Chapter 16

Epilogue

Greg Gaul continues to serve as senior deputy district attorney in Shasta County, California. He is assigned to the serious offender unit, concentrating on homicide cases.

Russell Swartz continues to take on the most difficult cases. He is considered one of the best defense lawyers in Shasta County.

Jim and Vicki Holman have a portion of their garden set aside as a memorial to Carole and Jesse Garton. They have forgiven Dale Gordon and become friends with Dale’s parents. As Vicki said, “His parents are victims, too.”

Gary and Virginia Griffiths constantly think of Carole and baby Jesse. Virginia said, “Carole will always be my daughter.”

Jesse and Pat Garton still believe in the innocence of Todd. They are supportive of their son’s cause in the appeal his conviction.

Dale Gordon is incarcerated in the California Medical Facility at Vacaville. This penal institution deals with prisoners who have suffered from mental problems. Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan have spent time there.

Lynn Noyes serves her time behind bars at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla. She counsels young female prisoners about the dangers of becoming enamored with charming but dangerous con men.

Norman Daniels is serving his sentence at one of California’s most notorious prisons—Corcoran State Prison in the Central Valley. Because of many gang members there, Corcoran has a reputation as a dangerous place. During the 1990s, Daniel McCarthy, onetime head of the California correctional facilities, said, “The level of violence was absolutely the highest I have ever seen in any institution, anywhere in the country.”

Todd Garton inhabits death row in San Quentin Prison on San Francisco Bay. Opened in 1852, San Quentin sprawls over 432 acres. The general population exceeds 1,500. The numbers of those on death row now exceed 600, in a prison that was built to hold a maximum of 554 death row inmates. As Bob Martinez, a spokesman for the State Department of Corrections, said, “San Quentin’s current death row is a hodgepodge of prison facilities, some of which previously were used to house inmates with lesser sentences. Additional cells were switched to death row status as more and more were sentenced to die.”

With the average of only one or two executions a year in California, Todd Garton may die of natural causes within its walls before he is ever executed. In the meantime he lives a life similar to that of a death row inmate described in the book A Murder, by Gary Fallis. Fallis wrote: His world had shrunk, collapsed in on itself. For the most part the boundaries of his life were the boundaries of his cell.... There was absolutely no privacy on death row. Never a moment of quiet seclusion.

 

 

As with all things concerning Todd Garton, the final resting place of Carole Garton’s ashes has remained somewhat of a mystery. Todd indicated where they might have been deposited, but then he was so prone to lying it was anyone’s guess if what he said was true. Vicki Holman, Carole’s stepmother, recalled, “We heard different stories about Carole’s and the baby’s remains. We tried for a year to get them. Todd’s mother said she still had them as of the time Todd was arrested. In May of 1999 we got a strange call from Pat Garton. She said that the Moose Lodge in Anderson was having a memorial service for all their members who had died in the previous year, and Carole was one of them. She said Todd thought we might want to go. I was dumbfounded. I told her kindly as possible that we would not be able to attend. I also took the opportunity to again ask her about the remains. Her reply was ‘Oh, we decided Carole would not want to return to Oregon, so we scattered her remains up at Burney Falls.’ ”

In some regards this was an appropriate spot for Carole Garton’s ashes to be deposited. She loved the outdoors and Burney Falls is a beautiful spot. Teddy Roosevelt had even declared it to be one of the “wonders of the natural world” at the turn of the twentieth century. Its double falls thunder 129 feet over a cliff of lava in a natural setting of pines. The shimmering pool beneath the falls is awash with cool spray, and rainbows often arch across the waters when the sun beams down between the pine needles. There is even a very probable spot where the ashes could have been deposited into Burney Creek above the falls. A footbridge spans the waters and is hidden from casual view by the forest and surrounding hills.

Beautiful or not, both Vicki Holman and her husband, Jim, were crushed by this news. They wanted Carole’s ashes, and those of the baby, back among people who loved her. But then they heard a story later related by another family member that the Burney Falls story was not true. That it had been invented by Todd Garton—a tale he told his mother to pass on to others.

Just where Carole Garton’s and Jesse James Garton’s remains were scattered, perhaps only Todd Garton knows for sure. And even if he told someone where they had been deposited, it might be the truth, or it might be a lie—or something in between. Todd was never one to let truth stand in the way when there was an elaborate story to be told. Todd Garton stayed true to only one thing—true to his character right down to the bitter end.