, killed by a single bullet, fired into his head at close range, execution style.

That morning, forty-seven-year-old Krishna Maharaj had awakened at the Broward County home he had shared with his wife since moving to Florida from Britain the previous year. Maharaj who had been born into a family of thirteen in Trinidad in 1939, had risen from earning his living as a truck driver to becoming a successful importer of bananas and West Indian goods into Britain. He became a millionaire, and with a stable of one hundred racing horses and twenty-four Rolls Royces, he became something of a fixture in British high society.

He and his wife, Marita spent a few months in Florida every year, primarily to escape the vagaries of the British winter, but never one to do nothing, Maharaj had started a new career in publishing. With a business partner, he had launched a weekly newspaper, the Caribbean Times, targeted at Florida’s tight-knit Caribbean community. The first issue was published on 4 July 1986.

That October morning, Maharaj climbed into his blue Chevrolet Caprice and drove off to a meeting with a Bahamian businessman with whom he wanted to discuss overseas distribution of the newspaper. It was a meeting that he later came to believe was a trap. He had been set up and had unknowingly walked straight into it.

The meeting was for 8.30 a.m. at the DuPont Plaza. It had been arranged by Neville Butler, a writer he’d hired as a freelancer several weeks previously. Maharaj parked at the hotel and Butler was there to meet him. They took the lift up to room 1215 to wait for their appointment to arrive. Maharaj opened a bottle of soda and watched some television as he waited but no one arrived and at 10.20 a.m. he said he gave up and left for another meeting at midday with an estate agent in Margate, around thirty miles away. He was going to check out a little shopping mall that he was interested in buying. Before that, at around 11 a.m., he drew up at the printing press he owned at Fort Lauderdale. There he bumped into Tino Geddes, a writer for the newspaper. Geddes was heading for a nearby cafe for a coffee and Maharaj joined him there, ordering a beer. He spent some time chatting with Geddes before paying for their drinks and leaving. He eventually met the estate agent and his accountant, George Bell, at around 1 p.m. and after looking at the property, treated the two men to lunch at Tark’s seafood restaurant in Dania Beach. They finally went their separate ways at 3.30 p.m that afternoon.

On the evening of 16 October. Neville Bauer, a City of Miami homicide detective took a call from a man claiming to have seen two people shot dead in a Miami hotel room that day. He named the murderer as Krishna Maharaj, added that he could be found at a Denny’s close to Miami International Airport and hung up. Butler found another officer, Lieutenant John Buhrmeister and the two men headed for the diner, situated at LeJeune Road and NW 25th Street. They walked into the restaurant, and Buhrmeister slid into the booth next to Krishna Maharaj. He stuck a gun into Maharaj’s side and told him to get up slowly from the table.

Three months later, Krishna Maharaj was charged with the murders of Derek Moo Young and his son.

At his trial, the prosecution based its case largely on the testimony of the only eyewitness, Neville Butler and it emerged that it had been Butler who had phoned the police later that day. Maharaj had known Derek Moo Young for more than twenty years and the two had been business partners since 1984, even at one point living next door to one another in Broward County. There had been a very public falling-out, however, a dispute over a property deal and only a month before the murders, Maharaj had filed a civil suit against the other man for the recovery of $424,000 he claimed he owed him. Butler claimed that Maharaj had insisted on settling matters face to face and for that reason he had been asked to set up the meeting.

Butler said that when Moo Young arrived, Maharaj was hiding behind the bathroom door with a gun. He leapt out and an argument ensued in the course of which he pumped half a dozen bullets into the Jamaican. Maharaj then ordered Butler to tie up Duane Moo Young, but the young man escaped and ran upstairs. Maharaj ran after him and shot him, even though he had known him since he had been a toddler and Duane called him ‘Uncle’. According to Butler, he was marched at gunpoint to Maharaj’s car and the two sat there for the next three hours awaiting the arrival of the police at the hotel.

Of course, Maharaj had never denied being in the room and it was littered with his fingerprints. The bullets and casings that were found on the floor came from a 9mm Smith and Wesson Model 39 gun. Maharaj owned just that make and model of weapon.

It seemed pretty clear, but there were numerous inconsistencies. Butler initially said that he had booked the room, but later told police that Maharaj had done it. He admitted lying about when Maharaj actually appeared in the room. At first he said he arrived after the Moo Youngs and then he gave them the version where Maharaj was waiting for them behind the bathroom door. Critically, he failed a polygraph and a lie detector test, while Maharaj passed several.

Police also fell down on the investigation. For instance, they failed to run a simple test to check whether Butler had fired a gun that morning and his clothing was never checked even though it was claimed that he had been wearing blood-soaked clothes and had changed them before making a statement.

The entire story did not add up. Why would Krishna Maharaj commit a double murder, spare the life of the only witness to it and then hold him at gunpoint for hours afterwards, only a short distance from the murder scene, before letting him walk away to inform the authorities?

Tino Geddes was the state’s other main witness. He had initially provided an alibi for Maharaj, but not long before the trial had changed his story, claiming that Maharaj had been talking about his plan to murder Derek Moo Young. He said that on that day Maharaj told him to tell anyone who asked that he had been with him that morning. He became frightened when he realised what Maharaj was asking him to do.

Interestingly, Geddes was, at the time, facing charges for illegally bringing ammunition into Jamaica from the United States. The prosecution attorneys in the Maharaj case flew to Jamaica and testified on his behalf at his trial and helped him to escape jail time.

Maharaj was let down by his counsel who for some reason failed to call witnesses who were able to place him in Fort Lauderdale at the time of the murders. Many of them have since died or cannot be located. To the astonished delight of the prosecution team, the defence part of the trial consisted simply of the words ‘the defence rests.’

The Moo Youngs were presented as ordinary hard-working Jamaicans living off a modest income. Documents discovered since the trial suggest other-wise, however. Million dollar life insurance policies and loans of $1.5 billion have led to speculation that they were involved in money-laundering or drug trafficking. It has been noted that there were a large number of people in South Florida at the time who had reasons to want to kill them, amongst whom is Adam Hosein, a Trinidadian who at the time owned a garage in Broward County. He closely resembled Maharaj and had even used this resemblance on occasion to gain access to horse races. He was an associate of Derek Moo Young and owed him a considerable sum of money. He placed a call to room 1215 on the day of the murders. Adam Hosein was never even questioned by police about the murders.

Colombian importer/exporter Jaime Maijas, who originated from Medellin, the drug capital of South America, was renting room 1214 at the DuPont Plaza that day. He was linked to Hosein but was questioned only cursorily and ruled out as a suspect. There is little doubt, however, that Derek Moo Young and his son were the victims of an assassination by a Medellin drug cartel

In his trial, the jury took just three hours to convict Krishna Maharaj. He was sentenced to death and spent fifteen years on death row exhausting the appeals process before his sentence was commuted to life in 2002 due to violations in due process at his trial.

In his six-by-nine-foot cell at Martin Correctional Institution in Indiantown, Florida, Krishna Maharaj, now seventy, his fortune long gone on legal fees, continues to protest his innocence.

 

 

Karl Chamberlain

 

Karl Chamberlain’s last meal request was extra-ordinary and easily the biggest of any that had been ordered up to that time by any of the four hundred and five inmates executed in Texas since the state recommenced carrying out the death penalty in 1982. He ordered a fresh fruit tray, fresh orange slices, apples, sliced watermelon, honeydew melon, cantaloupe, peaches, plums, grapes, strawberries; a fresh vegetable tray with carrot sticks, celery, two sliced tomatoes, lettuce, cucumber slices, olives, sweet pickles and any other fresh vegetables; slices of cheese and lunchmeat, served with a bowl of ranch dressing, two deviled eggs; six jalapenos stuffed with cheese, breaded and fried; a chef salad, ranch dressing on the side; a plate of onion rings, ketchup and hot sauce on the side; one half-pound of French fries, covered with melted, shredded cheese, salsa, jalapenos and ranch dressing on the side; a bacon double cheeseburger, smothered with grilled onions, three to four slices of cheese and mayonnaise with garlic and onion powder mixed in; two pieces of fried chicken, breasts preferred, or substitute two thighs and two legs; one bean and cheese quesadilla, salsa and jalapeno to the side with sour cream or guacamole if possible; a three-egg omelet with grilled onions, mushrooms, ham and lots of cheese. Ketchup to the side; two barbecue pork rolls; pitcher of orange juice (only a little ice) and a pitcher of milk to wash his enormous meal down.

Chamberlain, thirty-seven, was executed by Texas’s preferred method, lethal injection, on 11 June 2008 in Huntsville, Texas for raping and murdering thirty-year-old Felecia Prechtl in her apartment.

That day, 2 August 1991, Felecia had arranged for her brother and his girlfriend to babysit her five-year-old son so that she could go out with friends in the evening. At about six in the evening they had taken the boy to go to the grocery store while she got ready to go out. Returning to the apartment shortly after, they noticed that the bathroom door was closed and her clothes were still in the hallway. They thought she must be still getting ready but when they had heard nothing for a while and she had not emerged, her brother opened the bathroom door and went in. He found his sister lying face down, her jeans and underwear pulled down around her knees and her ankles and hands bound by duct tape. She wore nothing on the top half of her body and around her head was a pool of blood.

An autopsy revealed that the cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head. The trajectory of the bullet as it entered her head suggested that when she was shot she must have been seated on the toilet or possibly kneeling on the floor, indicating an execution-style killing. A .30 calibre bullet was found and when they checked her to establish whether she had been raped, they discovered sperm in her anal cavity. There was a roll of duct tape at the scene and from the duct tape that had been used to tie her up, they were able to lift fingerprints. Unfortunately, when these were submitted to the police criminal database, there were no matches.

As part of their door-to-door enquiries, a neigh-bour, Karl Chamberlain, was questioned but he denied knowing anything about the murder and neither he nor anyone else was arrested.

For five years, the case remained unsolved but in 1996, someone diligently decided to run another check on the prints from the duct tape. Karl Chamberlain’s name popped up as a potential match. His fingerprints had been taken after he was involved in an attempted robbery in Houston on 17 July 1996. He was subsequently arrested for the murder of Felecia Prechtl.

Chamberlain confessed. He claimed to have been drinking heavily on the day of the murder and had gone to her apartment to borrow some sugar but when she answered the door, he noticed that she wasn’t wearing much. She gave him the sugar and asked him to leave. He took the sugar back to his apartment but as he was preparing to take his dogs out for a walk, decided to go back down to hers again. This time he took with him the roll of duct tape and his .30 calibre rifle. He claimed that she had consented to have anal intercourse with him but an argument ensued when she threatened to tell his wife. He lost his temper, he said, and shot her. Afterwards, he took his dogs for a walk. The rifle, he told them, was at his father’s house. He gave a sample of his DNA and it matched the sperm that they had discovered that night back in 1991.

It was an open and shut case and Chamberlain was found guilty in June 1997 and sentenced to death. The sentence was confirmed by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in June 1999. Subsequent appeals were all denied.

While wishing that his lawyers and the jury had paid a little more attention to the fact that in the five years following the murder he had managed to stay out of trouble, he did show regret for what he did that night. ‘My greatest regret,’ he said, ‘is going down there and not killing myself. I had kind of like a slip into delusion. It makes absolutely no sense…It was like I lost all control.’

There had been a hiatus in executions from September 2007 when the Supreme Court had questioned the legality of lethal injection as a method of execution. Chamberlain gained a brief stay while the point was argued once again, claiming that this method violated his rights under the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States because it represented cruel and unjust punishment. The appeal on this basis was overturned, however, and the execution was scheduled for 11 June.

On the day of his execution, after twelve years on Death Row, Chamberlain was permitted to spend four hours with his family and friends before being transported to Huntsville Prison where Texas’s execution chamber is situated. He then spent the afternoon in a holding cell from which he was able to make phone calls, speak with a spiritual advisor and eat as much of that enormous last meal as he could.

The last words of the now thirty-seven-year-old killer, Karl Chamberlain, were as dignified as they were poignant. ‘I want you all to know I love you with all my heart,’ he said. ‘I want to thank you for being here. We are here to honour the life of Felicia Prechtl, a woman I didn’t even know, and celebrate my death. I am so terribly sorry. I wish I could die more than once.’ As the drugs were pumped into his veins, he said, ‘I love you. God have mercy on us all.’ He was smiling and with that smile still on his face, he started to add, ‘Please do not hate anybody because…’ He slipped into unconsciousness and nine minutes later he was pronounced dead.