Convicted Killer Expects Death Penalty
by Los Angeles (AP)
Convicted Freeway Killer William Bonin, entering the penalty phase of his trial today, says he expects the jury to recommend a death sentence for the homosexual torture-murders of 10 young men and boys. “I’d be stupid not to think it,” Bonin said in a telephone interview after a Superior Court jury returned the guilty verdicts on 10 counts of murder and 10 of robbery Wednesday. “Then, if it comes down that way, it makes it (a death sentence) easier to handle.” Bonin, reached at the Los Angeles County Jail by Orange County newsman Tim Alger of The Register late Wednesday, said he “almost expected” the jury to decide as it did, rendering verdicts of guilty on 20 of 25 counts and innocent on two counts of murder, one of robbery, one of mayhem and one of sodomy.
Bonin said the verdicts gave him “a peculiar kind of calmness. It’s finally over.” Today, jurors begin hearing more testimony as they ponder whether 1 to decree life imprisonment or death in the gas chamber for Bonin. ‘We will be asking for the death penalty,” said Deputy District Attorney Sterling Norris who promised to focus on Bonin’s prior sex crime convictions, past acts of violence and the heinous nature of his murders in prosecuting the penalty phase of the trial. Norris said he would call 20 to 30 witnesses to support a death penalty verdict. He predicted the penalty phase would take two to three days. Defense attorney William Charvet said he would fight to save Bonin’s life, citing the killer’s “Vietnam experiences” and prison troubles as mitigating factors.
Bonin, a 34-year-old truck driver from suburban Downey who was twice paroled on sex crime convictions in the 1970s, served with the Army in Vietnam in the late 1960s and has said he believes the experience changed him. The jury has to believe that there is no reason to execute him,” said Charvet. The pudgy, dark-haired Bonin, clad in a blue prison jumpsuit, was impassive as the seven men and five women of the jury returned their verdicts Wednesday after six days of deliberations. They found Bonin guilty of 10 homosexual murders, acquitted him of two slayings and found special circumstances murder in the commission of robbery and multiple murders which made Bonin eligible for the death penalty.
They acquitted Bonin on a charge of forcible sodomy and one of mayhem. The two murder acquittals came in the cases of 14-year-old Sean King of South Gate and Thomas Lundgren of Reseda. In both killings, jurors indicated they did not have enough evidence to convict Bonin. “Those were the two weaker counts,” Norris conceded later. “Reasonable people can differ, and I have no quarrel with that.” He termed the jury’s over, all decision “a very good verdict, a very just verdict.” King’s mother, seated in a front row of the courtroom, slumped into the arms of another son as the acquittal was announced. She left the courtroom in tears and later said she wished more evidence could have been presented on her son’s killing. “We know that William Bonin killed Sean, but they can’t use the evidence against him,” said Lavada Gifford, King’s mother.
Police reportedly obtained a confession from Bonin in the King murder which was not admissible in court because it constituted self-incrimination. Jurors were told only that the youth disappeared May 20, 1980. KNXT reporter David Lopez testified at the trial’s end that Bonin confessed King’s murder to him and said he had led police to the boy’s remains last year. Charvet said Lopez had “a very substantial effect,” on the outcome of the trial. In the Lundgren acquittal, jurors accepted Lopez’ testimony that Bonin insisted he had not killed the boy whose body was badly mutilated and castrated.
Lopez, who at first refused to testify in the case claiming First Amendment protections, changed his mind later saying, “It was the only humane thing to do.” Wednesday’s verdicts were the culmination of a lengthy probe into one of California’s most bizarre and gruesome mass murder Barbara Biehn, whose son, Steven Wood, was one of the victims in the Freeway Killer case, holds her daughter, Pamela, outside Superior Court Wednesday. She had just heard a jury find William Bonin guilty in the death of her son and nine others. cases, a tale of 44 strnilar killings that had occurred since 1972. Investigators said all 44 might not be linked, but they tied Bonin to 21 slayings in three counties. He was charged with 12 murders in Los Angeles.
Bonin was arrested June 12, 1980, while allegedly sodomizing a teenage boy in his van. Several alleged accomplices in the murders were arrested later and two pleaded guilty in plea bargains to escape the death penalty. Those confessed accomplices, young men with limited mental ability, were the state’s key witnesses against Bonin. Another alleged accomplice, Vernon Butts, committed suicide in jail before the trial began. Another defendant, William Ray Pugh, 18, is awaiting a Feb. 15 trial.
