Early on the morning of April 25, 1981, joggers found the body of a young woman in a ditch beside Bean Hollow Road, near the coast of San Mateo County, California. She was Paula Geddling, twenty-three, known as Patty. In her clothing was a claim ticket from a shoe repair shop with a phone number written on it. The number belonged to a thirty-seven-year-old machinist who worked at Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto and lived in a studio apartment in Redwood City. His name was Donald Jay Beardslee.
When a sheriff's sergeant asked him about it, Beardslee said that another man had shot Patty, "but I guess I'm involved because I shot her in the head twice myself." He then told detectives where to find a second woman, Stacy Benjamin, nineteen, whose body lay off a mountain road more than a hundred miles to the north. What the detectives learned next was that Beardslee was on parole. Eleven years earlier, in Missouri, he had killed a woman named Laura Griffin.
Beardslee spent almost twenty-one years on California's death row. On January 19, 2005, after Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger refused clemency and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to intervene, he became the first person California executed in three years, and the first under Schwarzenegger. This account is drawn from the court opinions in his case, the records of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), and wire and newspaper reports of the execution.
The record of Beardslee's early life is thin. Reuters, in its report of the execution, described him as an Air Force veteran. At the 1984 penalty trial his brother and sister testified about the family's history, but the California Supreme Court's opinion does not set out what they said. His lawyers later told the governor that he had been brain-damaged since birth and that the damage was made worse by two serious accidents, which an Amnesty International appeal placed in his teens and early twenties. According to a wire report collected by the Community of Sant'Egidio, those accidents were a car crash and a falling tree. None of this was in front of the juries that convicted and sentenced him.
On December 28, 1969, Laura Griffin was found dead in her apartment in Missouri. The Associated Press, in its reports of the 2005 execution, said Beardslee had met her in a St. Louis bar and killed her the same evening. According to the California Supreme Court, she was found in a bathtub with numerous knife wounds and marks from a garroting device, and a pathologist found that she died of blood loss. Beardslee later testified, as the Ninth Circuit summarized it, that he went home with her from the bar, held her head under water and stabbed her in the throat, and that he could not remember much about the night because he had been drinking. He also admitted taking her purse and burning it. Little else about Laura Griffin herself appears in the sources found for this page.
Beardslee did not run. He went to a lawyer, Donald Clooney, told him he had killed a woman and needed help, and Clooney arranged for him to surrender to the police with a request that he be placed in psychiatric care. Clooney told the police not to question his client without him there. They did anyway. After Clooney left, an officer interviewed Beardslee and obtained statements. A Missouri court refused to suppress them, and Beardslee pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. The California Supreme Court's opinion gives his sentence as eighteen years in one passage and nineteen in another. Clooney believed that Missouri never gave Beardslee the psychotherapy that had been part of the reason he turned himself in.
The Missouri case came back to matter in California. Years later, California investigators found that the officer who took Beardslee's statements had lied at the Missouri suppression hearing, and the San Mateo County prosecutor conceded the perjury. The California Supreme Court called the question of whether Beardslee's later admissions about the Missouri killing could be used against him "close and troubling," but held them admissible, because they were made years later, in California, to different authorities. Two justices, in separate opinions, disagreed with parts of the decision; the Amnesty appeal quotes them as calling the Missouri police conduct "egregious."
Beardslee served about seven years in a Missouri maximum-security prison. He was paroled to California in July 1977. One condition of his parole was outpatient psychiatric treatment. The psychiatrist stopped seeing him after seven weekly sessions.
By most outward measures he did well. Two of his instructors at the College of San Mateo later described him as a model student. From February 1979 to April 1981 he worked as a machinist at Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, and a supervisor testified that he was a very good employee. A former acquaintance told the penalty jury that his arrest was out of character.
Around February 1981 he met Ricki Soria, who was hitchhiking, and she moved into his studio apartment in Redwood City. Beardslee said he wanted to help her get off drugs and away from the people she was involved with. Those people included Frank Rutherford, a drug dealer who, the California Supreme Court wrote, "had a reputation for carrying guns and collecting drug debts," and Ed Geddling, another dealer, who was Patty Geddling's estranged husband. Beardslee had known them only a few weeks when the killings happened, according to the Amnesty appeal.
Paula Geddling, known as Patty, was twenty-three. Stacy Benjamin was nineteen. The court described them as close friends who lived together. Both were part of the same drug-dealing circle as Rutherford and Ed Geddling; Stacy sold drugs and, in the court's words, had a reputation for "ripping people off," and Patty sometimes sold drugs too. The sources found for this page say almost nothing else about either woman: where they grew up, their families, what they hoped to do. Four of their relatives watched Beardslee's execution in 2005. Their names and words were not in the reports that could be reached.
The spelling of Stacy Benjamin's first name varies. The California Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit use Stacy. The CDCR uses Stacie. The Associated Press and Reuters used Stacey. This page follows the courts.
On April 23, 1981, Soria told Beardslee that Stacy had cheated a man named William Forrester in a drug deal. The AP later put the sum at $185. The next afternoon, April 24, Beardslee agreed with Soria and Rutherford to help Forrester "get back at" Stacy and Patty that evening, at Beardslee's apartment. He picked up Rutherford, who brought a shotgun. At Beardslee's request, Soria went out and bought tape to gag the women. Prosecutors in 2005 described this as Beardslee sending his roommate for duct tape before the victims arrived.
They assigned roles. Soria would sit on the sofa. Beardslee would open the door. Rutherford and Forrester would hide. Beardslee testified that he expected the others to "rough [the women] up a little bit," tie and gag them, rob them and leave.
Patty and Stacy arrived at about 6:30 p.m. As they came toward Soria, the shotgun went off, and Patty was hit in the left shoulder. The Ninth Circuit called the shot "apparently accidental." Beardslee took her into the bathroom to try to stop the bleeding. Both women were tied up. Rutherford told Patty they would take her to a hospital.
Later that evening, at around nine or ten, Beardslee and Forrester went to get Rutherford's car. By Beardslee's own account, he understood by then that the women were going to be killed. When Rutherford handed him shotgun shells, he refused: "I'm not going to do this." Forrester said he would.
Forrester drove the women's van, with Patty inside and Beardslee in the passenger seat. Soria followed in Beardslee's car. Rutherford stayed in the apartment with Stacy. They drove south on Highway 1, along the coast, and turned onto Bean Hollow Road. There Patty got out and pleaded for her life. Beardslee loaded the shotgun and handed it to Forrester, who shot her twice. Then Beardslee fired twice more. They left her in a ditch beside the road.
The van ran out of gas. They wiped it for fingerprints and left it. Beardslee and Soria dropped Forrester off and went home, where Rutherford phoned and told them to meet him at the apartment of a woman named Dixie Davis.
At about three in the morning on April 25, Beardslee and Soria arrived at the Davis apartment. Stacy was there, watching television. Out of her hearing, Beardslee told Rutherford that Forrester had "chickened out" and that Beardslee had had to finish the job himself.
At about five in the morning the four of them, Beardslee, Rutherford, Soria and Stacy, set off in Beardslee's car. They stopped at a service station where Stacy collected drug money, then in Pacifica, where Soria bought cocaine, and at two other places to use it. In Sebastopol, in Sonoma County, they visited Rutherford's brother, who gave Rutherford advice on where to "drop off" Stacy. Beardslee said he understood this to mean killing her and leaving her body.
They drove north on Highway 101 and turned onto a winding side road. Rutherford told Stacy they were going to Lakeport for drugs. At a turnout they stopped and all four walked uphill. Stacy asked Beardslee whether he was going to strangle her. He told her no. Soria then told Beardslee that Rutherford had "fixed up" a wire and urged him to help when they heard a commotion.
Beardslee found Rutherford strangling Stacy with the wire. He punched her and helped pull the wire tight. The two men moved her to a more secluded spot, and Beardslee asked for Rutherford's knife and cut her throat. They were back at the Davis apartment by late that afternoon.
Beardslee told the story more than once, and the versions did not match on the point that mattered most. In his taped statement to detectives, he said Patty was still alive when he fired and that he shot her so she would not suffer, and that Stacy was still alive when he cut her throat. At the 1982 preliminary hearing for Rutherford and again at his own trial, he said he believed both women were already dead, and that he had taken part only because he feared Rutherford would have him killed.
The medical evidence supported the taped statement. The pathologist testified that the head wound to Patty Geddling had been fired from close range and was instantly fatal, and that Stacy Benjamin was alive when her throat was cut.
The shoe-repair ticket led the San Mateo County Sheriff's Office to Beardslee. Amnesty International says he gave police his detailed account the day after Patty's body was found. Detective Sergeant Robert Morse called on him, and Beardslee agreed to come to the sheriff's office. There Morse explained the difference between a witness and a suspect and asked whether he was involved. Beardslee said that Rutherford had shot Patty, "but I guess I'm involved because I shot her in the head twice myself." He told officers he was on parole.
After Miranda warnings, he gave a detailed taped statement covering both killings. Following his directions, officers found Stacy Benjamin's body near the Hopland Grade Road in Lake County, and physical evidence at several places in San Mateo County. Amnesty International's appeal gives May 3, 1981, as the date he was charged.
Beardslee's first lawyer, Douglas Gray, set up an arrangement under which Beardslee would testify against the others in exchange for protection for his safety, not for a lighter sentence. Beardslee testified at Rutherford's preliminary hearing in 1982, and his testimony there, including his account of the Missouri killing, was later used against him. The Ninth Circuit found in 2003 that Gray's investigation of the case fell below constitutional standards but that Beardslee could not show it had changed the outcome.
The four people at the apartment that evening were prosecuted separately, and their cases ended very differently, according to the Ninth Circuit.
Frank Rutherford was convicted of first-degree murder for the killing of Stacy Benjamin and sentenced to life without parole. A wire report collected by Sant'Egidio in 2005 said he had since died.
William Forrester, the man who fired the first shots at Patty Geddling on Bean Hollow Road, was acquitted of her killing.
Ricki Soria pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and received fifteen years to life.
Ed Geddling was never charged, according to Amnesty International. Nothing in the court opinions found for this page describes a role for him in the killings.
Beardslee was tried in San Mateo County Superior Court before Judge Robert D. Miller under California's 1978 death penalty law. With his consent, the court seated one jury for the guilt phase and a separate jury to decide the penalty. The prosecution's case rested largely on his own taped statement, the physical evidence and the pathology.
The guilt jury had a question during deliberations. It asked the judge to explain whether "the first degree murder" in the instructions referred to the act as a whole or to Beardslee's own part in it. The judge refused to explain, telling the jurors that "there is and can be no explanation of the instructions," and repeated the refusal the next morning. Both the California Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit later held that this was error, and both held that it was harmless.
On October 18, 1983, the jury convicted Beardslee of two counts of first-degree, premeditated murder. It found two special circumstances for each killing: multiple murder, and killing a witness to prevent testimony. It also found that he used a firearm in Patty Geddling's killing and a knife in Stacy Benjamin's.
The second jury heard most of the guilt-phase evidence again, along with the evidence of the Missouri killing. The defense called Beardslee's brother and sister, his Hewlett-Packard supervisor, his College of San Mateo instructors, the former acquaintance, and a sheriff's deputy who said he had been cooperative in jail. It presented evidence of his seven years in the Missouri prison and his parole. A forensic psychiatrist, Dr. George Wilkinson, testified about personality disorders and described a sociopathic diagnosis at length, testimony that later became the basis of an ineffective-assistance claim. The defense also tried to tell the jurors what the co-defendants had received. The trial court ruled that their sentences were irrelevant and kept them out.
The prosecutor told the jurors that Beardslee was "not suffering from any mental disorder" and that he had acted alone in Patty Geddling's killing. "Three murders is enough," he argued.
The jury deliberated for almost twenty-three hours over four days, according to Amnesty International. On January 23, 1984, it returned a split verdict: death for the murder of Patty Geddling and life without parole for the murder of Stacy Benjamin. The trial court denied motions to strike the special circumstances and to reduce the sentence and entered a judgment of death. Beardslee arrived on death row at San Quentin State Prison on March 14, 1984.
On March 25, 1991, the California Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and the death sentence in People v. Beardslee, 53 Cal.3d 68. Justice Arabian wrote for the majority, joined by Chief Justice Lucas and Justices Panelli, Kennard and Baxter; Justices Mosk and Broussard wrote separately.
The court struck both witness-killing special circumstances. It held that there was not enough evidence that either woman was killed to prevent her from testifying about a separate crime, because both killings were part of one continuous course of events. One duplicate multiple-murder finding was also set aside. The court still upheld the death sentence. It held that the prosecutor had improperly argued, more than once, that the absence of mitigating evidence was itself a reason for death, but found the error harmless because, with two murders and the Missouri killing, the case was not close on penalty.
On the disparity between Beardslee and his co-defendants, the majority answered the dissent's view that it was "irrational" to put only him to death. Beardslee, the court wrote, was an active participant in both killings, "and he alone committed the brutal murder in Missouri." The Amnesty appeal quotes a dissenting justice as calling it "altogether irrational."
Beardslee filed a federal habeas petition on July 10, 1995, and later amended it to raise sixty-seven claims. The U.S. District Court dismissed some, granted summary judgment to the state on others, held a three-day evidentiary hearing in September 2000, and denied the remaining claims on February 16, 2001.
A Ninth Circuit panel of Judges A. Wallace Tashima, Sidney R. Thomas and Richard A. Paez affirmed in an opinion by Judge Thomas filed March 20, 2003, and amended January 28, 2004, when rehearing was denied (Beardslee v. Woodford, 358 F.3d 560). The court held that the trial judge's refusal to answer the jury's question was a due process error but harmless; that excluding the co-defendants' sentences did not violate the Constitution; and that the Missouri admissions were voluntary and far enough removed from the Missouri perjury to be used.
A second claim followed. In 2003 the Ninth Circuit had held in another case, Sanders v. Woodford, that a death sentence could be undone when a penalty jury weighed special circumstances later found invalid. Three of Beardslee's four special circumstances had been struck. On December 29, 2004, the same panel ruled in Beardslee v. Brown (393 F.3d 1032) that his penalty jury had indeed weighed invalid factors, in violation of the Eighth Amendment, and that the California Supreme Court had not properly reviewed the error. But it held the error harmless. The witness-killing theory had come up mainly through the defense psychiatrist, who rejected it; the prosecutor had "all but abandoned" it in closing; and the jury's decision to impose life for one killing and death for the other suggested the special circumstances had played little part. "We are not left with grave doubt," Judge Thomas wrote.
With an execution date set for January 19, 2005, Beardslee's lawyers asked Governor Schwarzenegger to commute the sentence to life without parole. The petition rested on new medical evidence that no jury had heard.
An expert from the University of Pennsylvania who had recently examined Beardslee reported that the right hemisphere of his brain was "virtually non-functioning," according to letters from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. CounterPunch named the examiner as Dr. Ruben Gur. In a passage quoted by Phil Gasper, a death penalty opponent writing there, Gur described "profound, likely lifelong damage." The lawyers argued that the damage dated from birth, was made worse by the two accidents, and helped explain impaired judgment, paranoia and the detachment the jurors had seen. Human Rights Watch noted reports that jurors had seen Beardslee as "cold and calculating" because of his aloof manner at trial. Amnesty pointed to Soria's description of him falling silent and wandering from room to room during the crimes. The lawyers also argued that he had been led along by the others, that he was the only one of three people convicted in the killings to be condemned, and that the Missouri conviction rested on an interrogation tainted by perjury.
Supporters pointed to his prison record. According to Amnesty, he had no rules violations in his time on death row. Gasper wrote that Daniel Vasquez, a former warden of San Quentin, wrote a letter on his behalf.
Prosecutors answered that Beardslee had helped plan the killings and had sent Soria for the tape before the women arrived.
Schwarzenegger denied clemency on the afternoon of January 18, 2005, in a five-page decision, according to Reuters and Amnesty. He described the three killings in detail and rejected the brain-damage argument. "We are not dealing here with a man who is so generally affected by his impairment that he cannot tell the difference between right and wrong," he wrote. "Nothing in his petition or the record of his case convinces me that he did not understand the gravity of his actions." On the disparity with the co-defendants, he noted that Beardslee was the only one of the three who had been on parole for another murder at the time. He acknowledged Beardslee's good prison record, Amnesty reported, but said it did not move him to mercy. "I do not believe the evidence presented warrants the exercise of clemency in this case," he wrote. He also turned down a defense request for a 120-day reprieve to reopen the case in federal court.
The AP noted that no California governor had granted clemency to a condemned prisoner since Ronald Reagan spared a severely brain-damaged man in 1967. A year before Beardslee's date, Schwarzenegger had also declined to stop the execution of Kevin Cooper, whose execution was then stayed by the Ninth Circuit.
Beardslee's lawyers also challenged the method of execution. California's protocol, Procedure 770, used three drugs: sodium pentothal to anesthetize, pancuronium bromide to paralyze, and potassium chloride to stop the heart. The lawyers argued that if the first drug failed, he would suffer in silence, and that the paralytic would keep him from expressing pain, a First Amendment claim.
On January 14, 2005, the Ninth Circuit panel, ruling per curiam and amending its order the next day when rehearing was denied, refused to stop the execution (Beardslee v. Woodford, 395 F.3d 1064). It held that he had not shown enough likelihood that the anesthetic would be improperly given, or any risk peculiar to him, and it expressly left the larger question undecided. On January 18 the U.S. Supreme Court denied two final applications without comment, one on lethal injection and one arguing that the jurors had been improperly influenced.
Beardslee spent his last day with his legal team and his spiritual adviser, the Rev. Margaret Harrell, watching television and reading, according to the AP and Reuters. He declined a special last meal and the regular prison meal and asked only for grapefruit juice. He carried his Bible into the waiting area. He chose not to have family members witness the execution, and the AP reported that no relative had visited him in at least the previous month.
At midnight the warden gave the order to proceed. Five guards strapped him to the table, and it took about fifteen minutes to insert the intravenous lines into both arms. The drugs began at 12:20 a.m. Reuters reported that he yawned, blinked and moved his head before his breathing stopped. He was pronounced dead at 12:29 a.m. on January 19, 2005. He was sixty-one. He made no final statement. Through an attorney, according to the actor and activist Mike Farrell, he sent a message to the people outside that he wanted known "his appreciation for these people's presence."
About thirty officials, relatives of the victims and journalists watched from behind a glass partition. Four relatives of Patty Geddling and Stacy Benjamin were among them. Outside, about three hundred people held a vigil, according to the AP; one other report put the number above four hundred. Their signs read "Don't Kill In Our Name" and "Stop State Murder." About half a dozen protesters stood in the snow outside the U.S. Embassy in Austria, the country where Schwarzenegger was born.
It was California's first execution since January 2002, and the eleventh since the state reinstated the death penalty in the late 1970s, according to the CDCR and Reuters. California then held about 640 people on death row, the largest such population in the country.
The CDCR's record of executed inmates, checked for this page in October 2026, lists Donald Beardslee, received at San Quentin on March 14, 1984, as executed on January 19, 2005, after twenty years and ten months on death row. There is no further proceeding.
The execution came in the same week that the California Senate created a commission to study problems in the state's death penalty system, Gasper noted in CounterPunch.
The sources reached for this page do not record public statements by the families of Patty Geddling, Stacy Benjamin or Laura Griffin.
Proven in court: Beardslee was convicted by a jury of the first-degree murders of Patty Geddling and Stacy Benjamin. He pleaded guilty in Missouri to the second-degree murder of Laura Griffin.
His own admissions: he said he fired the last two shots into Patty Geddling and cut Stacy Benjamin's throat. He also described the Missouri killing under oath.
Disputed: whether he believed the women were already dead (his trial account) or knew they were alive (his taped statement, which the medical evidence supported). Whether he was a willing planner or a frightened follower: prosecutors and the governor said he helped plan and asked for the tape; his lawyers said he was duped and afraid of Rutherford. Whether brain damage explains his conduct: this rests on Dr. Gur's examination, presented only at clemency and never tested before a jury or a court on the merits. Whether the Missouri conviction should have been used: the courts admitted it despite the conceded perjury of the Missouri officer, over the objections of two justices.
Not established: the dates and details of the accidents his lawyers said worsened his injuries; any role for Ed Geddling.
December 28, 1969: Laura Griffin found dead in her apartment in Missouri. Beardslee surrenders through his lawyer, Donald Clooney, and later pleads guilty to second-degree murder.
July 1977: Paroled to California.
February 1979: Begins work as a machinist at Hewlett-Packard, Palo Alto.
About February 1981: Meets Ricki Soria; she moves into his Redwood City apartment.
April 23, 1981: Soria tells him Stacy Benjamin cheated William Forrester in a drug deal.
April 24, 1981, about 6:30 p.m.: Patty Geddling is shot in the shoulder at the apartment; she and Stacy Benjamin are bound.
Night of April 24 to 25, 1981: Patty Geddling is shot dead on Bean Hollow Road.
April 25, 1981: Stacy Benjamin is killed near the Hopland Grade Road, Lake County. Joggers find Patty Geddling's body.
Late April 1981: Beardslee confesses to Sgt. Robert Morse and leads officers to Stacy Benjamin's body.
May 3, 1981: Charged (per Amnesty International).
1982: Testifies at Frank Rutherford's preliminary hearing.
October 18, 1983: Convicted of two first-degree murders, San Mateo County.
January 23, 1984: Penalty jury returns death for Geddling, life without parole for Benjamin.
March 14, 1984: Received on death row at San Quentin.
March 25, 1991: California Supreme Court affirms (People v. Beardslee, 53 Cal.3d 68).
July 10, 1995: Federal habeas petition filed.
February 16, 2001: District court denies relief.
March 20, 2003: Ninth Circuit affirms; amended January 28, 2004.
December 29, 2004: Ninth Circuit finds invalid special circumstances weighed, but harmless (Beardslee v. Brown).
January 14 to 15, 2005: Ninth Circuit refuses to halt execution over lethal injection.
January 18, 2005: Governor Schwarzenegger denies clemency; U.S. Supreme Court denies final appeals.
January 19, 2005, 12:29 a.m.: Executed at San Quentin State Prison.