On March 10, 1994, a woman came into an antique store in Riverside County, California, to buy a picture frame for a photograph of her dead mother. Dorinda Hawkins, fifty-seven, was working there alone. The customer strangled her with a telephone cord, took five dollars from her purse and twenty from the register, and an hour later was shopping on a credit card belonging to a woman killed twelve days before. Hawkins, much younger than the others, survived, and she described her attacker. The story was in the newspaper the next day.
Dana Sue Gray was born Dana Sue Armbrust in California on December 6, 1957, to Russell Armbrust, a hairdresser, and Beverly Arnett, a former beauty queen and MGM starlet; they divorced when she was two. After watching nurses care for her mother, who developed breast cancer when Dana was fourteen and died in 1975, she decided to become a nurse. She graduated from Newport Harbor High School in 1976 and from nursing school in 1981, skydived, windsurfed and played golf, and in 1987 married Tom Gray, a fellow sports enthusiast. They lived in the gated community of Canyon Lake. She ran up heavy debts, left him in early 1993 for a friend, Jim Wilkins, and his young son Jason, and filed for divorce. In September 1993 the couple filed for bankruptcy, and on November 24 she was fired from her job as a labor and delivery nurse at Inland Valley Regional Medical Center for taking Demerol and other painkillers.
On February 14, 1994, Norma Davis, eighty-six, was killed in her condominium in Canyon Lake. She was the former mother-in-law of Jeri Davis, who in 1988 had married Dana's father, and Dana knew her well. A neighbor found her two days later with a utility knife in her neck and a fillet knife in her chest. There was no forced entry, the phone cord had been ripped out, and her Social Security check lay untouched. On February 28, June Roberts, sixty-six, also of Canyon Lake, let Dana in when she asked to borrow a book about controlling a drinking problem. While Roberts looked for it, Dana unplugged both phone cords and strangled her with one, then took two credit cards and went on a spending spree at an upscale shopping center in Temecula. On March 16 she knocked on the door of Dora Beebe, eighty-seven, in Sun City, asking for directions, and killed her after Beebe invited her in to look at a map. An hour later she was shopping with Beebe's credit card and checkbook.
Canyon Lake was terrified. Elderly widows slept in groups at designated houses, some residents moved in with family, and a few decided a cult was committing ritual sacrifices. Detective Joseph Greco of the Perris police, working only his second homicide, at first suspected Jeri Armbrust, who had cared for Davis, before he came to trust her. The credit card company had called Roberts's family about the spending, and cashiers in Temecula described the buyer: a woman who had recently dyed her hair and had a little boy named Jason with her. When Greco described the suspect to Jeri Armbrust, she told him the next day that she thought it was her stepdaughter.
Narcotics officers staked out Dana's house in Lake Elsinore, unaware that she had killed Dora Beebe in Sun City hours before; they watched her use Beebe's card at a bank and go shopping. On March 17, 1994, Greco arrested her while she was cooking dinner. The search turned up Roberts's belongings and Beebe's credit cards in her sock drawer, and Hawkins picked her out of a photo lineup. She said she had found the cards and kept them because of an overwhelming need to shop, and she showed no sympathy for the women.
Deputy District Attorney Richard Bentley sought the death penalty, and she pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. After a witness said she had seen her at Roberts's house the day of the murder, she changed her plea on September 9, 1998, to guilty of robbing and murdering June Roberts and Dora Beebe and of attempting to murder Dorinda Hawkins, on the condition that the state not prosecute her for Norma Davis's death, and she waived her appeals. On October 16, 1998, she was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. She is held at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla.