In 1982 Oakland police arrested Anthony McKnight for attempting to rape a girl who had refused to have sex with him. He was not convicted. He paid a fine, and his details went into a sex offender register and his fingerprints into the federal system. He was twenty-eight and had enlisted in the army that year. He later joined the navy and served at Naval Air Station Alameda. In 1983 he married and had a child, and the friends who knew him as lively and friendly had no idea of his record.
Between September and December 1985 five women and girls were abducted in the East Bay, sexually assaulted, and stabbed or beaten to death, their bodies left in secluded places in Oakland, Emeryville, Berkeley and Richmond. Betty Lynn Stuart, twenty-two, had her throat cut on September 22. Diane Stone, seventeen, was found with knife wounds to her neck in the grounds of an Oakland elementary school on September 29. Talita Dixon, thirteen, was stabbed to death on October 8. Monique Franchone Davis, eighteen, was killed with blows to the head on December 9, and Beverly Ann Bryant, twenty-four, was beaten to death on Christmas Day.
Five other women were attacked and survived. In October he stabbed a girl in the neck and chest, raped her and left her unconscious on the western edge of Oakland. Days later he raped and beat another at a construction site; she got away and hid in a drainage ditch. By December there had been two more, one stabbed ten times and one in the face, and both described a Black man in his early thirties with a beard and mustache, and one gave a description of his car and part of the plate. In January 1986 he raped a woman, tried to strangle her and dumped her in Oakland's industrial district. She lived too. Police looking at men with that description and that kind of car came to McKnight, whose record stood out, and learned that he had been stationed at Treasure Island at the time. Questioned in January, he denied everything and was let go. Then detectives showed his photograph to three of the women, and all three identified him.
He was arrested on January 24, 1986, but not for the killings. The charges concerned a series of attacks on women in Oakland and Emeryville between 1984 and his arrest, and on August 24, 1987, after blood typing matched him to the rapist, he was convicted of eleven felony counts including attempted first degree murder, rape by force, assault with a deadly weapon, oral copulation and kidnapping to commit a sex offense. He was admitted to state prison that month to serve sixty-three years, and was later held at Salinas Valley State Prison. He had been suspected at the time in as many as seven killings, but nothing connected him to them, and he was never charged.
So the twenty-three year gap between the killings and the verdict was not a case left idle. There was no murder case at all. It began in the late 1990s, when investigators took blood and saliva from him in prison and entered his profile in California's DNA index, and the tests linked him to all five. One account dates the sample to 1996; another puts it twelve years into his sentence.
The trial ran for nearly two months in Alameda County. The evidence was largely circumstantial and largely genetic, and the prosecutor, Jim Meehan, told the jury that DNA connected him to every one of the five. The defense argued that if the jury did not find the killings premeditated or committed in the course of a felony, the verdict had to be second degree murder, which would have taken the death penalty off the table.
On September 17, 2008 the jury convicted him of five counts of first degree murder and found five special circumstances: three of murder during a rape, one of murder during sodomy, and one of multiple murder. It deliberated for nearly three days on the penalty before recommending death.
Judge Jeffrey Horner refused two motions for a new trial and imposed the sentence on November 17, 2008, at the end of a day-long hearing. Nine relatives and friends of the five women spoke. Meehan called him a sociopath, and said he laughed when the sentence was passed.
He was found unresponsive in his cell at San Quentin at half past nine on the evening of October 17, 2019, and pronounced dead forty minutes later. He was sixty-five and had been on death row for almost eleven years to the day. The cause was not determined at the time and the corrections department said there was no reason to suspect foul play.