Dead Men Walking

by Bill Wallace

  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 h
ad 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 professio
nal 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.