Darrell Keith Rich killed four people in the Redding area of northern California between early July and mid-August 1978. Three of them were adult women: Annette Edwards and Patricia Moore of Redding, and Linda Slavik of Chico. The fourth was Annette Selix, an 11-year-old girl from Cottonwood. A jury in Yolo County convicted him of all four deaths, three as first-degree murder and one as second-degree murder, and of a long list of other crimes against five people who survived. In March 2000, after appeals that began in the 1980s, he was executed at San Quentin State Prison.
Rich was adopted. The California Supreme Court's 1988 opinion, drawing on the trial evidence, describes a difficult childhood in which he repeated the first grade. His adoptive parents divorced when he was about 15, and he showed suicidal tendencies. The opinion records an incident at 17 that may have been a suicide attempt, a drunken collision at 18 that led to time in a county jail camp, and an assault at 19 that led to a commitment to the California Youth Authority. He later married and had a child, and worked at a lumber mill. According to the opinion, he struck his wife on several occasions, and the couple separated in August 1977.
Amnesty International, in its 2000 notices about his case, described him as part Native American, of Cherokee ancestry, adopted and raised as a Mormon. It reported that he was 45 at the time of his execution. CBS News said he claimed to have found redemption through his Cherokee faith, and that his lawyers argued he had studied Native American beliefs in general before learning of his ancestry.
The indictment grouped Rich's crimes of 1978 into four murders and a series of offenses against five other people, all of whom survived. The opinion places the earliest of the other offenses in mid-June 1978 in Redding and Anderson, with further counts in late June in Redding, early July in Redding and mid-July in Red Bluff. Each of the five was the subject of separate counts in the indictment.
The killings fall inside and just after that run.
Annette Edwards, of Redding, was killed in early July 1978. Amnesty International gave her age as 19. She was the first of the four, and her case was tried on a felony-murder theory.
Patricia Moore, of Redding, was killed in early August 1978. Amnesty International gave her age as 17. According to Amnesty International's summary of the verdicts, hers was the one second-degree murder verdict.
Linda Slavik, of Chico, a mother of one, was killed in early August 1978. Amnesty International gave her age as 26 (spelling her name Slovik), and CBS News gave it as 28. The opinion records that the jury's findings in her case rested on premeditation.
Annette Selix, 11, of Cottonwood, was killed in mid-August 1978. Her death was the last of the four, and the one that brought Rich to the attention of the police. The opinion records that the verdict in her case also rested on premeditation. The opinion states that Rich had once worked for her mother.
The four deaths came in separate events: one in early July, two in early August and one in mid-August. The three women lived in Redding and Chico, and the girl in Cottonwood.
Police first spoke to Rich because of Annette Selix. As a former employee of her mother he was among the people interviewed, and at that point he was not a suspect. An account he gave a friend did not match the physical evidence. Investigators asked him to take a polygraph examination, which he did on August 23, 1978, and the examiner found him deceptive.
That evening he told friends that he had failed the test. He then told them he had killed the two women, and he claimed that he had been paid to do it. They contacted the police. Rich was arrested in Redding that night. At the station he gave a tape-recorded statement that lasted almost two hours and ended at about 2 a.m. on August 24.
The trial court later suppressed that confession, together with one seized item. The court allowed his statements to his friends, his statements to a lieutenant and a detective, a handwritten list of crimes he gave the lieutenant, forensic comparisons, and other physical evidence. The California Supreme Court held on appeal that the evidence admitted would inevitably have been discovered or came from sources independent of the suppressed statement.
The case began in Shasta County, where the crimes were committed. The defense moved to change the venue. The court ruled on that motion on September 29, 1978, and a transfer to Lake County was proposed, but it was delayed. The formal order moving the trial to Yolo County came in mid-April 1980, about eighteen months later. On appeal Rich argued that the Shasta court lost the power to proceed while the motion was pending; the Supreme Court rejected the argument. The former Shasta County district attorney, Robert Baker, served as a special prosecutor. The trial was held in Yolo County, with prosecution and defense offices in Woodland.
The indictment charged four counts of first-degree murder, along with three counts of kidnapping, several counts of rape, and a series of other sexual and assault counts involving the five survivors. Each murder count carried a special circumstance of multiple murder. During the trial the indictment was amended to add a further count.
The defense was diminished capacity, and then insanity. Six experts testified for the defense side. Two court-appointed doctors, Dr. French and Dr. Kaldor, diagnosed an antisocial personality disorder but found him sane and able to form intent. Others, Dr. Wilson, Dr. Morrison, Dr. Satten and Dr. Axelrad, diagnosed various combinations of intermittent explosive disorder, borderline personality disorder and depression, and Dr. Satten also described mild brain damage. Two of them told the jury that Rich was legally insane at the time of three of the crimes. The prosecution called rebuttal experts who disputed those opinions, including the reliability of a hypnotic interview technique that one defense expert had used. The guilt-phase evidence ran to more than 3,100 pages of transcript, and defense counsel's closing argument lasted seven and a half hours.
The jury returned its verdicts in three stages: guilt, sanity and penalty. On three of the murder counts it found Rich guilty as charged, and found true the special circumstances alleged. On the fourth it found him guilty of second-degree murder and found the multiple-murder special circumstance not true. On the 18 other counts it found him guilty as charged on all but three. It found him sane when he committed the crimes. The sanity phase was decided on the guilt-phase record.
The penalty trial followed, and the jury fixed the sentence the next day: life without the possibility of parole for one of the first-degree murders and death for each of the other two. Which count received which sentence is not on record. Amnesty International's account differs from it: Amnesty listed death for the three first-degree murders and life without parole for the second-degree murder.
Amnesty International also reported two points about the trial that were raised later. It said that no hearing was held on his competency to stand trial, and that the judge made a finding of competence after reading the expert evidence. It also said that the jury at first could not agree on the penalty, that the judge did not tell the jurors that a deadlock would result in life without parole, and that he ordered them to resume deliberating the next morning, after which they returned a death verdict.
The case went to the California Supreme Court as an automatic appeal. In an opinion written by Chief Justice Lucas and issued on June 30, 1988, the court rejected the challenges Rich raised. These included the sufficiency of the evidence of premeditation, a conflict of interest said to arise from shared office space between the prosecutor and one of the defense lawyers, the use of restraints on Rich during the trial (which the court held would have been harmless error in any case), the disclosure of defense psychiatric videotapes, prosecutorial misconduct, and the effectiveness of counsel. CBS News reported in 2000 that state and federal courts upheld his death sentence.
The U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the case on January 23, 1989, in Rich v. California. Justices Brennan and Marshall dissented from the refusal on their general ground that the death penalty is always cruel and unusual punishment.
In the federal courts, Amnesty International reported that the federal appeals courts held that a failure to hold a competency hearing was not an error that could be raised on appeal, and that it was too late to decide his competency as of 1980. It added that trial experts for the defense later said they had never been asked about his competency and that his impairment, including evidence of long-standing brain damage, made it unlikely he could assist in his own defense, and that the state had offered no expert evidence against that statement.
On March 6, 2000, a clemency hearing was held, at which relatives of the victims described their pain and asked that the sentence be carried out without more delay, Amnesty International reported. On Friday, March 10, Governor Gray Davis denied clemency. CBS News quoted his statement that the crimes were committed in a "callous and almost unbelievably brutal manner." President Bill Clinton, CBS added, also declined to intervene.
In the final days Rich went to court over a religious request. On March 8 he filed a civil rights action asking for a one-time exception to a prison rule that confined condemned men in the highest-security category to their housing units, so that he could take part in a sweat lodge ceremony with two spiritual advisers before his execution. The district court refused on March 13. A panel of the Ninth Circuit affirmed on March 14, and a majority of the court's active judges declined to rehear the case. The state had offered other arrangements, including a sacred pipe ceremony in the visiting room. Judge Reinhardt, joined by three colleagues, and Judge Kozinski, joined by Judge Wardlaw, dissented from the refusal to rehear, arguing that the state had not shown a reasonable security reason. His lawyers acknowledged in argument, CBS reported, that sweat lodges are not part of Cherokee tradition. The Supreme Court, in an order dated Tuesday, March 14, 2000, denied his application for a stay and his petition for review in Rich v. Woodford.
Rich was executed at San Quentin State Prison in the first minutes of Wednesday, March 15, 2000. CBS News reported that he was pronounced dead at 12:13 a.m. and that a ceremonial eagle feather lay across his chest. Five relatives of the victims and one survivor of an earlier attack watched. The survivor told reporters, "I can finally live in peace. He won't be there to haunt me any more." Rich's lawyer, James Thomson, who also attended, said that Rich's last thoughts were of remorse and forgiveness. A candlelight vigil outside the prison drew several hundred people, according to Amnesty International. Lance Lindsey of Death Penalty Focus, which opposes capital punishment, called the execution "a senseless, meaningless act of revenge."
Amnesty International counted Rich as the 22nd person executed in the United States in 2000 and the 620th since executions resumed in 1977. He was the eighth person executed in California since 1992.
The motive. According to the Supreme Court opinion, Rich told friends after his polygraph that he had been paid to kill the women. The opinion records the statement as part of the evidence of what he said to his friends, not as a finding, and the jury's verdicts do not rest on any such payment.
Ages. Reports differ on Linda Slavik's age: Amnesty International gave 26 and CBS News gave 28.
The sentence by count. The Supreme Court opinion says the jury imposed death for two of the first-degree murders and life without parole for a third. Amnesty International's summary assigns the sentences differently, listing death for the three first-degree murders and life without parole for the second-degree murder.
Competency. The claim that Rich was impaired to the point that he could not help his lawyers was made by trial defense experts in later proceedings, as reported by Amnesty International. The courts held that the issue could not be revisited.
Other killings. No killing beyond the four is on record against him, whether charged, attributed or confessed.
Mid-June 1978: first of the offenses against five survivors, in Redding and Anderson.
Late June to mid-July 1978: further offenses against survivors in Redding and Red Bluff.
Early July 1978: Annette Edwards killed.
Early August 1978: Patricia Moore and Linda Slavik killed.
Mid-August 1978: Annette Selix, 11, killed.
August 23, 1978: polygraph examination; Rich tells friends; arrested in Redding that night.
September 29, 1978: ruling on the venue motion.
Mid-April 1980: trial formally moved to Yolo County; convicted that year and sentenced by the jury.
June 30, 1988: California Supreme Court issues its opinion.
January 23, 1989: U.S. Supreme Court refuses review.
March 6, 2000: clemency hearing.
March 10, 2000: Governor Gray Davis denies clemency.
March 14, 2000: Ninth Circuit and U.S. Supreme Court refuse his last applications.
March 15, 2000: executed at San Quentin State Prison.