Franklin Lynch was born in 1955. In the summer of 1987 he attacked elderly women in their homes in the East Bay area of California, and the press called him the Day Stalker because he did it in daylight.
He was convicted of murdering three women while robbing their homes in San Leandro: Pearl Larson, seventy-six; Adeline Figuerido, eighty-nine; and Ruth Anna Constantine, seventy-three. He was also convicted of robbing two other women in the Hayward area.
The violence was extreme. A forensic pathologist testified at his trial that Adeline Figuerido had died of as many as a dozen blows to the head, neck and face, with a brain haemorrhage and numerous broken bones. Her daughters found her on the dining room floor with her hands tied behind her back and a blanket tied round her head. The death sentence was imposed for the beating of Ruth Constantine on August 13, 1987.
He was already suspected of a string of robberies and killings before the first of those three murders, and was the subject of a manhunt a month beforehand. FBI agents arrested him in Los Angeles in October 1987.
Contemporary accounts connect him to as many as thirteen killings of elderly women in northern California going back to 1980, and to a wider series of attacks that frightened communities across the region. He was charged with three. The larger figure is an investigative attribution and is kept separate here from what was proved.
He was sent to San Quentin in April 1992. What happened after that is the part of this case worth setting out, because almost nothing did.
His appeal was automatic and went directly to the Supreme Court of California, bypassing the Court of Appeal. The State Public Defender's Office was not appointed to represent him until 1997, more than five years after sentencing. Two years after that his lawyers applied to correct and settle the trial record, and the full record, about seventeen thousand pages, was not filed until 2002. He tried to dismiss the State Public Defender's Office in 2003 and was refused. The opening brief was filed in 2004, the state's response a year later, and his reply in 2007. The case was finally argued in May 2010, eighteen years after the sentence.
His brief ran to four hundred and eighty-one pages. Among the grounds: that the trial judge should have allowed him to dismiss his lawyers and represent himself; that four prospective jurors who said they would have difficulty returning a death verdict were wrongly removed; that the charges should have been severed so that the jury weighed them separately rather than together; that he was unrepresented at a police line-up where witnesses identified him; that a prosecutor made an improper statement in closing; and that California's death penalty law is unconstitutional and contrary to international law. The Attorney General's office disputed all of it, and said he had two lawyers with him at the line-up.
One of his own trial lawyers, Michael Ciraolo, asked whether eighteen years was some kind of record. The state's Administrative Office of the Courts said it was not, and that other cases had waited longer.
The prosecutor at trial, Jim Anderson, had called him a human reptile and a murder machine. By 2010, retired, he pointed out that a habeas corpus case was pending in the same court and that a federal one could follow, put the likely remaining wait at another fifteen years, and said the delays had made the death penalty in California a farce.
Adeline Figuerido's family had been told at the sentencing that the execution would probably be about fourteen years away. Her grandson's wife said they had thought at the time what a waste of taxpayers' money that was, and that they were still paying for him to sit there.