Clarence Ray Allen was a California businessman who caused two sets of killings at the same Fresno market, six years apart, without being present for either one. In 1974, after a burglary of Fran's Market, he ordered the death of a 17-year-old girl who had told the owners' son what she knew. A jury convicted him of that murder in 1977, and because California had no death penalty in force when she died, the sentence was life in prison. In 1980, from Folsom Prison, he arranged for a fellow inmate to kill the people who had testified against him. On September 5, 1980, that man went to Fran's Market and killed Bryon Schletewitz, the son of the store's owners, and two teenagers, Douglas Scott White and Josephine Rocha. A fourth person was wounded and lived.
A jury in Glenn County convicted Allen in August 1982 of three counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances and of conspiracy to murder seven people, and sentenced him to death. He was 76 when he was executed on January 17, 2006, and was the thirteenth person put to death in California since the state restored capital punishment. His age, his near blindness and his poor health made the last weeks of his case a public argument about whether a state may execute a frail old man. The courts, and the governor, answered that it could. Both convictions rest on the same finding: that he planned the killings and gave the orders, and that the men who acted did so for him.
Little is known of Allen's early life, and what the court opinions record of it comes mainly through witnesses called years later to speak for him. A federal hearing in April 1997, which examined whether his lawyer had prepared properly for the penalty phase of the 1982 trial, heard that his family had lived in poor conditions, that he worked hard on California farms as a teenager, and that he lost a close sister as a child. His brother described him as a preacher, and other witnesses called him a church deacon. A former coworker at an olive company, where Allen worked in the 1950s, told the court that he had been a good supervisor, husband and parent.
By 1974 Allen was 44, according to the California Supreme Court, and ran a security guard business. Two of his employees would later testify against him. He had sons, Roger and Kenneth, and a daughter-in-law, Kenneth's wife. He had been married and was divorced; at the 1997 hearing his former wife said she did not want him executed, though a state agent was ready to challenge her credibility.
None of that testimony touched the crimes. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, summarizing the 1997 hearing in its 2005 opinion, noted that most of those witnesses had lost contact with Allen long before 1974 and did not know of his robberies or of the killing of Mary Sue Kitts. The court called the mitigation evidence "neither explanatory nor exculpatory."
Fran's Market in Fresno was owned by a married couple whom, according to the California Department of Justice, Allen had known for more than a decade. Their son was Bryon Schletewitz. In June 1974 Allen decided to burglarize the store, and he enlisted his son Roger and two men from his security business.
The California Supreme Court recorded that Roger obtained Bryon's keys at a swimming party at Allen's home. With them the group removed a safe containing about $500 in cash and more than $10,000 in money orders. The money orders were then cashed at shopping centers in southern California under false identification by Roger, by Mary Sue Kitts, and by three others in Allen's circle.
Mary Sue Kitts was 17 and the only child of her parents. News reports at the time of Allen's execution described her as the girlfriend of one of his sons. She had helped cash the stolen money orders, and sometime after the burglary she told Bryon Schletewitz so.
That conversation set off what followed. Bryon confronted Roger Allen, Roger told his father, and Allen said that Bryon and Kitts would have to be "dealt with." According to the California Supreme Court, a group of Allen's associates met at his house and voted that Kitts should die. Allen also let it be known that the Schletewitzes' house might be burned, and the court records that he paid one of his associates $50 for an attack on their home. In August 1974 that associate killed Kitts. The Ninth Circuit's account makes clear that the order came from Allen. Afterward, the state court found, Allen boasted of the killing and threatened the people who knew of it.
Her parents made a statement dated November 15, 1977, after Allen's conviction, which the Department of Justice later reproduced. They described their only child, described their lives since her death, and asked that Allen not be granted probation or parole. He "needs to be institutionalized," they said, "so that he does not harm someone else's child."
Between 1974 and 1977, according to the Ninth Circuit, Allen directed eight armed robberies: of a jewelry store, a hotel, an elderly couple's home, a drug store, a grocery market and two K-Mart stores, among others. One victim suffered permanent nervous-system damage, and another was permanently disabled. He recruited two more men for the K-Mart jobs, which took place in Tulare in February 1977 and in Visalia in March 1977. At Visalia a bystander was wounded. Arrests followed.
The police work on the robberies led back to the earlier crimes. Allen was convicted of robbery-related charges, and then tried for the Fran's Market burglary and for Kitts's death. In 1977 he was convicted of burglary, conspiracy and first-degree murder and sentenced to life with the possibility of parole. Witnesses at that trial included Bryon Schletewitz and several men who had been in the group. Bryon and his father also testified about Allen's motive. The Department of Justice states that Allen entered Folsom Prison on April 27, 1978, and that because the death penalty was not in effect when Kitts died, he could not be sentenced to death, or to life without parole, for her murder.
The man who came out of that trial was a convicted murderer in a state prison with a hope of parole and a pending appeal. Prosecutors later argued that this appeal explained everything that came next: Allen feared that the people who had testified against him would be heard again if he won a new trial, and he wanted them gone.
At Folsom, according to the California Supreme Court, Allen asked his son Kenneth to send him magazine articles to help him solicit retaliation against informants. He also met Billy Ray Hamilton, an inmate known as "Country," who was close to being paroled. Another inmate, who later testified, saw the two men talking repeatedly. The Ninth Circuit described Hamilton as running errands for Allen in exchange for cash. Allen offered him $25,000 to kill witnesses who had testified against him, among them Bryon Schletewitz and one other witness.
Allen could not carry out the plan without people outside the prison. On August 15, 1980, he met Kenneth and Kenneth's wife. He described the plan, gave Kenneth a photograph of Hamilton, and, in the weeks that followed, sent letters in which the phrase "country music" stood for killing. The Department of Justice's account of the case adds that Kenneth agreed to take part and received coded letters outlining the plan.
Hamilton was paroled in late August 1980. The Department of Justice gives the date as August 29. Kenneth met him at the Fresno bus depot, and Hamilton's girlfriend joined him there. Kenneth provided money, transportation and what Hamilton needed, according to the state's record. A first attempt on September 4 was called off that night. The Department of Justice says it was abandoned because the girlfriend objected to harming a 15-year-old boy who was in the store.
On September 5, 1980, Hamilton and his girlfriend went to Fran's Market. The California Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit agree on the outcome: Hamilton killed Bryon Schletewitz, Douglas Scott White and Josephine Rocha. A fourth person was hurt but survived. The Department of Justice dates the killings to September 5, although its own document also gives September 4 in one place; the court opinions use September 5.
A neighbor heard what was happening and went to the market. He confronted Hamilton, and Hamilton was injured. His girlfriend was arrested at the scene. Hamilton got away, telephoned Kenneth Allen, changed cars and went to Modesto, according to the California Supreme Court.
The Department of Justice's background document of January 2006 includes statements from the victims' families, dating from 1982 and 1997. They describe three people as their families knew them.
Bryon Schletewitz, 27, was the only son of the market's owners. He had testified against Allen at the 1977 trial, and his father had done the same. His father described him to the state as "a good, fun-loving son." The father also told of what the family endured after the killings, including threats and attacks on their home, and said he had "no faith in our judicial system."
Douglas Scott White was 18. His mother remembered a caring, nonviolent young man who planned to study law and architecture. She also spoke of an earlier loss in her family. According to ABC30 in Fresno, he had graduated from high school only weeks before.
Josephine Rocha, 17, was known to her family as "Phina." Her sister remembered her as fun-loving, a girl who hoped to become a teacher. The family still carried grief and guilt, the sister said. When Allen was executed, the Associated Press reported that her relatives said "justice has prevailed today" and that Allen had "abused the justice system with endless appeals."
Five days after the killings, Hamilton was arrested in Modesto after a liquor store robbery. The Department of Justice dates the arrest to September 11, 1980. He had with him an address book, which the Department of Justice calls a hit list, naming eight people who had testified against Allen in 1977. The California Supreme Court says the names included the Schletewitzes and several members of Allen's former circle.
Investigators also reached Allen's family. Kenneth Allen was arrested on drug charges on September 9, 1980, and gave statements to police. He then made an arrangement under which he agreed to testify "truthfully and completely." In return, he received protective custody, release on his own recognizance and a choice of prison, and in February 1981 he entered a plea to an accessory charge and drug possession. In July 1981, prison officials intercepted a letter he had written to his father promising to "tell them the real truth." The prosecution ended the agreement. Kenneth testified for the state at trial anyway.
Another man, a Folsom inmate paroled in July 1980, told jurors that Allen had tried to recruit him and Hamilton to kill witnesses, and that Allen had offered to pay. Hamilton, according to that witness, said after the killings that he had "killed three people for Ray." His testimony was challenged at trial and later because of his history of substance use, his prior felonies, and deals that dropped charges against him and his wife.
In June 1981 Allen was charged by information in Fresno County with the murders of Bryon Schletewitz, Douglas White and Josephine Rocha and with conspiracy to murder seven people. Eleven special circumstances were alleged. The state attorney general's office handled the prosecution, rather than the Fresno County district attorney, because a Fresno chief deputy prosecutor had earlier represented Allen in an unrelated murder case. The two deputy attorneys general who tried the case were Ronald Prager and Ward Campbell.
The court moved the trial to Glenn County, in northern California, on March 12, 1982. The guilt phase lasted 23 days. The jury heard 58 witnesses. Allen testified in his own defense and denied any involvement in the killings. The jury deliberated for three days and found him guilty as charged. Allen then admitted his prior murder conviction, the 1977 case.
The verdict of August 22, 1982 was a conviction on three counts of first-degree murder. The jury found true the special circumstances of a prior murder conviction, multiple murder, and the intentional killing of Bryon Schletewitz in retaliation for his earlier testimony and to prevent his testifying in the future. The California Supreme Court later held that most of the multiple-murder findings, and two of three prior-murder findings, should not have been counted separately. Only one of each remained, and the court held that the error did not affect the outcome.
The penalty phase began on August 30. Over seven days prosecutors presented eight armed robberies between 1974 and 1977, a June 27, 1981 attack on a fellow inmate in the Fresno County jail that Allen had ordered, and threats against people he called informers. They also put before the jury Allen's repeated efforts to interfere with prosecutions by threatening witnesses. The defense called a friend, who spoke about his financial help, his kindness to children and his poetry; she also acknowledged that he had threatened her husband. The jury deliberated for one day and returned three death verdicts on September 10, 1982. Allen was 52. On November 22, 1982, Judge Roy G. McFarland denied the motion to modify the verdict and sentenced him to death.
Hamilton was tried separately. The California Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Mosk dated July 28, 1988, recorded that a jury had convicted him of three counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of Josephine Rocha, Douglas White and Bryon Schletewitz, of attempted robbery of Schletewitz, and of two counts of assault, against the survivor and the neighbor. The jury found robbery-murder and multiple-murder special circumstances and returned a verdict of death. On rehearing the court upheld the convictions and the sentence, setting aside five of six multiple-murder findings because they should have been pleaded as one, and found the errors it identified in the penalty phase harmless. "The judgment is affirmed," the opinion concludes. When Allen was executed in 2006, the Associated Press reported that Hamilton was also on death row and that no execution date had been set for him.
The California Supreme Court decided Allen's direct appeal in an opinion by Justice Joseph Grodin dated December 31, 1986. It set aside most of the special-circumstance findings, which the jury had been given in duplicate, and affirmed the rest: "We affirm the verdict of guilt, the finding of special circumstances, and the judgment of death." It found that a prospective juror had been properly excused for cause, that the prosecutor's argument had not misled the jury about its discretion, and that the prosecutor's remarks that Allen's age was aggravating, which the law does not allow, did not affect the result. The U.S. Supreme Court denied review on October 5, 1987.
The later history is long. According to the Department of Justice's chronology, the California Supreme Court denied his first petition for habeas corpus on the merits on June 23, 1988, and a second on June 22, 1993. Allen filed in the federal district court on August 31, 1988. A magistrate judge held a six-day evidentiary hearing in April 1997 on the claim that his lawyer had failed him at the penalty phase, and recommended denial of relief in March 1999. The district judge adopted that recommendation on May 11, 2001.
The Ninth Circuit affirmed on May 6, 2004, in an opinion by Judge Kim Wardlaw, joined by Judges Susan Graber and Richard Clifton, and amended it on January 24, 2005. The court rejected Allen's guilt-phase claims, which included allegations of false testimony, an instruction on accomplice evidence, and prosecutorial misconduct, and said any error was harmless. "Evidence of Allen's guilt is overwhelming," Judge Wardlaw wrote. On the penalty phase, however, the court agreed with Allen on one point. His lawyer had begun preparing only after the guilty verdicts, had a list of 26 possible mitigation witnesses from Allen and contacted only a few, and had not looked into the matter with the care required. The court held that his performance was deficient. It found no prejudice, because the evidence on the other side, which included the killing of witnesses from inside a prison, outweighed the mitigation. The U.S. Supreme Court denied review on October 3, 2005.
On October 3, 2005, the day review was denied, Attorney General Bill Lockyer asked the Glenn County Superior Court to set January 17, 2006 as the date of execution. The court did so at a public session on November 18, 2005. The Attorney General's office noted that Allen had exhausted his legal options but could still ask the governor for clemency.
By the time of the order Allen was 75. He was legally blind and nearly deaf, used a wheelchair, and had diabetes and heart disease. In September 2005 his heart stopped at San Quentin and he was revived. Prison officials said he later asked for a do-not-resuscitate order. His lawyer, Annette Carnegie, said the state had neglected his medical needs.
His lawyers asked the governor to commute the sentence to life without parole. They were joined by two people with direct knowledge of the case and the prison: Joseph Grodin, the former justice who had written the 1986 opinion affirming Allen's sentence, and Daniel Vasquez, who was warden of San Quentin from 1983 to 1993. Grodin wrote that executing Allen at that point would serve no legitimate purpose of retribution or deterrence, given the time that had passed and his physical suffering. Vasquez said Allen "presents absolutely no risk to institutional safety." The Death Penalty Information Center reported their letters in December 2005.
The case for clemency also included claims about his mind. Allen's lawyers said there was evidence of organic brain damage. He was found competent in an evaluation dated December 27, 2005, and a federal court rejected a separate argument that his health prevented him from helping prepare a clemency petition.
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger denied clemency on January 13, 2006. According to the Associated Press, he said that Allen's age and health did not matter, and that Allen was 50 when he committed his crimes, which reflected "the hardened and calculating decisions of a mature man." CNN quoted him as saying, "The passage of time does not excuse Allen from the jury's punishment." JURIST reported that he described the crimes as attacks on "the justice system itself." Prosecutor Ward Campbell argued that Allen "conspired to attack the heart of our criminal justice system." Josephine Rocha's brother told the Associated Press that Allen was frail because of his own appeals, and that his sister had been too young to die. Mark Klaas, whose daughter had been murdered and who had become an advocate for crime victims, told CNN that Allen "should have been executed long ago."
The state courts and the federal courts took up the last claims in the days before the date. On January 10, 2006, the California Supreme Court denied relief. On January 15, 2006, a Ninth Circuit panel of Judges Graber, Wardlaw and Clifton, in an opinion by Judge Wardlaw, decided Allen v. Ornoski without argument. It held that no authority bars executing an elderly or infirm prisoner and that his age and illness did not reduce his culpability. It treated his argument that more than 23 years on death row was cruel as a successive petition, which could have been raised before. It denied a certificate of appealability and a stay of execution.
The U.S. Supreme Court refused to stay the execution on Monday, January 16, 2006. Justice Stephen Breyer dissented. He wrote that Allen was 76, blind, diabetic and confined to a wheelchair, and that the case raised "a significant question." The Court had barred executing juveniles, people with intellectual disability and people found incompetent, but had set no upper age limit and no exception for physical illness.
Allen was executed early on Tuesday, January 17, 2006, at San Quentin State Prison. The prison warden, Steve Ornoski, read a final statement in which Allen expressed love for his family, his friends and the other men on death row. It ended: "It's a good day to die. Thank you very much. I love you all. Goodbye." A prison spokesman said Allen had spent the last day visiting with his family.
About 200 people gathered outside the prison, a tenth of the number who had come a month earlier for the execution of Stanley "Tookie" Williams. One man who attended said he had come to remember the victims, who "are forgotten after 25 years." Allen was the thirteenth person executed in California since 1977 and the third in twelve months, and the Associated Press recorded that before him the oldest California inmate executed since the state's reinstatement had been 61. John Nixon, 77, had been executed in Mississippi the month before, the oldest executed in the country since 1976.
In July 2014, after a federal ruling that California's death penalty was unconstitutional, the ABC station in Fresno spoke to the neighbor who had gone to the market in 1980. He called the ruling unfair to the victims' families. A former California justice who had prosecuted Allen's first murder trial called it insulting to people who had lost everything. ABC30 described Allen in that report as the last person California had put to death.
In March 2026 ABC30 returned to the case in a series built on its archival footage. It said investigators called the killings at the market deliberate, not spontaneous, and that the case took about thirty years to reach its end.
Allen denied any part in the Fran's Market killings at his trial. The courts found against him on the strength of letters written in code, a list of witnesses found on the man who killed, and testimony from his own son.
That testimony was the subject of the most significant challenge. After judgment, Kenneth Allen recanted. The Ninth Circuit held the recantation unreliable because it contradicted his wife's testimony, Allen's own letters, the list found with Hamilton, and a photograph found in Kenneth's home. The Ninth Circuit also rejected the attack on the witness who said Hamilton had admitted the killings, finding no evidence that his trial testimony was false and noting that his account had been consistent across proceedings.
The penalty phase was the one place where the Ninth Circuit found fault with the defense. Allen's lawyer, who was inexperienced in capital cases, did not prepare for the penalty phase until after the guilty verdicts and left himself about a week. The court found no harm. His opening statement recited a poem of Allen's called "Hit Man," which the court found was a deliberate choice to blunt its use by the prosecution.
Amnesty International opposed the execution, citing Allen's age and health, claims of brain damage, and trial counsel; its statement attributes the brain-damage and witness-credibility claims to his lawyers, and they were not findings of any court.
June 1974: Fran's Market in Fresno is burglarized in a plan led by Allen.
August 1974: Mary Sue Kitts, 17, is killed on Allen's orders.
February to March 1977: Allen's group carries out robberies in Tulare and Visalia; arrests follow.
1977: Allen is convicted of burglary, conspiracy and first-degree murder in the Kitts case and sentenced to life with the possibility of parole.
April 27, 1978: Allen enters Folsom Prison.
August 15, 1980: Allen meets his son Kenneth and Kenneth's wife at Folsom.
August 29, 1980: Hamilton is paroled.
September 5, 1980: Bryon Schletewitz, Douglas Scott White and Josephine Rocha are killed at Fran's Market; Hamilton's girlfriend is arrested at the scene.
September 9, 1980: Kenneth Allen is arrested on drug charges.
September 11, 1980: Hamilton is arrested in Modesto.
June 1981: Allen is charged with the three murders and with conspiracy.
March 12, 1982: The trial is moved to Glenn County.
August 22, 1982: The jury finds Allen guilty as charged.
September 10, 1982: The jury returns death verdicts.
November 22, 1982: Allen is sentenced to death.
December 31, 1986: The California Supreme Court affirms.
October 5, 1987: The U.S. Supreme Court denies review.
July 28, 1988: The California Supreme Court affirms Hamilton's convictions and death sentence.
May 6, 2004: The Ninth Circuit affirms the denial of federal relief; amended January 24, 2005.
October 3, 2005: The U.S. Supreme Court denies review; execution date requested.
November 18, 2005: Execution date set for January 17, 2006.
January 13, 2006: The governor denies clemency.
January 16, 2006: The U.S. Supreme Court denies a stay; Justice Breyer dissents.
January 17, 2006: Allen is executed at San Quentin State Prison.