John Sapp confessed in April 1986 to three killings that had gone unsolved for years. The first was his best friend from high school, John Abono, who disappeared in December 1975. The second was Elizabeth Duarte, a former girlfriend and coworker at Chevron Research in Richmond, California, who disappeared in January 1981, six months after she obtained a restraining order against him. The third was Robert Weber, a Concord man who owed Sapp money and was found dead in Colusa County in August 1985.
He had been picked up on a gun warrant. Over four days in a Nevada County jail he told investigators he could tell them about 20 murders, asked for a lawyer, and then, a day later, summoned them back on his own and confessed to the three. At trial in 1991 his lawyers argued that he was a chronic false confessor, and they called a prosecutor who testified that Sapp had falsely confessed to a killing in another case. A Contra Costa County jury convicted him of all three murders and returned death verdicts for Duarte and Weber. The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment in 2003. The penalty jury also heard the prosecution's case that he had killed his mother in Butte County in 1985. He denied it and was never charged with it.
Sapp's early life was laid out for the jury by defense witnesses at the penalty phase of his trial. He grew up in a household that a Stanford psychiatrist described as dysfunctional and dominated by his mother, who had psychiatric problems, took powerful antipsychotic drugs and beat her children with a belt. Dr. Gretchen White told the jury that his mother had uncontrollable anger, that his oldest brother was in prison during his childhood, and that a first cousin was on death row. He began using drugs at 13, according to a drug researcher who testified for him.
In 1971, at 18, he was found with a sawed-off shotgun, an incident the prosecution later put before the penalty jury as uncharged criminal conduct. By 1976 he was working at Chevron Research in Richmond. One of his brothers was a Richmond police officer. He had a son who was 20 and confined at the California Youth Authority for car theft when his father was sentenced. The court record does not give Sapp's date of birth; the California Supreme Court described him as "over 30" when he was questioned in 1986.
John Abono was 22 and lived in Concord. He and Sapp had been best friends in high school. Abono disappeared on December 22, 1975, and was not seen again.
A Concord police officer, Richard Berendsen, questioned Sapp about the disappearance. Sapp told him he knew he would be suspected, because Abono had "snitched" on him, but said Abono had "simply left town."
More than ten years later, after his 1986 arrest, Sapp told Concord officer Jim Webster a different story: he said he had shot Abono in Contra Costa County in December 1975. To the investigators who heard his confession he said, "I did it for personal reasons." Abono's body was not found.
California had no death penalty law in force when Abono was killed, so the Abono count could never carry a death sentence. That fact became one of the issues on appeal.
Elizabeth Duarte met Sapp in 1976, when both worked at Chevron Research in Richmond. They dated for several years. She had a young son.
By the summer of 1980 the relationship had broken down. In July 1980 she obtained a restraining order against Sapp, describing violence and threats in a sworn declaration and saying she feared for her own life and for her son's. She then began dating another coworker at Chevron.
A defense witness at Sapp's trial, his next-door neighbor in 1980, described another episode from that year. Duarte visited Sapp, the two argued loudly, and she left. Shortly afterward someone fired shots toward Sapp's house. Sapp later told a detective that Duarte had arranged for a hit man to shoot at his house.
Duarte disappeared in January 1981. Her father reported her missing to the Richmond police on January 25.
On January 26, Richmond police investigator Patricia McKittrick interviewed Sapp. He told her that Duarte made him "so mad" he wanted to kill her, and said he had been fishing on January 24. On February 1, 1981, police searched his van and found evidence the prosecution would later put before his jury. No charge followed at the time. Later in 1981 Sapp was convicted of a felony, recklessly setting fire to an inhabited dwelling; the house was Duarte's.
A woman who lived in the coworker's house that winter went to the police in 1985. At trial she testified about what she had seen in January 1981, and explained that she waited years because she "was afraid for my own life." Over a defense objection, she testified that the coworker and her husband had told her that if she went to the police she would "end up just like Liz." On recross she agreed that Sapp himself had never threatened her.
In April 1986 Sapp told Richmond detective Michael Tye that he and Duarte had a "love-hate relationship" and that he decided to kill her because "the love-hate was not balancing out anymore." He said he had shot her. He also said someone had offered him $20,000 to kill her because she was a "snitch," though he never received the money. Her death was confirmed in April 1986.
Robert Weber lived in Concord. He owed money to several people, Sapp among them. On August 18, 1985, he was found dead in Colusa County. He had been shot.
In April 1986 Sapp told Colusa County sergeant Steven McCulloch that he had shot Weber. He called the killing "murder for hire," and said people he would not name had paid him $10,000 in advance. When he was arrested, about eight months after the killing, he was carrying $27,439 in cash. The prosecutor told the jury the money was $17,000 that Weber had been carrying, plus the fee. Weber's girlfriend and his brother testified about the money Weber had with him. The jury found the financial-gain special circumstance true.
In December 1986, while awaiting trial, Sapp wrote to Weber's brother. "It's obvious who pulled the trigger," he wrote, but he described himself as a tool of other people: "I was used as a tool and nothing else." He said Weber had owed him $32,000. Of the people he said were behind the killing, he wrote: "Sometimes I wish they would be executed right along side of me."
On April 25, 1986, Nevada County deputies arrested Sapp on a Butte County warrant charging him with being a felon in possession of a concealable firearm. On the way to the jail he volunteered that he wanted to "talk and clear things up" and that he could tell them about 20 murders.
Investigators from three counties came to see him. About an hour after he arrived, Sergeant McCulloch of Colusa County asked to talk about the Weber killing. With him was Butte County detective Bill Elliott, who was investigating the disappearance of Sapp's mother. McCulloch read Sapp his Miranda rights. Sapp said he understood them, but added that "if the detectives wanted to talk about murders maybe I should have an attorney."
McCulloch kept questioning him. When Elliott raised the mother's disappearance, Sapp refused to talk about it. He became emotional and did not answer Elliott's questions, and Elliott left.
Detective Tye of the Richmond police then questioned Sapp for about two hours about Duarte. He stressed that Sapp's involvement in murders was hurting his brother, Tye's fellow Richmond officer, and that telling the truth could help him. After a two-hour dinner break Tye talked with Sapp for another half hour. Then Sapp said he wanted an attorney. Tye stopped, gave him his card, told him to think it over during the night, and told him that homicide investigators could not talk to him again, with or without a lawyer, unless he contacted them first.
On the evening of April 26, Sapp called jail deputy Mary Fryback to his cell and said he was ready to talk about the murders "those guys were asking me about yesterday." She told him the investigators had gone back to their home counties. He insisted they had left a message and that she should call them "now." Deputy Troy Arbaugh phoned McCulloch, Elliott and Tye, and asked Sapp whether he was serious. Sapp answered: "I want to admit to three murders, two in Contra Costa County and one in Colusa County." He said he did not want attorneys involved.
That night Sapp spoke with Tye by telephone for about ten minutes. The call was taped, and Tye asked him no questions. "I just want to get this shit over with," Sapp said, and then: "I killed Abono; I killed Weber; I killed Duarte." He told Tye: "you've convinced me that it would be best for [his brother]." Tye said he would be there in the morning.
Before 9 a.m. on April 27, Tye arrived at the jail with McCulloch, Elliott and Tony Koester, an investigator for the Butte County district attorney. Sapp was read his rights again and waived them, and Tye told him he could stop at any time. Sapp then said: "I killed John Abono. . . . I did it for personal reasons." He said he had killed Duarte and Weber for money. Investigators traveled with him to Contra Costa County that day and to Colusa County on April 28, reading him his rights again at each stop.
He was arraigned on the murder charges on April 30, 1986.
The trial court suppressed what Sapp said on April 25, the day he raised the question of a lawyer. It admitted everything from the evening of April 26 onward, after Sapp himself started the conversation again, including the confessions.
Because the Abono and Duarte killings came before June 8, 1982, the date article I, section 28 of the California Constitution took effect, the prosecution had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that those confessions were voluntary. The trial court applied that stricter standard to all three killings and found it met. The California Supreme Court agreed. It held that his April 25 remark that "maybe" he should have a lawyer was not a clear request, that Tye had properly stopped when Sapp did ask for one, and that Sapp's decision to summon the investigators on April 26 was his own act and broke any link to the earlier questioning.
The court also rejected a claim about the five days between arrest and arraignment. Sapp had not objected at trial, and in any case he had confessed before the deadline for arraigning him on the Butte County gun charge, which fell on Monday, April 28.
About two weeks after his arrest, Sapp gave a two-hour jailhouse interview to Erin Hallissy, a reporter for the Contra Costa Times. Her story ran on May 10, 1986, under the headline "I Killed Many for Pay, Says Sapp."
In January 1987 Sapp's lawyers subpoenaed Hallissy and her interview notes for his preliminary hearing. Their argument was that his own statements were most of the evidence against him and that her unpublished material might show inconsistencies in them. The magistrate quashed the subpoena under California's shield law, which protects journalists' unpublished information. The superior court disagreed, saying "the rights of the defendant in this case are paramount to the media's protection," and sent the case back for a reconvened hearing. There Hallissy refused to answer defense questions, was held in contempt and was ordered into custody. The California Supreme Court stayed the contempt order and sent the matter to the Court of Appeal.
In 1988 the Court of Appeal, in an opinion by Justice Poché, ruled for the reporter in Hallissy v. Superior Court. It ordered the contempt order and the remand vacated. It held that Sapp had shown at most that the material was relevant. He had not shown that it was necessary, that it could not be had from less intrusive sources, or that it might lead to his exoneration, in part because he conceded that other people had heard his confessions.
In May 1990, before Sapp's trial, the California Supreme Court decided Delaney v. Superior Court. It set a lower bar for criminal defendants seeking a journalist's material, and noted that when the defendant himself is the source, keeping the material secret may serve no confidentiality interest. It disapproved Hallissy on those points. Sapp never renewed his request in the seven months between Delaney and his trial. When he raised the issue on appeal, the Supreme Court held that he had let it go, and added that even if the notes had been withheld in error, the rest of the evidence was strong enough that the outcome would not have changed.
The Contra Costa County Public Defender, Charles James, was appointed to represent Sapp in May 1986. Trial was set for February 14, 1989, before Judge Norman Spellberg.
On January 30, 1989, James filed an affidavit declaring a conflict. At a hearing on February 1 the deputy public defender assigned to the case argued that there was no conflict and asked to stay on. Sapp told the court: "I would like to keep [the deputy] as my attorney at this point." The deputy offered to take leave from the office and continue as private counsel. Judge Spellberg turned down the request, and the matter went to Judge Michael Phelan, who held a closed hearing on February 3. Stephen Houghton, a lawyer appointed to advise Sapp on the conflict, attended; the prosecutor did not.
At that hearing James described a case in disarray. Investigators had complained that the deputy had not prepared the case, and James believed he had no coherent theory for trial. Former supervisors had reported "outbursts of rage" followed by periods in which he seemed catatonic. On January 11, 1989, the law clerk on the case had walked off the job after the deputy screamed at her and threatened her with a hammer; he then ran outside and yelled about the case within hearing of the district attorney's office. A private investigation firm wrote that the case was in "basic shambles." Its investigators said the deputy had asked one of them to impersonate a police officer while interviewing witnesses, and that when they suggested he seemed unstable he accused them of misconduct and ordered them off the case. When James told the deputy he was thinking of declaring a conflict, the deputy cupped his hands over his ears and ran from the office.
Sapp himself had complained before. In January 1988 he wrote asking for a different deputy, saying there was no longer an attorney-client relationship, and James persuaded him to stay. Even so, Houghton reported that after going over all the allegations with Sapp, Sapp still wanted the deputy and offered to sign waivers. Judge Phelan said that "this is not factually a conflict of interest case," but expressed "grave misgivings" about whether a defendant can waive the right to competent counsel. He relieved the public defender's office and declined to appoint the deputy as private counsel.
The trial began in January 1991. Sapp was represented by Houghton and Marlene Weinstein, both in private practice, with help from the former law clerk, who by then had left the public defender's office. On appeal the California Supreme Court held that the trial court had acted within its discretion: serious doubts about the deputy's competence were the kind of "countervailing considerations" that allow a judge to refuse a defendant's choice of appointed counsel.
All three murder counts went to a single jury in Contra Costa County Superior Court. Sapp twice asked to have them tried separately, and both requests were denied. The Supreme Court later held that the Abono evidence would have been admissible at a separate trial anyway, to rebut his claim of false confession, because Abono had been his best friend and Sapp had confessed to killing him. It also held that the fact that Abono's body was never found did not make that evidence too weak to be joined.
The prosecution's case rested on the confessions and the evidence around them: the 1981 search of his van, the testimony of Weber's girlfriend and brother, the testimony of the woman from the coworker's house, and the cash Sapp carried when he was arrested. Duarte's 1980 declaration was read to the jury. The defense did not object to it, and on appeal the Supreme Court noted that counsel may have had a reason not to: the declaration also supported a defense picture of a mentally ill man who killed out of rage after being rejected.
The defense told the jury that Sapp was a chronic false confessor. Its main witness was Lawrence Barnes, a Contra Costa County deputy district attorney. Both sides agreed that Barnes could testify as an expert in judging the credibility of witnesses.
While he was awaiting trial on these charges, Sapp had confessed to another killing, the death of a man in a case Barnes prosecuted in 1986 and 1987 against a different defendant. Barnes told the jury that Sapp's confession in that case was false and that the defendant he had prosecuted was the real killer. He gave two reasons: Sapp's account did not match the physical evidence, and Sapp had much to gain by "taking the rap" for that defendant, whom Barnes described as a Hell's Angel and a member of the Aryan Brotherhood.
On cross-examination the prosecutor turned the testimony around. Barnes agreed that when asked whether he had committed other crimes since October 1984, Sapp had said he had, and that when asked about other homicides, Sapp said he had committed them. The defense did not object.
The jury found Sapp guilty of the first-degree murders of Robert Weber, Elizabeth Duarte and John Abono, and found that he personally used a firearm in each. For Weber and Duarte it found true the special circumstances of multiple murder and murder for financial gain. It also convicted him of being a felon in possession of a concealable firearm and found true an allegation that he had served a prior prison term.
To argue for death, the prosecution relied on his 1981 felony conviction for recklessly burning Duarte's house and on five crimes for which he had never been tried. They were the 1971 sawed-off shotgun; a homemade knife, or shank, found on him in jail in 1986 while he awaited trial; an attempted murder in Willits, Mendocino County, in November 1983, in which a man was wounded and survived; an attempted murder in 1986, in which a woman survived; and the 1985 death of his mother. He was never tried for any of them.
His mother lived in Butte County and disappeared in June 1985. The prosecution told the penalty jury that he had killed her. Its case was circumstantial, built on evidence about large sums she withdrew from the bank in late 1984 and early 1985, money she said was for a business venture with him, and on the timing of her disappearance, when he was living with her.
Sapp denied it from his first day in custody. As the California Supreme Court recorded it, he told police: "I didn't kill her, but she was killed because of me." He said he had killed the person responsible. He was never charged with her death, and it reached the penalty jury only as an unadjudicated crime the prosecution attributed to him.
The defense presented a long case in mitigation. Witnesses described a hard childhood and what the court called "pathological behavior" by his mother. Friends and relatives described him as devoted and helpful to them, especially to his son.
Much of the testimony was medical. Dr. Arthur Kowell, a neurologist, testified that a brain-mapping test known as BEAM showed an abnormality in Sapp's left posterior temporal lobe, and that his son's test showed a similar abnormality. An MRI found a tumor at the base of Sapp's skull. Dr. Robert Bittle, a psychiatrist, linked damage to the left temporal lobe with sudden shifts of mood and violent outbursts. Dr. Donald Lunde, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Stanford, described the family dominated by his mother. Dr. Gretchen White described an upbringing in which authority figures were undermined. Dr. David Stein testified that Sapp had a poor self-image and grandiose fantasies.
Dr. Stephen Pittell, the director of a drug research program, told the jury that Sapp had used drugs since he was 13 and ranked in the top 5 percent of drug abusers in the Bay Area. On a typical evening, he said, Sapp took about 3,000 milligrams of methamphetamine in six or seven half-gram doses, about 15 times what would ordinarily be a lethal amount. Friends confirmed the drug use.
Raymond Procunier, a former director of the California Department of Corrections who had worked in prison systems for about 40 years, interviewed Sapp and told the jury he would make a good life prisoner who would not cause trouble. Sapp, he said, was "willing to take his medicine." His son, then 20 and held by the California Youth Authority for car theft, asked the jurors to spare his father's life.
The prosecution answered with its own experts. A psychologist diagnosed antisocial personality disorder and said neither family problems nor brain abnormality explained Sapp's conduct. The trial court barred the defense from questioning him about Medi-Cal fraud charges that had been brought against him about four years earlier and later dismissed. Dr. Douglas Goodin, a professor of neurology, testified that the BEAM test was unreliable, that Sapp's own results were normal, and that Kowell's conclusion about father and son was "nonsense." Abono's wife testified that Sapp had bragged about having a mass in his head that he could use in a criminal defense.
The jury asked to rehear defense evidence and deliberated for three full days. It returned death verdicts for the murders of Weber and Duarte. Judgment was entered on October 16, 1991. On the firearm count the court imposed two years plus a one-year enhancement.
Because the sentence was death, the appeal went directly to the California Supreme Court. Sapp was represented by Bruce Eric Cohen; the state by Deputy Attorney General Christopher Grove. The opening brief, filed February 11, 1999, ran to 599 pages in two volumes. The state's answer followed in October 1999 and Sapp's reply in February 2001. In June 1999 the court unsealed the transcript of the closed February 1989 hearing on the public defender's withdrawal.
The case was argued in San Francisco on May 8, 2003. On July 31, 2003, the court affirmed the judgment in full in a unanimous opinion by Justice Joyce Kennard, joined by Chief Justice Ronald George and Justices Baxter, Werdegar, Chin, Brown and Moreno.
The court rejected each of Sapp's claims. Besides the confession, counsel and shield-law rulings, it held that joining the noncapital Abono count with the two capital counts was not unfair, because the Duarte and Weber verdicts alone supported the multiple-murder special circumstance. It held that the testimony that the witness had been warned she would "end up just like Liz" was properly admitted to explain why she waited to come forward, whoever made the threat. It upheld the financial-gain finding for Duarte on his own statement that he had been offered $20,000, even though he said he was never paid, and rejected a claim that the jury had to agree unanimously on which theory of financial gain applied to Weber. It found any error in the handling of the restraining-order declaration harmless, given what the court called overwhelming evidence that he killed Duarte.
Sapp asked for a rehearing on August 20, 2003. Two days later a lawyer who was not a party asked the court to modify the opinion. On October 15, 2003, the court denied rehearing and deleted a parenthetical phrase, "(the public defenders in other counties where the deputy had worked)," from its account of the conflict hearing, without changing the judgment. The remittitur issued the next day. The United States Supreme Court denied review on May 3, 2004.
On December 30, 2004, a petition for a writ of habeas corpus was filed in the California Supreme Court on Sapp's behalf, as case S130314. A federal habeas case, Sapp v. Brown, was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose Division, naming the acting warden of San Quentin State Prison as respondent. In that case Judge Jeremy Fogel granted a motion by Federal Defender Services of Idaho and appointed that office to represent him. The outcome of the state petition and the later course of the federal case were not reported.
On March 13, 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order placing a moratorium on executions in California and closing the execution chamber at San Quentin. CalMatters reported that the order halted executions while Newsom remained governor, but that the 737 people then on death row stayed under sentence of death.
As of June 1, 2026, the Habeas Corpus Resource Center's list of persons under sentence of death in California included John Sapp, with a judgment date of October 16, 1991, and Contra Costa as the county of conviction. The list showed that state habeas counsel had been appointed and that no petition of his was pending in the California Supreme Court.
The number of killings. Sapp told deputies on the day of his arrest that he could tell them about 20 murders, and Barnes testified that Sapp had claimed other homicides after October 1984. Sapp was convicted of three. His defense at trial was that he confessed falsely, and the one confession Barnes examined in detail, in an unrelated killing, Barnes judged false. Beyond the three murders, the court record gives no other killing that was proven against him.
His mother's death. The prosecution told the penalty jury that he killed his mother in 1985, relying on evidence about her finances and the timing of her disappearance. He denied killing her from the start, saying she was killed because of him by someone he then killed. He was never tried for her death.
Murder for hire. Sapp told investigators that Weber's killing was a paid contract and that he had been offered $20,000 to kill Duarte. He never named who paid him, he said he was never paid for Duarte, and in his letter to Weber's brother he blamed unnamed "other people." The jury's financial-gain findings rest on his own statements and, for Weber, on the cash he was carrying when arrested.
The 1983 and 1986 attempted murders. Both were presented to the penalty jury as unadjudicated crimes. He was not tried for either.
1971: At 18, found with a sawed-off shotgun (later presented to the penalty jury as uncharged conduct).
December 22, 1975: John Abono, 22, disappears.
1976: Sapp and Elizabeth Duarte meet at Chevron Research in Richmond.
July 1980: Duarte obtains a restraining order against Sapp.
January 25, 1981: Duarte's father reports her missing.
January 26, 1981: Richmond investigator Patricia McKittrick interviews Sapp.
February 1, 1981: Police search Sapp's van.
1981: Sapp convicted of recklessly burning Duarte's house.
November 1983: Attempted murder in Willits, Mendocino County (later put to the penalty jury; never tried).
June 1985: Sapp's mother disappears in Butte County (her death later put to the penalty jury; he denied killing her).
August 18, 1985: Robert Weber found dead in Colusa County.
April 25, 1986: Sapp arrested in Nevada County on a Butte County gun warrant; questioned and asks for a lawyer.
April 26, 1986: Sapp summons investigators and confesses by telephone to Detective Michael Tye.
April 27 and 28, 1986: Investigators travel with Sapp to Contra Costa and Colusa counties; Duarte's death is confirmed.
April 30, 1986: Arraigned on murder charges.
May 10, 1986: Contra Costa Times publishes Erin Hallissy's jailhouse interview.
December 1986: Sapp writes to Weber's brother.
January 1987: Sapp subpoenas the reporter's notes.
1988: Court of Appeal decides Hallissy v. Superior Court for the reporter.
January 30, 1989: Public Defender Charles James declares a conflict; trial set for February 14 is postponed.
February 3, 1989: Judge Michael Phelan relieves the public defender.
May 1990: California Supreme Court decides Delaney v. Superior Court.
January 1991: Trial begins.
October 16, 1991: Judgment of death for the Duarte and Weber murders.
May 8, 2003: Oral argument in the California Supreme Court.
July 31, 2003: People v. Sapp affirms the judgment in full.
October 15, 2003: Rehearing denied; opinion modified.
May 3, 2004: United States Supreme Court denies review.
December 30, 2004: State habeas petition filed (S130314).
March 13, 2019: Governor Newsom orders a moratorium on executions.
June 1, 2026: Listed by the Habeas Corpus Resource Center as under sentence of death.