Between September and December 1985, five young women and girls were killed in the East Bay, in Oakland, Emeryville, Berkeley and Richmond. They were Betty Lynn Stuart, 22; Diane Stone, 17; Talita Dixon, 13; Monique Franchone Davis, 18; and Beverly Ann Bryant, 24. The youngest was 13. Beyond their names and ages, little about their lives has been made public.
According to the prosecutor who later tried the case, the five were stabbed or beaten to death over a period of about four months. A Bay City News report of the closing arguments said the killings caused outrage and panic in the East Bay. Police from Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond and Emeryville, joined by officers of the East Bay Regional Park District, formed a task force to investigate.
Anthony McKnight was a Navy enlisted man who lived in Oakland. Reports from his 2008 trial describe him as assigned to Alameda Naval Air Station, and a CBS San Francisco report published at his death said that in 1985 he was stationed with the Navy on Treasure Island, in San Francisco Bay. His date and place of birth, his family background and his early life have not been made public. He was 54 during the 2008 trial and 65 when he died in 2019.
He was already known to the authorities before the killings began. At his trial, the prosecutor, Jim Meehan, told jurors that a prosecutor had decided in late 1984 not to charge McKnight over two separate attacks on women, because the evidence was judged insufficient. Meehan described this as one of several missed opportunities that left McKnight free to continue a long run of crimes. He also told the jury that blood testing in the mid-1980s was far less advanced than it later became.
McKnight was arrested in January 1986. The case against him then was not about the five deaths. It concerned attacks on women between 1984 and the time of his arrest, and in August 1987 he was convicted of 11 felony counts, including attempted murder, mayhem and kidnapping, with other charges. ABC7 and Bay City News described the counts as arising from attacks on six women; the Associated Press, writing in 2019, said he was convicted of attacks on three women who testified against him. All of the women in that case survived. He was sentenced to 63 years in state prison and had been in custody since 1987 when he died.
Evidence had been collected in the five killings in 1985, but it was not analyzed for DNA until the late 1990s, when new techniques had become available, the Associated Press reported. CBS San Francisco dated the DNA tests that linked him to the 1985 deaths to 1996. The results tied McKnight, already in prison on the earlier case, to all five women.
On June 24, 1999, an Alameda County grand jury indicted him on charges of murdering five women between September and December 1985. Why the case did not reach a jury until 2008 has never been explained publicly.
The case came to trial in Alameda County Superior Court in 2008, before Judge Jeffrey Horner, as a death penalty trial. McKnight was represented by Alex Selvin and Michael Berger. In his opening statement, Meehan told jurors, "This case is not about happy endings." He said each of the women was stabbed or beaten to death.
The defense opened in July. Selvin told the jury that the case was complex because of the number of charges and the volume of DNA evidence, and he argued that witness testimony could be unreliable because the events were more than twenty years in the past. McKnight testified in his own defense and denied that he had ever met any of the five women.
In his closing argument, Meehan said that DNA evidence connected McKnight to all five victims. He argued that the killings were deliberate, that McKnight "knew what he was doing," and that he chose isolated places such as parks and industrial areas, with nothing to suggest sudden impulse. Meehan asked the jury to convict on five counts of murder with special circumstances, among them multiple murder. If the jury found any special circumstance true, a separate penalty phase would follow, in which the same jurors would choose between death and life in prison without parole.
After a trial that CBS San Francisco said lasted nearly two months, the jury returned its verdicts on September 17. It convicted McKnight of five counts of first degree murder and found five special circumstances true, among them multiple murder.
The penalty phase opened the following week. Selvin objected that Meehan's opening statement in that phase was inappropriately emotional. Judge Horner said he did not think Meehan was trying to influence the jury, and remarked, "We can excuse a quaver in the voice or a lump in the throat."
On October 20, ABC7 reported, the same jurors recommended death; Meehan said they had deliberated for nearly three days. Judge Horner was then to weigh the evidence independently before deciding the sentence, and no sentencing date had been set.
Judge Horner imposed the death sentence at the end of a day-long hearing later in 2008, ABC7 reported, after denying two defense motions for a new trial. Nine relatives and friends of the five women spoke at the hearing in favor of the death penalty. Meehan said that McKnight laughed when the sentence was pronounced. ABC7 noted that every death sentence in California is reviewed automatically by the California Supreme Court.
McKnight was held on death row at San Quentin State Prison. Earlier in 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom had imposed a moratorium on executions for as long as he remained governor. The moratorium left 731 people on California's death row, the largest in the nation, the Associated Press reported.
In October 2019, corrections officials said McKnight had been found unresponsive in his cell at 9:30 p.m. on a Thursday and pronounced dead at 10:09 p.m. He was 65. The cause of death awaited an autopsy, and Terry Thornton, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said there was no reason to suspect foul play. CBS San Francisco reported that, since California reinstated capital punishment in 1978, 82 condemned inmates had died of natural causes, 27 by suicide and 14 of other causes, while 13 had been executed in California, one in Missouri and one in Virginia. McKnight's death was one of two whose cause was still pending.
How far his automatic appeal had progressed has not been reported. He was not executed.
The reports agree on the names and ages of the five women, the year of the killings, the 63-year sentence and the 2008 death sentence. They differ on several points.
The earlier case. ABC7 and Bay City News describe the 1987 counts as arising from attacks on six women between 1984 and January 1986. The Associated Press in 2019 described a conviction for attacks on three women, and CBS San Francisco also gave three.
The DNA link. CBS San Francisco dated the tests to 1996; the Associated Press said only that the evidence was analyzed in the late 1990s.
The special circumstances. In closing argument, Bay City News reported, the prosecutor asked for six special circumstances; ABC7 and ABC11 reported that the jury found five.
His age. ABC7 gave his age as 54 at the start of the penalty phase and at sentencing, while ABC11's report of the penalty verdict gave 55.
1984: According to the prosecutor at his 2008 trial, a prosecutor declined late in the year to charge McKnight over two attacks on women, for lack of evidence.
September to December 1985: Betty Lynn Stuart, Diane Stone, Talita Dixon, Monique Franchone Davis and Beverly Ann Bryant are killed in Oakland, Emeryville, Berkeley and Richmond.
January 1986: McKnight is arrested over attacks on women between 1984 and his arrest.
August 1987: Convicted of 11 felony counts, including attempted murder, mayhem and kidnapping, with other charges; sentenced to 63 years in state prison.
1996 to late 1990s: DNA analysis of evidence collected in 1985 links him to the five deaths (CBS San Francisco gives 1996; the Associated Press, the late 1990s).
June 24, 1999: An Alameda County grand jury indicts him for the five murders.
2008: Death penalty trial in Alameda County Superior Court before Judge Jeffrey Horner; McKnight testifies and denies knowing any of the women.
2008, September 17: Convicted of five counts of first degree murder with five special circumstances.
2008, October 20: The jury recommends death.
2008: Judge Horner denies two motions for a new trial and imposes the death sentence.
2019: Governor Gavin Newsom imposes a moratorium on executions.
October 2019: McKnight is found unresponsive in his cell on San Quentin's death row and pronounced dead, aged 65.