A prosecutor who cannot prove a killing with fingerprints or film has a few other places to turn, and the oldest of them is the person who was there. The accomplice who watched, drove, held the door or took part is often the only witness who can say what happened and who did it. He is also, almost always, a person who has something to gain. The bargain that brings him to court (a promise to drop the death penalty, a reduced charge, immunity from a lesser case, a transfer to a different prison) is disclosed to the jury, and defense lawyers build their closing arguments around it. What follows is how nine such bargains played out in American courtrooms between 1965 and 2012: what each witness was offered, what he or she said, what corroboration the prosecutors sought elsewhere, and what became of the witness afterward. The record does not support a single lesson. In some cases the accomplice carried the verdict. In others the witness nearly collapsed the prosecution, or refused to testify at all, or was cast aside by the state that had made the deal.
Charlene Gallego, Karla Homolka and Linda Kasabian also testified against partners or co-defendants, in cases with histories of their own.
The best-known cooperating witness among these cases turned out to be the worst. Kenneth Bianchi was arrested in Bellingham, Washington, in January 1979 over the deaths of two college students. His older cousin, Angelo Buono Jr., ran an auto upholstery business in Glendale, California, and Bianchi named him as his partner in the Los Angeles killings. On October 19, 1979, Bianchi pleaded guilty in Washington to the two Bellingham murders. Prosecutors withdrew their request for the death penalty, and he received two consecutive terms of life without parole. Three days later, in Los Angeles, he pleaded guilty to five of the ten murders of women and girls that Los Angeles had endured between October 1977 and February 1978, to one count of conspiracy to commit murder and to a further count, and received concurrent terms. In return he was spared a death sentence and agreed to testify truthfully against Buono. Glendale police arrested Buono on October 19, 1979, the day of the Washington plea. He was charged with 24 felonies, ten of them murder.
The witness the state had bargained for did not behave as promised. According to a legal history by the attorney Kirk Jenkins, Bianchi testified that he did not know whether he was telling the truth about Buono’s role. Roger Boren, the deputy attorney general who later tried the case, wrote in the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review that Bianchi recanted his responsibility for the murders despite his recorded confessions and guilty pleas. HistoryLink adds that he gave contradictory statements, recanted his testimony against Buono, and then took back the recantations.
The district attorney’s office concluded that its own witness would not survive cross-examination. A couple of months before the scheduled trial it moved to dismiss all the murder charges against Buono. Superior Court Judge Ronald M. George refused, ruling that enough evidence existed to corroborate Bianchi and support a conviction. District Attorney John Van de Kamp then declared a conflict of interest, because his own deputies had told the court Bianchi was not credible, and stepped aside. Attorney General George Deukmejian assigned two deputy attorneys general, Boren and Michael Nash, to try the case.
Bianchi first took the stand on a June morning in 1982. Asked whether he had taken part in the murders, Boren wrote, he said at first that he did not know. By that afternoon he said he believed he had been involved but could remember only bits and pieces. Direct examination lasted about four weeks. The cross-examination by Buono’s lawyer, Gerald Chaleff, lasted about four months. In all Bianchi spent about six months as a witness, and United Press International later counted 80 days. Boren described him as earnest in the mornings and listless by the afternoon recess, often mumbling his answers.
Because Bianchi could not carry the case, Boren and Nash built it on witnesses who had no deal to protect. A man who said he knew one of the victims identified Buono as the driver of the car that took her; his account matched Bianchi’s on the route but not on the car, and he had left a mental hospital days before police flew him to Los Angeles, which the defense used recorded telephone calls to exploit. A neighbor of another victim testified that she had seen her stopped by two men she took for police officers, and the court ruled that this witness had not been hypnotized and let her testify. A woman who had seen a struggle in North Hollywood in February 1978 identified Buono as the driver of a tan car. Investigators also learned that after Bianchi’s arrest Buono had destroyed a piece of equipment that Bianchi had described, which the prosecution presented as evidence of a guilty mind.
The jury convicted Buono of nine counts of murder in verdicts returned between late October and November 1983, and did not convict him on the tenth. Prosecutors then asked for death. Chaleff argued that Buono should not be punished more harshly than Bianchi, who had received life in exchange for his testimony. The jury chose life over death, and on January 9, 1984, Judge George sentenced Buono to nine concurrent terms of life without parole. (A UPI dispatch headed as a sentencing report is dated November 18, 1983, which does not match the January date.)
The judge then dealt with the witness. He ruled that Bianchi had not testified truthfully and completely, as his plea agreement required, and ordered him returned to Washington to serve his sentence there rather than in a California prison, as he had bargained for, UPI reported. California lodged a detainer on February 1, 1984, so that Bianchi could be handed over to serve his California terms if Washington ever released him. Chaleff told reporters he still believed Buono was innocent and would appeal; later, Boren recorded, he called the life verdict a "belated dose of postconviction reasonable doubt." Buono died of heart disease at Calipatria State Prison on September 21, 2002. Bianchi was denied parole in Washington in August 2010, according to a CBS News report with the Associated Press, and in June 2025 the Washington State Standard reported that a state board was to consider parole for him; the outcome was not reported at the time.
The bargain held in a narrow sense: Bianchi kept his life. It did not do what prosecutors had hoped, and the judge who had refused to let the case be dropped ended by withholding from the witness the prison term he had bargained for.
Lawrence Bittaker, a paroled machinist living in Burbank, California, and Roy Norris, a man he had met in prison, were accused of the murders of five girls and young women between June and October 1979 in Los Angeles County. They were aged 13 to 18, by the court’s account. Norris made a plea agreement, pleaded guilty to all counts in exchange for prosecutors not seeking the death penalty, as the Associated Press and the California corrections department each reported, and became the central witness against Bittaker. UPI recorded in March 1981 that he had pleaded guilty in return for a promise that he would not be sentenced to death.
The trial was held in the Superior Court at Torrance. Norris testified, UPI reported, that he had killed one of the girls and that Bittaker had killed the other four. His account was supported by physical evidence that the California Supreme Court later summarized, and the court noted that what investigators recovered matched what Norris had said about two of the girls.
Bittaker’s defense was that Norris had done it alone. His lawyers called Richard Shoopman, a convict who knew both men, who testified that Norris had told him many times of his designs on young women. Investigators had searched Shoopman’s cell at the California Men’s Colony under a warrant issued by a judge in San Luis Obispo and taken 14 photographs and five letters, two of which went into evidence. The Supreme Court later upheld the warrant.
Bittaker took the stand himself. He said he had no part in the death of one of the girls and that Norris had told him he and another man were responsible. For each of the others he described an encounter that, in his telling, the girl had entered willingly and that ended with Norris taking her away or leaving her. The Supreme Court noted that his account contradicted both Norris’s testimony and the prosecution’s other evidence. The prosecutor confronted him with his own writing: while in custody he had written a manuscript called "The Last Ride," a partly fictional account of the crimes, and had shown early versions to a guard and to a newspaper reporter. He described the book as part fact, based on what Norris had told him, and part fiction. On appeal the court held that he had no reasonable expectation of privacy in property kept in his jail cell.
The state also leaned on witnesses lower in the chain who had their own reasons to talk. Richard Dryburgh, who lived in Burbank, testified that Bittaker had shown him photographs of girls and said one of them was called Cindy; he picked out one victim’s picture and identified another. He testified in exchange for the dismissal of an explosives charge against him. Another resident, Mike Horn, said Bittaker had shown him photographs of two of the girls. A cellmate, David Lambert, said Bittaker had asked him to draw a girl on the cell wall, said she looked like "Cindy," and signed the drawing "Pliers Bittaker." An inmate, Lloyd Douglas, testified that Bittaker had described to him in detail how two of the girls died, including details that Norris had never described. Bittaker also signed autographs for other prisoners, one of them reading "Norris did it."
On February 17, 1981, a jury at Torrance convicted Bittaker of all 26 counts against him, five of them murder. It voted for death a week later, and he was sentenced in March 1981. The California Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and sentence on June 22, 1989. He stayed on death row at San Quentin and died there of natural causes on December 13, 2019, at 79, without being executed. Norris’s own sentence has not been reported.
Dale Hausner, an airport janitor who photographed boxing matches, and his roommate Samuel Dieteman were arrested in Mesa, Arizona, in August 2006 after a series of killings and attacks in the Phoenix area in 2005 and 2006. Dieteman pleaded guilty to two murders under a plea agreement and became the prosecution’s main witness. The agreement did not shield him from a death sentence; a jury would decide his penalty later.
The Maricopa County trial lasted about six months. Dieteman told the jury that he and Hausner had driven out at night looking for strangers. He quoted Hausner as saying, "It’s your turn, dude." Hausner testified in his own defense. He denied any part in the crimes, offered alibis and suggested that Dieteman might have carried out some of the incidents himself. His lawyers argued that Dieteman had fed the authorities bad information to escape the death penalty. Prosecutors told the jury that Hausner had acted for notoriety and kept news clippings as trophies.
Dieteman’s testimony reached beyond the killings. He told the jury that he saw Hausner’s brother Jeff commit an assault in May 2006, and at Dale Hausner’s trial he testified over objection that both he and Dale were present for it. Jeff Hausner was later convicted of attempted murder and aggravated assault in that case; the victim, who survived, testified, and the Arizona Court of Appeals upheld the conviction, rejecting arguments that Dieteman was not believable. Phoenix New Times reported that Jeff Hausner’s sentences totaled 25 years.
The jury convicted Dale Hausner in March 2009 of six murders and 74 other offenses and acquitted him on counts relating to two earlier killings. He told jurors he believed a death sentence should be imposed, and the jury sentenced him to death six times. The Arizona Supreme Court affirmed in July 2012, except for one animal cruelty count, and he asked the court to stop his appeals. On June 19, 2013, he was unresponsive in his cell at the state prison in Florence. The medical examiner ruled that he died by suicide.
Dieteman’s own penalty hearing ended on July 30, 2009. He had not asked for leniency in court. "I’m truly sorry for the pain that I’ve caused to many, many people," he said, and in a written apology to one of the wounded men he said he would make "no cries for mercy." The jury chose a life sentence over death. Two jurors told reporters they had first favored death before agreeing on life. The wounded man to whom he had written attended the verdict and said it was the closest thing to closure he could have. A Phoenix police sergeant called the verdict just. Phoenix New Times later reported that Dieteman was serving his sentence at the state prison in Buckeye.
For Dieteman the reward stayed uncertain to the end. He cooperated without a promise of life, faced a second jury on his own, and received life from jurors who had heard his apology.
Gwendolyn Graham, a nurse’s aide from Tyler, Texas, was 26 when a jury in Grand Rapids, Michigan, convicted her in September 1989 of five counts of first-degree murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder. The victims were elderly women with dementia who had been patients at Alpine Manor in Walker, Michigan, and who had died in early 1987. Their deaths had been put down to natural causes. No post-mortem examinations were done, and three of the women were cremated. Nobody questioned anything until more than a year later, when the former husband of Graham’s partner and co-worker, Catherine Wood, went to police and said his ex-wife had told him what the two women had done.
Wood, who had supervised the nurse’s aides at Alpine Manor, was charged with two counts of open murder, for the deaths of Edith Cook and Marguerite Chambers, and by mid-January 1989 she had been ordered to stand trial. Graham was held in Texas on a bond of $1 million from early December 1988 and waived extradition in January 1989.
Before Graham’s case reached a jury, Wood pleaded guilty before Kent County Circuit Judge Robert Benson to second-degree murder in the death of Marguerite Chambers and to conspiracy to commit second-degree murder. Under the plea agreement she promised to testify against Graham. Her lawyer, Christine Yared, later described what Wood admitted: that she had stood watch while Graham killed Chambers, and that at other times she had known Graham meant to kill patients and had done nothing to stop it. The Michigan Attorney General’s office later said Wood had confessed to helping kill at least five patients and had said that she and Graham planned to kill many more.
At trial Wood was the prosecution’s main witness. She told the court that she had gone along with the plan because she wanted to remain Graham’s partner and because she was afraid of her, and she described Graham as physically and emotionally abusive. "I thought Gwen was the first person to really love me," she said.
The medical evidence did not carry the case. Investigators had the deaths of two of the women re-examined late in 1988, and the medical examiner told the jury that he could neither confirm nor rule out the cause the prosecution alleged. That left Wood as the proof. Graham testified in her own defense that no patient had been killed and that she and Wood had invented the story to shock a co-worker; Wood, she said, had later claimed it was true out of revenge, after Graham left her in August 1987 and returned to Texas with another aide. The jury believed Wood. First-degree murder in Michigan carries a mandatory sentence of life without parole, and Graham has been in prison since.
Wood was sentenced to 20 to 40 years. The state parole board voted to release her. Attorney General Dana Nessel objected in 2019, and the question went to Judge Joe Rossi, who ruled in October 2019 that Wood could be released; WABC-TV and WSOC reported on January 17, 2020, that she had left prison and moved to Fort Mill, South Carolina, over the objections of a victim’s family. In May 2026, the University of Michigan Law School’s Innocence Clinic page listed a Grand Rapids television report that Graham was seeking clemency and claiming innocence. Her conviction stands.
In 1990 six women were killed in San Diego, three of them in two neighboring apartment complexes in the Clairemont area. Cleophus Prince Jr., then a young man from Alabama working in building supply and cable jobs, was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama, on March 1, 1991. The prosecution’s case rested mostly on physical evidence: DNA tests on items connected with one victim, rings taken from three of the women and later traced to him or to people he had given them to, shoe prints, work gloves, and the account of what he told friends and co-workers. But two witnesses with something to gain told the jury what they had been given.
The first was one of two people who had lived in Prince’s apartment in the autumn of 1990. He testified under a grant of immunity about a break-in at a different apartment complex on October 6, 1990, and about other burglaries that were never charged. The jury also decided nine burglary and six attempted burglary counts against him. Two people who later lived with him testified that he had a wedding ring that had belonged to one of the Clairemont victims.
The second was a jailhouse informant, a man with many prior convictions and an escape charge pending. He testified that Prince made remarks disparaging White women, that he said his cable job let him check a mailbox to see whether a woman lived alone, and that he said he enjoyed stalking women. The California Supreme Court recorded the terms: the informant faced at least 20 years and received a prison transfer and the chance of early release in return for his testimony. The opinion says nothing more about the arrangement, and the court treated the informant’s evidence as one strand among many.
A San Diego jury convicted Prince of six counts of first-degree murder, with rape-murder and multiple-murder special circumstances and a finding of knife use for each, along with other charges, and judgment was entered on November 5, 1993, with a death sentence. The California Supreme Court affirmed on automatic appeal on April 30, 2007. The Habeas Corpus Resource Center’s list updated June 1, 2026, shows him under sentence of death, with state habeas counsel appointed and no petition pending in the California Supreme Court. California has had a moratorium on executions since March 13, 2019.
The Prince case shows the lower end of the accomplice bargain: two witnesses who were neither partners nor co-defendants, one paid in immunity and the other in a prison transfer and a chance at early release.
The bargain with Gore ran the other way and went wrong differently. David Gore, a grove worker in Indian River County, Florida, surrendered to police on July 26, 1983, after the killing of Lynn Elliott, 17. He confessed to six killings of women and girls between 1981 and 1983, two of them with his cousin, Fred Waterfield. A jury in St. Petersburg convicted him of Elliott’s murder and related charges in March 1984, recommended death by 11 votes to 1 on March 15, and the next day Judge L. B. Vocelle sentenced him to death for the murder and to life on the other five counts.
The Florida Supreme Court’s 1997 opinion records that Gore also pleaded guilty to three other murders under a plea agreement that included a promise to testify against Waterfield. When it became clear that Gore’s testimony at his cousin’s trial would have played down Waterfield’s part, the state did not call him. In the Elliott case Waterfield was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced on July 25, 1984, to 15 years. In the case of two 14-year-old girls, Barbara Byer and Angelica LaVallee, he was convicted of murder and given consecutive life sentences, the Associated Press reported in 2012.
The consequences surfaced at Gore’s resentencing in 1992. The defense called Bob Stone, who had prosecuted both men, to make the point that Waterfield, whom Stone had once called "just as guilty as Gore," had not been sentenced to death. The state answered that Waterfield’s manslaughter verdict came about because Gore had backed out of his plea deal, not because the state had gone easy on the cousin. Stone also said, on cross-examination, that none of Gore’s life sentences carried a minimum mandatory term. The jury voted 12 to 0 for death, and on December 8, 1992, Judge Dan L. Vaughn sentenced Gore to death again. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed on July 17, 1997. Gore was executed at Florida State Prison on April 12, 2012, pronounced dead at 6:19 p.m., aged 58.
Accounts differ on how many of the other killings ended in a formal conviction. The 1997 opinion speaks of three murder pleas; News 13 in Orlando reported in 2012 that he had been sentenced to life for three of the other murders; Associated Press stories that week said he was sentenced to life for the other murders, and one described him as convicted of all six. The opinion does not name the victims in the three pleas.
The Gore bargain is the plainest example among these cases of a deal that failed on its own terms. The state did not call the witness it had bargained with, and in the Elliott case the cousin received 15 years for manslaughter while Gore received death.
Michael Dale St. Clair broke out of an Oklahoma jail in September 1991 while awaiting sentence for two murders. Before he was caught again, two more men were dead: Timothy Keeling, 22, taken in Colorado and killed in New Mexico, and Frank Brady, a distillery worker from Bardstown, Kentucky, taken in Hardin County and killed in neighboring Bullitt County. In both cases the men’s pickup trucks were stolen. Traveling with St. Clair was a man named Reese.
The two men separated soon afterward. Reese was arrested in Las Vegas, Nevada, about two weeks later and waived extradition. St. Clair was arrested about two months after Brady’s death in Hugo, Oklahoma. Reese pleaded guilty and agreed to testify for the Commonwealth of Kentucky. The Kentucky Supreme Court’s opinions do not give his sentence.
St. Clair was tried in Bullitt County first, in 1998. Reese testified for the Commonwealth that St. Clair kidnapped and killed Brady. St. Clair testified and claimed an alibi, telling the jury among other things that he had never been in Kentucky; the Kentucky Supreme Court later noted that several details of that account were proven false. The jury convicted him of Brady’s murder and recommended death, and the judge imposed that sentence. By the time of his later trials his story had changed. He testified that Reese alone had approached Brady and had later come back alone with the truck, and that the two had split up in Texas. Reese testified that they stayed together and went on to Colorado.
The evidence had weaker props than the accomplice. The prosecution used comparative bullet lead analysis, then offered by the FBI, and an FBI agent described bullets from the Keeling and Brady killings as very close in composition. The method was later shown to be unreliable and the FBI abandoned it; in 2009 the bureau sent a letter saying the testimony in St. Clair’s case had been inappropriate. The Kentucky Supreme Court upheld the denial of a new trial on that basis in 2014, finding that the bullet evidence was a small part of the proof of guilt. The convictions were reversed on other grounds: on October 20, 2005, the court held that St. Clair’s wife at the time of the escape had testified to confidential spousal communications and that the error was prejudicial because her testimony was crucial.
The litigation ran for more than two decades. St. Clair was sentenced to death for the Brady murder three times; the first two sentences were set aside and the third, imposed in October 2011, was affirmed on August 21, 2014. On the separate kidnapping charge in Hardin County he was sentenced to death in 2001 and again in 2012, and both were reversed, the second on February 19, 2015. On April 12, 2017, he pleaded guilty and received 30 years for kidnapping, 20 for attempted murder of a Kentucky State Police trooper, and five years each on two counts of receiving stolen property and on facilitation of second-degree arson. He had also been convicted in Oklahoma of four murders, with consecutive life sentences, and in New Mexico of second-degree murder in Keeling’s death in 2014. He returned to death row at the Kentucky State Penitentiary at Eddyville in April 2017. The Associated Press called him a six-time killer in 2014.
Reese gave the Commonwealth his account in 1998, and the two men’s stories about each other never converged. The reversals that followed turned on spousal privilege and on the prosecutor’s opening statement, not on anything about Reese.
Charles Schmid, a 23-year-old Tucson man with a following of teenagers, was arrested on November 10, 1965, after a 19-year-old friend, Richard Bruns, gave detectives information about the deaths of Gretchen Fritz, 17, and Wendy Fritz, 13. A jury in Pima County convicted him of both murders on March 1, 1966, and fixed his penalty at death. In May 1967, in the middle of a second trial, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the 1964 death of Alleen Rowe, 15, and was sentenced to 50 years to life.
The Rowe case is where the accomplices sat. According to Arizona Attorney’s account by William J. Schafer III, who prosecuted Schmid, the two other young people who had been with him on the night of May 31, 1964, John Saunders and Mary French, pleaded guilty in November 1965 and agreed to testify against him. Saunders received a life sentence; Schafer’s article says he pleaded to second-degree murder, a detail on which sources conflict. French’s testimony about the Rowe killing was admitted at the Fritz trial on the ground of motive, and the Arizona Supreme Court summarized her account in its 1971 opinion. Schmid, she testified, had said he wanted to kill someone and see whether he could get away with it, and had said afterward, "We killed her."
The prosecution’s theory, which the Arizona Supreme Court accepted in 1973, was that Schmid killed the Fritz sisters because Gretchen knew about the Rowe killing and was using it against him. Bruns was the witness who tied the two together. By the court’s summary, about a week after the sisters' deaths Schmid told Bruns he had killed them. Bruns told no one in authority, even during two to three hours of talking with FBI agents. He testified for the state at the Fritz trial and testified that Schmid had told him the killings happened at Schmid’s house. The defense argued that Bruns himself was the killer, and the jury convicted Schmid anyway. The Supreme Court noted the trial court’s exclusion of unrelated evidence about Bruns.
No bargain for Bruns appears in the court opinions or in Schafer’s account. He was the closest the case had to a volunteer, and that separates this case from the others. French and Saunders were defendants who pleaded; Bruns was a friend who had known and said nothing for months. The Arizona Supreme Court reduced Schmid’s death sentences to life in 1973 after the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Furman v. Georgia. He escaped from the state prison in November 1972, was recaptured within three days, and died on March 30, 1975, after an assault by two other prisoners.
Donald Dufour was sentenced to death in two states for murders committed in the late summer and fall of 1982. In Mississippi, a Hinds County jury convicted him of the capital murder of Earl Wayne Peeples in Jackson on October 14, 1982. A second man, Daniel King, died the same night. Robert Taylor, Dufour’s companion, testified that Dufour killed Peeples and that he, Taylor, killed King. Taylor admitted his part, was given a court-appointed lawyer, and his plea agreement with prosecutors was put before the jury at Dufour’s trial; the courts' opinions do not give its terms. The Mississippi Supreme Court pointed to Taylor’s account that Dufour demanded to know where Peeples kept his money, to what Dufour had said beforehand and to the search for money to find that the killing happened during a robbery, the element that made it a capital crime. Dufour was sentenced to death in 1983, and the court affirmed on June 6, 1984.
Taylor’s testimony then crossed state lines. Dufour was tried in Orange County, Florida, for the first-degree murder of Zack Miller in Orlando on September 4, 1982. Taylor had been a close associate; witnesses at the Florida trial said he bought some of the jewelry taken from Miller. At the Florida penalty phase, over defense objection, Taylor described the killing of Peeples in detail, and the Mississippi prosecutor, Thomas Mayfield, testified about the Mississippi trial. The state used a second cooperating witness as well. Henry Miller, held in the cell next to Dufour’s at the Orange County jail, went to the authorities on his own and testified that Dufour had told him about the murder in some detail and had tried to arrange through him for the former girlfriend to be killed for $5,000. In return he received immunity from several armed robbery charges. The former girlfriend herself testified that on the evening of September 4 Dufour announced that he meant to rob and kill a man.
The jury convicted Dufour on May 31, 1984, and recommended death by a vote of 12 to 0. Judge Michael F. Cycmanick sentenced him to death on July 3, 1984, and the Florida Supreme Court affirmed on September 4, 1986. Earlier that year, on March 6, 1986, he had pleaded no contest to the first-degree murder of Edward Wise, killed in Orlando on July 4, 1982, and received a life sentence; a murder charge in the death of Wise’s companion, John Stinson, was dropped as part of that plea. The United States Supreme Court refused to hear his Mississippi appeal on October 14, 1986, with Justices Brennan and Marshall dissenting. His Florida postconviction appeals ran to 2011, when the Florida Supreme Court rejected his claim that he was intellectually disabled. The Mississippi Office of the State Public Defender lists a later postconviction result on the instruction for one aggravating circumstance and an agreed sentence of life without parole there; no date is given. The Florida Commission on Capital Cases listed him as under sentence of death in Florida as of March 2011.
The nine cases ended in nine different ways. Bianchi kept his life but lost his California prison term. Dieteman, who had no promise of life, received it from a jury. Wood was sentenced to 20 to 40 years and left prison on parole in January 2020, about three decades after her plea. Saunders, by Schafer’s account, received life. Gore’s own bargain collapsed and left his cousin with 15 years for the Elliott killing. In the Prince, St. Clair and Dufour cases the terms given to the witnesses were thin or absent from the opinions, and in the Bittaker case Norris’s sentence went unreported. The appeal courts that heard these convictions said little about the accomplice as such. They asked what else supported him: eyewitnesses, physical evidence, the defendant’s own words, and witnesses with nothing to gain. Bianchi, the most compromised witness of the nine, produced the strangest procedural record: a district attorney’s motion to dismiss the case against a man a jury later convicted, a judge who refused, and the same judge’s finding at sentencing that the witness had not kept his side of the bargain.
• May 31, 1964: Alleen Rowe dies in Tucson, the earliest of the deaths in these cases; the Los Angeles County killings follow in 1977 to 1979.
• November 10, 1965: Charles Schmid is arrested in Tucson after Richard Bruns gives detectives the information.
• November 1965: John Saunders and Mary French plead guilty in the Rowe case and agree to testify.
• March 1, 1966: a Pima County jury convicts Schmid of two murders.
• October 19, 1979: Kenneth Bianchi pleads guilty in Washington; Angelo Buono Jr. is arrested in Glendale.
• October 22, 1979: Bianchi pleads guilty in Los Angeles to five murders and agrees to testify against Buono.
• February 17, 1981: Lawrence Bittaker is convicted on all counts in Torrance; Roy Norris had pleaded guilty and testified.
• June 1982: Bianchi begins his testimony against Buono, which runs about six months.
• July 26, 1983: David Gore surrenders after the killing of Lynn Elliott.
• Late October to November 1983: the Buono jury returns nine murder verdicts.
• January 9, 1984: Judge George sentences Buono to life without parole; Bianchi is ordered returned to Washington.
• May 31, 1984: an Orange County jury convicts Donald Dufour of first-degree murder.
• July 25, 1984: Fred Waterfield is sentenced to 15 years for manslaughter in the Elliott case.
• January 1989: Catherine Wood is ordered to stand trial; she later pleads guilty and testifies against Gwendolyn Graham.
• September 20, 1989: a Grand Rapids jury convicts Graham of five counts of first-degree murder and conspiracy.
• November 5, 1993: Cleophus Prince Jr. is sentenced to death in San Diego.
• 1998: Reese testifies for Kentucky against Michael St. Clair in Bullitt County.
• March 2009: Dale Hausner is convicted; Samuel Dieteman, who testified, receives life on July 30, 2009.
• April 12, 2012: Gore is executed.
• June 19, 2013: Hausner dies by suicide in prison.
• December 13, 2019: Bittaker dies on death row.
• January 17, 2020: Wood leaves prison on parole.