Gov. Gavin Newsom’s decision to turn San Quentin State Prison into a criminal rehabilitation facility means some of Southern California’s most notorious death row killers will be transferred to other prisons.
The change will not affect their death sentences. No one has been executed in California since 2006, and the governor’s moratorium on the death penalty remains in place.
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They will follow other death row inmates who have already been transferred to other prisons, where they have received more time outside of their cells than in San Quentin, working to pay restitution as part of a convicted prisoner transfer pilot program. The program, which expired in January but which officials say they hope to make permanent, was created after voters passed Proposition 66, whose main feature was to simplify death row appeals.
Approximately 124 prisoners participating in this program, out of approximately 700 prisoners on death row, will remain in their current prisons. More than $49,000 in restitution has been raised as of 2021, according to Vicki Waters, spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Participants in the program included Earl Ellis Green, who was sentenced to death for the November 7, 2010 murder of Riverside police officer Ryan Bonaminio. The officer’s mother, Jerry Bonaminio, called the program “So, so wrong.”
Here are some of the other notable Southern California-related killers currently on death row:
Los Angeles County
• Donald DeBose: In 1997, he shot Danny Kim, stuffed her in the trunk of a car, and set her on fire.
• Timothy Joseph McGee: Between 1997 and 2001, he killed two members of a rival gang and the girlfriend of another.
• Michael Hughes: In 1998, he was convicted of strangling four women, leaving three in the alleys.
• Chester Turner: From 1987 to 1998, he strangled eight women.
Orange County
• Randy Kraft: A Long Beach computer consultant targeted young drifters and Marines he found hitchhiking. In 1989, Kraft was convicted of 16 murders.
• James Marlow: In 1986, along with Cynthia Coffman, he raped and strangled college student Lynelle Murray, 19, and then went to a shrimp dinner.
• Gerald Parker: He raped and murdered five Orange County women in the 1970s, earning him the nickname Bedroom Breaker because he beat his victims with a mallet, mallet, or 2 on 4.
Riverside County
• Joseph R. Avila: He stabbed two people to death during an argument over a woman in Riverside in 1991.
• Michael R. Bergener: He killed a Riverside convenience store clerk on Halloween 1980 in a robbery that earned him $50.
• Raymond Lee Oyler: He started the Esperanza fire in 2006 that killed five US Forest Service firefighters.
San Bernardino County
• Luis Alonso Mendoza: He was one of the gunmen who killed four people in 2000 in the infamous Dead Presidents case.
• Ricky Lee Fowler: He ignited the 2003 Old Fire that killed five people.
• Charles “Chase” Merritt: He was found guilty of killing and burying their bodies in the High Desert in 2010, former business partner Joseph McStay Sr., his wife and two young children.
