In 1983 the bodies of five women and one man were found around the San Francisco Peninsula and in San Francisco itself. One woman was left beside Skyline Boulevard, another on a street in South San Francisco, another on a road where a passing witness interrupted the man dragging her body behind a pickup truck. Three were found sealed in metal drums of concrete in Golden Gate Park. All six had died in or after visits to the same place: a warehouse in Burlingame that served as the shop and home of a former Millbrae police officer named Anthony John Sully.
Sully was arrested in August 1983, tried in San Mateo County in 1986 and sentenced to death. He denied every killing, from the witness stand and for the rest of his life. California carried out no execution after 2006, and he died on death row at San Quentin in September 2023, at 79, after thirty-seven years there.
Sully was born in San Francisco in 1944 and grew up in Millbrae, a small city in San Mateo County, where he was known as Jack. According to a 2022 local history column in the Redwood City Pulse, he was drawn to police work as a young man; a November 1968 issue of the local Times newspaper reported his "permanent appointment" to the Millbrae Police Department. Bay City News, drawing on the federal appeals court record, gave his years on the force as 1967 to 1974. The California Supreme Court described him as having served "nearly eight years" and said he was trained in fingerprint detection and other law enforcement techniques.
After he left the department, Sully set up an electrical contracting business. By the early 1980s it was operating out of a warehouse in Burlingame, and he had converted the front of the building into his living quarters. The courts described the business as successful. Neighbors, business associates and an employee of eight years later testified that he was a good electrician, a good employer and a good friend, and that they were astonished when he was arrested.
His second marriage, in the mid-1970s, lasted a little more than a year. At his penalty trial his former wife testified that when she decided to divorce him, he became violent and threatening. On the morning she and her eleven-year-old daughter moved out, the girl and her grandmother found the daughter's pet ducklings killed in the backyard. In phone calls over the following days, some of them overheard by a co-worker and by a friend who was sheltering her, he said he had killed the birds to show what he could do to her daughter, threatened her and her family, and said that as a police officer he knew how to dispose of bodies so they would never be found. A defense witness suggested raccoons had killed the ducklings. These events were never charged.
Around the time he left the police and started his business, Sully began investing in an escort service, putting several thousand dollars into it as a partner, and regularly paid for sex. He also became addicted to freebasing cocaine. The back of the warehouse, the court record says, was his private domain; his longtime employee had been allowed there only a few times. Sully told police himself that he combined cocaine and sex with prostitutes there on a regular basis.
In 1982 he met Tina Livingston, a partner in an escort service. Livingston had a 1976 manslaughter conviction in Illinois. She, a 21-year-old prostitute named Angel Burns, and a younger friend of Sully's named Michael Francis are the people the courts later placed around him during the killings. Livingston became the prosecution's main witness.
Three women who survived testified at his trial that he had held them at the warehouse, bound and beaten and raped them while he freebased cocaine. One of them, Monica Tafoya, said that on May 14, 1983, he had her handcuffed and gagged and assaulted her over more than eight hours. Another, Louisa Garcia, said Burns lured her to the warehouse and that when she refused Sully and tried to escape, the two of them caught her and beat her. The courts admitted these accounts as evidence of his intent and method. They were not among the murder charges.
The record of the case was written by courts and prosecutors, and it describes the six people mainly by how they came to the warehouse. What can be said about each of them from the sources available is set out here.
Gloria Jean Fravel was 24. She worked for Livingston's escort service and owed Livingston $500 in charges she had run up on Livingston's credit card. On a Friday afternoon in February 1983, Livingston and Burns picked her up in San Francisco and drove her to the warehouse, telling her they were going to collect camping equipment.
Brenda Oakden was 19. Court papers also list her as Brenda Rule. She shared an apartment with a receptionist at Livingston's escort service, and she had worked for the service once. She was nervous, Livingston said, when Burns took her to Burlingame in April 1983.
Michael Thomas was 24, and Phyllis Melendrez was 20; court papers also list her as Chris Thomas. Sully described Thomas to another escort service owner as a pimp and Melendrez as one of his prostitutes. Livingston testified that Sully told her he had "taken care of" a couple from the Tenderloin, San Francisco's downtown district of residential hotels.
Barbara Lee Searcy was 22. She knew Sully, and by his own testimony he had given her money when she needed it and had used cocaine with her. Shortly before she died she went to the warehouse with her landlord, Raleigh Hall, to collect money Sully owed her. She told a friend she was waiting to hear from a man she had seen several times and planned to see in Burlingame, and Sully left a message on her answering machine saying he had "fifty" for her.
Kathryn Barrett was 24. The court described her as a drug dealer who had offered to sell Sully six ounces of cocaine.
Four of the six, the California Supreme Court noted, worked in prostitution, one was described as a pimp, and one sold drugs. All of them were young. None of the sources consulted for this page include statements from their families.
The account that follows is the one the jury accepted and the appellate courts summarized. It rests on Livingston's testimony, statements Sully made to others, and physical evidence. Sully denied all of it.
Gloria Fravel was kept in the back of the warehouse through the weekend in February 1983. When she screamed for help, Livingston and Burns tried to silence her; then Sully strangled her with a rope. He and Burns put her in a vehicle to dispose of her. Finding she was still alive, Sully stopped at the side of the road and attacked her with a hatchet, and they left her body beside Skyline Boulevard. The pathologist found she had died of head and neck injuries. Sully later read Livingston a newspaper story reporting that a butcher had found the body, a detail he found funny.
Soon after, according to Livingston, Sully told her he wanted to kill a young woman who had never worked as a prostitute before anyone else could have her. Livingston mentioned Brenda Oakden. In April 1983, at Sully's request, Burns brought Oakden to the warehouse. An hour later, Livingston testified, Sully told her by phone that Oakden was dead, and told her to tell Oakden's roommate that Oakden had left to catch a bus. He later remarked to Livingston, she said, that the only difference between killing someone now and killing someone as a police officer was that the police had permission.
Michael Thomas and Phyllis Melendrez were shot in the warehouse, Melendrez after being struck in the mouth; she had a defensive wound on her hand. Michael Shing, another escort service owner, testified that Sully told him he had killed a pimp and a prostitute who had cheated him, that he made his victims kneel before he shot them, and that he asked Shing for advice on getting rid of bodies stuffed in barrels. Livingston gave a different motive: that Sully killed the couple to make up to Burns for not killing Louisa Garcia. Either way, the bodies of Oakden, Thomas and Melendrez were sealed in metal drums with concrete. Sully later told Livingston he had to get rid of the barrels because they were making the warehouse smell. They were left in Golden Gate Park. All three had died of a gunshot wound to the back of the head.
Barbara Searcy was also shot in the back of the head, after being bound with white cotton rope and yellow ski rope. Sully gave Livingston a satchel of Searcy's clothing and belongings and asked her to break into Searcy's apartment to retrieve the tape from the answering machine; she tried, with another man, and was scared off. When she returned, Sully showed her Searcy's body, wrapped in plastic in a green hamper, and said he had killed her for "personal reasons." They loaded it into his pickup, and he began dragging it behind the truck so it could not be recognized. A witness appeared on the road, and they sped off and left the body. It was found the next day.
Kathryn Barrett came to the warehouse to sell cocaine; Sully and Francis, the court found, had decided to steal it. Livingston drove her there and waited at a bar. Two hours later Sully called to say there was no need to pick her up. When Livingston came back for her car, she saw Francis stabbing Barrett. Barrett was still alive. Francis came out of the back room later, visibly ill, and told Livingston that Sully had struck Barrett in the face with a sledgehammer. Her body, wrapped in plastic sheeting, was left on a street in South San Francisco. She had died of knife wounds, blood loss and blunt force injuries.
No detailed account of the police investigation was found in the sources available for this page. What the court records show is the evidence that police gathered and how it pointed to the warehouse.
The drums in Golden Gate Park had been stolen from a storage yard three buildings away from Sully's warehouse. His fingerprints were found in two places on the barrels, in one place pressed into the concrete while it was still wet; Angel Burns's palm print was on one barrel too. A footprint matching Sully's right foot was found on a bloodstained trash bag where Searcy's body lay, and his footprint was on the plastic sheeting around Barrett. Yellow ski rope seized at the warehouse had a microscopic defect identical to one in the rope on Searcy's ankles, and white rope like that around her wrist was found in his van. Plastic bags from the van shared a manufacturing defect with the bag around Michael Thomas. A cigarette butt found on Barrett's arm came from the same batch as a pack in the warehouse, and metal shavings tied her body to the building. Police also found several handguns and ballistics textbooks. Sully had removed the barrel from a Smith and Wesson revolver, which made it impossible to test as the murder weapon; he said he wanted to fit a longer barrel for target shooting, but an employee testified that Sully had turned down an invitation to go shooting because it did not interest him.
Sully was arrested in August 1983 for the murder of Barbara Searcy. He was read his rights by Detective Sergeant Robert Morse and, as a former officer, said he understood them before giving a tape-recorded statement. Asked about evidence that the women had been bound, he said he had no interest in bondage and had done it only once, in Los Angeles. He said he had never touched the barrels; at trial he testified that he had seen them on his property and had touched the wet concrete out of curiosity. After he had been arraigned and given a lawyer on the Searcy charge, Inspectors Schneider and Mullane of the San Francisco Police Department questioned him about the barrel murders, and he again waived his rights. Records later filed in his appeals show that after an arrest for rape in 1983 he was admitted to Chope Community Hospital on a psychiatric referral, having threatened suicide and said he feared police would kill him.
From jail, Sully telephoned Livingston and asked her to approach Michael Francis, then a juvenile, about taking the blame for Searcy's death in exchange for $10,000. He later offered another $10,000 if Francis would also take the blame for Barrett. Police overheard him asking Francis what he thought of "the deal" and telling him he would have a good chance with a diminished capacity defense.
Three other people were prosecuted in connection with the killings.
Tina Livingston pleaded guilty as an accessory to the murder of Kathryn Barrett and admitted her 1976 manslaughter conviction. Under her plea agreement she had to testify truthfully and completely and to pass a polygraph examination stating that she had no physical involvement in or encouragement of the deaths of Fravel, Melendrez, Thomas, Oakden and Searcy. She received a three-year sentence and testified at the trial.
Michael Francis was convicted of the first-degree murder of Kathryn Barrett. He invoked his right not to testify at Sully's trial.
Angel Burns did not testify either. A prosecutor called by the defense at the penalty phase explained that the district attorney's office was seeking life without parole for Burns, not death, because she was directly involved only in Fravel's murder, was 21, and was dominated and controlled by Sully, who was the main actor in each case. The outcome of her case was not found in the sources available for this page.
Sully was not tried until 1986, almost three years after his arrest. Judge Gerald E. Ragan presided in San Mateo County Superior Court. The court appointed Douglas Gray as lead defense counsel, and John Balliet joined him four months before trial. The court denied a defense request to move the trial out of the county. A survey offered by the defense found that 63 percent of 200 San Mateo County residents had heard of the case, but only 18.2 percent believed Sully was probably or definitely guilty. The court also refused to split the six murders into separate trials, finding that the evidence in each case was admissible in the others to prove identity.
The defense was complete innocence. Gray portrayed Sully as a former officer and successful businessman who had sunk into drugs and prostitution but had not killed anyone. Sully testified for two days, more than three hundred pages of transcript. He admitted using huge amounts of cocaine but denied that it affected his mind or memory, denied committing any crime while high, and blamed Livingston, Burns, Francis and others. A pharmacologist, Dr. Sidney Cohen, testified for the defense that planned aggression is difficult under cocaine and that users do not black out. The defense cross-examined Livingston at length about her plea bargain and her past; the judge barred some lines of questioning about her life in Illinois as marginal and prejudicial.
After a three-week trial and four hours of deliberation, the jury convicted Sully of six counts of first-degree murder and found the special circumstance of multiple murder true. When the clerk read the first verdict, Sully shouted obscenities at the clerk and the jurors and walked out of the courtroom, telling the court to finish without him.
Sully refused to come back. Two days later, with his lawyer, he told the court he would continue to disrupt the proceedings if made to attend, and the penalty phase went ahead without him. The jury was told only that he had chosen to be absent.
The prosecution presented the three surviving women's accounts, his former wife's testimony about the ducklings and the threats, and the circumstances of the six murders, stressing torture and the lack of remorse. Gray waived an opening statement and called ten witnesses, including neighbors, acquaintances, business associates and a former girlfriend, who described Sully before his arrest as a good friend, electrician and employer. The defense also called the prosecutor who explained why Burns was not facing death; on cross-examination, the prosecutor said none of those reasons applied to Sully. His later lawyers argued that calling this witness was itself ineffective assistance, and the federal courts rejected the claim. The jury returned a death verdict.
Sully did appear at the hearing on the motion to modify the verdict, where he made an extended statement. KTVU and the Redwood City Pulse describe a speech of thirty to forty minutes proclaiming his innocence, which they place after the guilty verdict; the court record mentions only the later statement. According to the San Jose Mercury News, as reported by the Associated Press, he told the judge he had not received a fair trial and insisted that he was not a maniac or subhuman. He was sentenced to death on June 3, 1986, and arrived on death row at San Quentin State Prison on June 15, 1986.
California death sentences are appealed automatically to the state Supreme Court. On July 11, 1991, in People v. Sully, a unanimous court affirmed the convictions and the death sentence in an opinion by Chief Justice Lucas; Justice Mosk wrote separately, concurring in the judgment. The court rejected arguments that Livingston's plea deal improperly forced her to testify a certain way, that cross-examination had been unfairly limited, that the murders should have been tried separately, that the surviving women's accounts should have been excluded, that his statements to police were improperly obtained, that the trial should have been moved, and that the penalty phase could not lawfully proceed in his absence. Livingston's testimony, it found, was corroborated on every count by physical evidence or other witnesses.
Sully then went to federal court. His federal petition, filed on December 16, 1996, in the Northern District of California, was put on hold while he returned to the state courts. There, with new lawyers, he argued that Gray had failed him. Declarations filed in support said that a psychiatrist hired by Gray during the trial, Dr. Philip Grossi, had visited Sully about fifty times over sixteen months, for around 150 hours, and had seen signs of serious mental disorder, including possible cocaine psychosis and delusional thinking. Grossi had never formally evaluated him. A psychologist working with Grossi, Dr. Mark Elin, had diagnosed a narcissistic character disorder with an underlying borderline organization. In 1997 a third psychiatrist, Dr. George Woods, concluded that Sully had suffered from acute cocaine psychosis on top of long-standing mental illness, which in his view affected Sully's ability to appreciate what he was doing and made him incompetent to stand trial. Balliet, the second lawyer, said in a declaration that Gray had "put all of his eggs in the guilt phase basket" and treated the penalty phase as an afterthought. None of this had been put before the jury. Gray died before he could give his own account.
The California Supreme Court denied the state petition summarily, without a written opinion. Back in federal court, Judge William H. Alsup granted the state summary judgment in four orders between 2003 and 2008 and refused an evidentiary hearing.
On August 6, 2013, a Ninth Circuit panel of Judges Sidney R. Thomas, Marsha S. Berzon and N. Randy Smith affirmed. Writing for the court, Thomas held that even if Gray's performance had been deficient, the state court could reasonably have found no prejudice, given what the opinion called the "already staggering" aggravating evidence. On competence, the panel pointed to Sully's own two days of detailed, coherent testimony, and found that even his outburst at the verdict showed he understood what was happening. It also rejected his claims about the impeachment of Livingston and Francis. Bay City News reported that this 2013 decision was his last loss in the courts.
Sully spent thirty-seven years on death row. California's last execution was that of Clarence Ray Allen in January 2006. On March 13, 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order placing a moratorium on executions, and in March 2023 he announced that San Quentin would become San Quentin Rehabilitation Center.
At 2:21 a.m. on Friday, September 8, 2023, Sully was pronounced dead at a medical facility outside San Quentin. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said he died of natural causes, and the Marin County Coroner's Office was to determine the official cause. He was 79. His death left 654 people under sentence of death in California.
Steve Wagstaffe, the San Mateo County District Attorney, told the San Mateo Daily Journal that Sully was "for sure one of the most evil persons of this county that I have ever seen."
What was proved: a jury found beyond a reasonable doubt that Sully murdered all six victims, and that verdict survived direct appeal, state habeas review and federal habeas review. The convictions rested on physical evidence for each count as well as on the testimony of an accomplice who had a plea agreement.
What was alleged but not tried: the imprisonment and assaults of three surviving women, and the threats against his former wife and stepdaughter, were presented as evidence but were not separate counts in the murder trial. Whether Sully was ever separately convicted of the 1983 rape for which, according to the federal court, he was arrested was not found in the sources available.
What was disputed: the role of the accomplices. Sully blamed Livingston, Burns and Francis. Livingston's credibility was attacked at trial and in every appeal, and her plea agreement required her to show she had no physical involvement in five of the killings. The courts found her account corroborated. The motive for the deaths of Michael Thomas and Phyllis Melendrez was given two ways by two prosecution witnesses, and was never settled. Sully's mental state is also contested: his later lawyers and three mental health professionals described serious mental illness and cocaine psychosis, while Sully himself testified at trial that cocaine did not affect his judgment, and no court ever found him incompetent.
What is not known: no evidence in the sources consulted suggests further victims, and no court or police statement found for this page attributes any other death to him.
1944: Anthony John Sully born in San Francisco; grows up in Millbrae.
1967 or 1968: joins the Millbrae Police Department (the Redwood City Pulse cites a November 1968 notice of his permanent appointment).
Mid-1970s: leaves the police force; second marriage ends in divorce amid threats against his wife and stepdaughter.
Late 1970s to early 1980s: runs an electrical contracting business from a Burlingame warehouse; invests in an escort service; becomes addicted to freebase cocaine.
1982: meets escort service partner Tina Livingston.
February 1983: Gloria Jean Fravel killed; body left beside Skyline Boulevard.
April 1983: Brenda Oakden killed at the warehouse.
May 14, 1983: Monica Tafoya held and assaulted at the warehouse; she survives.
1983: Michael Thomas and Phyllis Melendrez killed; their bodies and Oakden's later found in concrete-filled drums in Golden Gate Park.
1983: Barbara Searcy and Kathryn Barrett killed.
August 1983: Sully arrested for Searcy's murder; later charged with all six.
1986: three-week trial in San Mateo County; convicted on six counts after four hours of deliberation; death verdict.
June 3, 1986: sentenced to death.
June 15, 1986: received on San Quentin's death row.
July 11, 1991: California Supreme Court affirms (People v. Sully, 53 Cal.3d 1195).
December 16, 1996: federal habeas petition filed.
2003 to 2008: federal district court rules against him in four orders.
August 6, 2013: Ninth Circuit affirms denial of habeas relief (Sully v. Ayers, 725 F.3d 1057).
March 13, 2019: California moratorium on executions.
September 8, 2023: Sully dies of natural causes, aged 79.