Dana Sue Gray
- Victims
- 3 deaths - 2 MURDER CONVICTIONS, for June Roberts and Dora Beebe, by guilty plea, together with the attempted murder of Dorinda Hawkins who survived. She was NEVER PROSECUTED for the death of Norma Davis, her father’s stepmother-in-law and the first of the three, because the plea agreement expressly excluded it
- Years active
- February 16 - March 16, 1994
- Location
- Canyon Lake, Riverside County, California, USA
- Method
- Stabbing with knife - Ligature strangulation
- Status
- Arrested at her home in Lake Elsinore on March 16, 1994 for the murder of June Roberts, on the same day she killed Dora Beebe; a search of the house produced property belonging to Roberts, Beebe and a fourth woman, Dorinda Hawkins, who survived being strangled in the antique shop where she worked and later identified her. The prosecution sought the death penalty and she pleaded insanity on all counts. On September 9, 1998, after a witness placed her at Roberts’s house, she abandoned the insanity defence and pleaded guilty before Judge Patrick F. Magers to robbing and murdering two women and to the attempted murder of Hawkins, on the express condition that the State would not prosecute her for the murder of Norma Davis. She waived all rights of appeal. Sentenced on October 16, 1998 to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, and held at the Central California Women’s Facility at Chowchilla.
Gray was born on December 6, 1957 and had worked as a trauma nurse before losing her position. She was living in Canyon Lake, California, deep in debt and with a compulsive spending habit.
Between February 16 and March 16, 1994 she killed three elderly women she knew or had access to: Norma Davis, eighty-six, stabbed at her home; June Roberts, sixty-six, strangled with a telephone cord; and Dora Beebe, eighty-seven, beaten and strangled. She took their credit cards and cash and, within hours of each killing, went shopping: clothes, wine, restaurant meals, a manicure, toys for a child in her care.
She was arrested in March 1994 after using a victim's card at a shop where staff had been alerted.
She pleaded guilty and was sentenced on October 16, 1998 to life imprisonment without parole.
The spending is the whole of the recorded motive, and it is why the case is cited in the literature on female offenders as an unusually direct instance of killing for immediate consumption. Three elderly women died so that their cards could be used that afternoon.