On the evening of April 26, 1986, a prisoner in the Nevada County jail called a deputy over to his cell and said he was ready to talk to the homicide investigators who had come to see him the day before. Asked whether he was serious, John Sapp said this: he wanted to admit to three murders, two in Contra Costa County and one in Colusa, he would show where two of the bodies were buried, and he would show where his mother was buried. He had not killed her, he said. She was killed because of him, and he had killed the man who did it and put him in the bay.
He had been arrested the previous morning in Grass Valley on a Butte County warrant for being a felon in possession of a concealable firearm. On the way to the jail, unprompted, he told the deputies he wanted to clear things up and could tell them about twenty murders.
What followed over the next four days is set out at length in the California Supreme Court's 2003 opinion affirming his death sentence, and it is an unusual sequence. On the first day he was read his rights and said that if the detectives wanted to talk about murders, "maybe I should have an attorney." Questioning continued. A Butte County detective investigating his mother's disappearance asked him to say where he had hidden her body so she could be properly buried; Sapp came close to tears and said nothing. A Richmond detective, Michael Tye, spoke to him for two hours about Elizabeth Duarte, and worked on him with the one lever available: Sapp's brother Mike was a Richmond police officer, and Tye told him the murders were having an adverse effect on Mike. After dinner Sapp said plainly that he wanted a lawyer. Tye stopped, handed him a card, and told him no investigator could speak to him again unless he made the first move.
Twenty-four hours later he made it. In a taped ten-minute call he told Tye: "I just want to get this shit over with. I'll give you the locations of what you guys want." He added that the main reason was that Tye had convinced him it would be best for Mike. The next morning, with four officers present and his rights waived, he said: "I killed John Abono. I did it for personal reasons. I killed Elizabeth Duarte for money. I was paid to kill her. I killed Robert Weber for money. I was paid to kill him." That afternoon he took them to Contra Costa County and pointed out where he had killed and buried two people. The day after, he took them to Colusa County and showed them where he had left the third.
The oldest of the three was his best friend from high school. On December 22, 1975, John Abono, who was twenty-two and living in Concord, drove a friend named Tim Bowler over to Sapp's house to buy two pounds of marijuana. Bowler had given him two or three hundred dollars for it. Abono parked his sports car on the street and Bowler, who did not know Sapp, walked home. When Bowler came back that evening the Volkswagen that had been outside Sapp's house was gone and Abono's car was still at the curb. It was still there at eleven.
A Concord officer spoke to Sapp soon afterward. Sapp said he knew he was suspected, because Abono had once informed on him, but that Abono had simply left town out of fear and would be back. Eleven years later he told a Concord detective what had actually happened. Abono had been putting him in business with heroin dealers and doing bad deals, and had become an addict and a liar, and so Sapp had decided to kill him and had done it within a few days. He met him for the marijuana sale, put a gun to his head, drove him to an area near Castle Rock on Mount Diablo and made him walk for about forty-five minutes into open country, then shot him several times in the head with a .22. He covered the body with brush and came back later with a shovel.
He directed officers to the place in 1986. They searched and found nothing. Abono's body has never been recovered.
Elizabeth Duarte, who was twenty-six when she died, met Sapp at work. They were both employed at Chevron Research in Richmond in 1976 and dated for several years. In July 1980 she went to court and obtained a restraining order against him, and her sworn declaration in support of it survives in the record. She said he had pounded her head against a wall and thrown her to the ground, that he had destroyed her telephones so she could not call the police, and that he had repeatedly threatened to kill her if she would not let him go on living in her house. She had changed the locks; he came in through the windows. He carried a gun at all times. She was afraid for her own life and for that of her four-year-old son. Six months later she was dead.
She had started seeing another Chevron coworker, James Luddon. Sapp paid Luddon eight hundred dollars to get her to Luddon's house on the evening of January 24, 1981. He was waiting in the bathroom. When she came in he stepped into the hall and hit her in the head hard enough to split her scalp open to the bone. He later told detectives he had killed her both for personal reasons and because someone had offered him twenty thousand dollars to do it.
What he did next is the part of the case that is hardest to make sense of. He put her in his van, drove her to his own house, wrapped a bandage around her head and gave her a blanket. Then he drove her out to the Lime Ridge area of Mount Diablo, to a grave he had dug some time earlier, and the two of them talked there all night. At one point he handed her his .38 and told her to shoot him. At sunrise he shot her once in the stomach. She asked him to shoot her again, and by his own account he emptied the gun into her. He buried her in the blanket.
Her father had come for her five-year-old son late on the twenty-fourth and brought him home the next morning to an empty house. He reported her missing to the Richmond police that day. Two days later an investigator named Patricia McKittrick interviewed Sapp, who asked whether he was suspected of murder and was told he was not. He volunteered that Duarte made him so angry he wanted to kill her, said he had been fishing, and closed the interview with this: "If I am not a suspect, I ought to be; I had a dream the other night that she got shot in the head." Police searched his van on February 1 and found caked dirt on the pedals and dried human blood on the floor of the type Duarte had. In July 1981 he was convicted of recklessly burning an inhabited dwelling. The dwelling was her house.
A woman named Laura Norris was living at Luddon's that January with her husband. She testified that on the twenty-fifth she cleaned blood off the bathroom and hallway. She said nothing to the police for four years, and explained why on the stand: Luddon and her husband had told her that if she went to them she would end up just like Liz.
Robert Weber, thirty-four, was a small-time cocaine dealer in Concord who owed money to several people, Sapp among them. On August 13, 1985 he told his girlfriend Linda Brown that he and Sapp were going away for a few days to buy drugs, and he took seventeen thousand dollars, a sawed-off shotgun and a 9mm pistol with him. He called her from Clearlake that evening to say the people they were meeting had not turned up. Four days later Sapp turned up at Weber's condominium with an armed companion, answered Brown's telephone call there, and told her he had waited three days in a motel and Weber had never come. He and Weber had in fact stayed at the El Grande in Clearlake on the thirteenth and fourteenth.
Two deer hunters found Weber's body the next day on a hillside on Walker Ridge in Colusa County, about eighteen miles out of Clearlake, with four spent 9mm casings and bloodstains a short distance off. He had been shot in the head, back, chest, throat and both arms. Sapp later walked a Colusa County sergeant to the spot and described it simply: Weber was ahead of him on top of the hill, Weber turned around, and he shot him several times. He dragged the body and rolled it over the side, and noticed the brush stopping it.
He denied Weber had any money on him. "It was murder for hire," he said. People he would not name had paid him ten thousand dollars in advance, and he had invented the drug deal to get Weber out to Clearlake. When he was arrested eight months later he had $27,439 in cash on him, which the prosecutor put to the jury as Weber's missing seventeen thousand plus the fee.
In December 1986, awaiting trial, he wrote to Weber's brother Michael, and the letter is the one place he pushed back on his own confession without retracting it. "It's obvious who pulled the trigger," he wrote. "I'm curious if you ever think about who put the 'thing' in motion or who put up the 'money' to have it done. Those people are still out there just like you are. Your brother died being a good friend of mine. He owed me $32,000 but that's not the reason he died." He described himself as a tool used by other people, and finished: "After I'm executed or if I am executed those 'other people' will still be out there. Sometimes I wish they would be executed right along side of me."
His defense at trial was that he was a man who confessed to murders he had not committed, and it was not a fanciful argument. By 1987 police were saying he had admitted killing twelve people. While in custody on these charges he had confessed to killing a man named Roger Gardner, and had testified for the defense at the trial of Larry Leroy Brownson, who was being prosecuted for that killing. Sapp's lawyers called the prosecutor in that case, Contra Costa Deputy District Attorney Lawrence Barnes, to the stand. Both sides stipulated that Barnes was an expert in judging the credibility of witnesses, and Barnes told the jury that Sapp's confession to the Gardner murder was false. His reasons were specific: the account did not match the physical evidence, and Brownson was a Hell's Angel and a senior figure in the Aryan Brotherhood who was in a position to make Sapp's life in the California prison system considerably easier.
Two weeks after his arrest a Contra Costa Times reporter, Erin Hallissy, interviewed him in jail for two hours, and on May 10, 1986 the paper ran her story on the front page under the headline "I Killed Many for Pay, Says Sapp." Sapp then spent years trying to subpoena her unpublished notes, not to clear himself but to attack his own credibility with his own inconsistencies. His deputy public defender, Jack Rauch, told the courts that Sapp had lied when he confessed and that he needed Hallissy's testimony to prove it. Her lawyers answered that the shield law protected her because Sapp had confessed to at least three police officers, so she held nothing unique. A trial judge ordered her to testify, and in 1988 a state appellate court cleared her of contempt and of a possible jail sentence, finding that Sapp had not shown a need for the material that outweighed the protection. The fight over the newsperson's shield law went to the Court of Appeal and produced a published decision, Hallissy v. Superior Court, which the Supreme Court later disapproved in part, partly on the ground that the man seeking the notes was himself the source of everything in them. He never renewed the request once the law had changed, and on appeal that failure cost him the point. The Supreme Court added that even if the notes had contradicted his confessions, the evidence against him was strong enough that the verdict would not have changed.
His trial should have started in February 1989. It began in January 1991, and the reason is recorded in the opinion in more detail than such things usually are. Two weeks before the original date, the Contra Costa County Public Defender, Charles James, filed an affidavit stating that his office refused to represent Sapp. At an in camera hearing he explained that the problem was his own assigned deputy. Investigators with experience of twenty-five capital cases had written that the case was in a state of basic shambles. The deputy had asked an investigator to impersonate a police officer while interviewing witnesses, and when the investigators suggested he seemed unstable he accused them of misconduct and threw them off the case. Former supervisors described outbursts of rage followed by periods in which he was catatonic and unable to work. Five weeks before trial he had screamed at a law clerk on the case, threatened her with a hammer, and run into the parking lot shouting about the Sapp case within earshot of the district attorney's office.
Sapp wanted him kept on anyway, and said so in court. The deputy offered to resign from the public defender's office and continue as private counsel. The judge refused, saying he had grave misgivings about whether a defendant can waive the right to competent appointed counsel at all. Sapp went to trial two years later with two private attorneys, assisted by the same law clerk, who had by then left the public defender's office and qualified.
The jury convicted him of all three murders, found he had personally used a firearm in each, and found the multiple-murder and financial-gain special circumstances true as to Duarte and Weber. It could not have returned a death verdict for Abono: California had no death penalty statute in force in December 1975, a gap the court had to address on appeal when Sapp argued that trying a noncapital count alongside two capital ones was itself unfair.
At the penalty phase the prosecution put four crimes before the jury that he had never been tried for, including the attempted murder of a man named Al Redenius, shot in the face, neck and hip outside his house in Willits in 1983 by men in a passing car. Sapp told police in 1986 that he had been paid ten thousand dollars for it and had fired the shotgun himself.
The case in mitigation was substantial and largely medical. A neurologist testified that brain imaging showed an abnormality in Sapp's left posterior temporal lobe, and that the same test on his son Richard showed a similar abnormality in the same place. An MRI found a tumor at the base of his skull near the region governing impulse control. A psychiatrist said the findings indicated organic brain damage of the kind associated with sudden mood shifts and violent outbursts. A Stanford psychiatrist described a household dominated by his mother, who was prescribed powerful antipsychotic drugs and beat her children with a belt for small infractions. His oldest brother was in prison throughout his childhood and a first cousin was on death row. A drug researcher put him in the top five percent of Bay Area substance abusers, taking methamphetamine at something like fifteen times a normally lethal dose across an evening, apparently because it calmed him. Raymond Procunier, who had run the California Department of Corrections, interviewed him and told the jury he would make a manageable life prisoner. His son Richard, twenty and himself in custody for car theft, asked the jurors to spare his father.
They returned death verdicts for Weber and Duarte. The California Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the judgment in full on July 31, 2003, in an opinion by Justice Joyce Kennard, rejecting every claim including the severance argument, the confession challenges and the assertion that his trial counsel had been ineffective. Rehearing was denied on October 15, 2003, and the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case on April 26, 2004. His appellate lawyer, Bruce Cohen, said at the time that he would raise further issues in later appeals.
The fourth death is still open. Geraldine Sapp disappeared in June 1985 from the Butte County home she shared with her son. Prosecutors put her killing to the jury as one of the unadjudicated crimes supporting a death sentence. No murder charge was ever brought over her death, and from the first night in the Nevada County jail Sapp's account never changed: he did not kill his mother, she died because of him, and he killed the man who did. Butte County was still deciding whether to charge a fourth count while he was being arraigned on the other three. It never did.
The death sentence has never been carried out. No execution has been carried out there since 2006, a moratorium has been in force since 2019, and the condemned unit at San Quentin was closed in 2024.