Police in San Mateo County suspected Jon Scott Dunkle of killing three boys long before they could prove it. They said so to reporters. What finally made the case was not forensic work but a man in the next cell at the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo, where Dunkle was serving time for a Sacramento County burglary.
He was born in Los Angeles on October 11, 1960, and by his early twenties was living on the San Francisco peninsula, where he had worked as a student clerk at Carlmont High School in Belmont.
On the night of November 8, 1981, fifteen-year-old John Thomas Davies disappeared from his home in Belmont. Dunkle, then twenty-one, was a friend of the Davies family. Davies was last accounted for at home in the middle of the night and was not seen again, and for five years there was no body and no case.
A year later two more people were attacked and survived, one surnamed Murphy on November 5, 1982 and one surnamed Hansen on December 31. Both attacks appear in the court record of the case against him.
Lance Turner was twelve. He was found on October 2, 1984 near the field where he went for daytime soccer practice, in a park close to Waterdog Lake, stabbed twenty-three times. A telephone call to his grandmother on November 19 later became part of the evidence.
Sean Gregory Dannehl, also twelve, was from Fair Oaks outside Sacramento. On July 2, 1985 he was riding his bicycle in a park near the American River when he was knocked off it and stabbed. He was found six days later.
Investigators reached Dunkle while the boy was still missing. On July 5, 1985, Detective Robert Bell questioned him about Dannehl, and he gave blood samples and helped officers search sites. He denied any part in it. He already had a case of his own: he had been arrested for burglary on April 4, 1985 in Rancho Cordova, and the maximum term of six years that followed was the sentence he was serving the next year at San Luis Obispo.
In September 1986 a fellow inmate named Charles Rice went to the authorities and said Dunkle had been talking to him about the killings. Over the following weeks Rice obtained two hand-drawn maps of the scenes, and on September 28 he recorded Dunkle describing the murders. On October 3, FBI agents interviewed him at the prison. He confessed to all three, and he drew a map that led investigators to what was left of John Davies.
Then the case stalled for more than three years, and the reason was his mental state. Psychiatrists raised questions almost immediately. He was admitted twice to a mental hospital before trial, once after hallucinations and a statement that he wanted to kill himself. One court-appointed psychiatrist concluded he was not competent to stand trial. Another examined him three times and found that he was. A judge ruled him competent in 1988, and on August 3, 1989 a jury did the same.
The trial for the Davies and Turner murders opened in late 1989 before Judge Judith Whitmer Kozloski, with Steve Wagstaffe prosecuting. Two psychiatrists testified that he was schizophrenic or delusional. A third testified that he was faking it, and jail guards said he seemed ordinary except when he was called into court. The jury convicted him on both counts of first-degree murder, with findings of multiple-murder special circumstances; accounts date the verdict to December 6 or 7, 1989. He was sentenced to death early in 1990, on January 10 by one account and February 7 by another.
The Sacramento case was settled by agreement five years later. Dunkle pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in Dannehl's death and admitted two special circumstances: that he had already been convicted of killing two other boys, and that he had lain in wait on the bike trail. Judge Lloyd G. Connelly called it a despicable crime; Dunkle said nothing. On December 30, 1994 he received life imprisonment without parole plus a year for the knife, and as part of the bargain he gave up his right to appeal. Proceedings in Sacramento had themselves been suspended for a period after two psychiatric reports raised the same questions as in San Mateo.
His automatic appeal took fifteen years, and in 2002, while it was pending, a guardian was appointed for him. On August 4, 2005 the California Supreme Court affirmed the death judgment unanimously in People v. Dunkle, an opinion largely taken up with the competency findings. His appellate lawyer said it was not the last word, and that the Department of Corrections had been medicating him involuntarily for years.
She was right about that. A federal habeas petition was filed on June 30, 2006, and the death sentence has since been put on hold because a federal judge decided he is not competent to assist in his own appeal. In 2016 the Los Angeles Times described him as gravely disabled. He holds a death judgment affirmed on direct appeal that cannot go forward, alongside a life sentence without parole that he agreed not to contest.
His name came up again in 2010, when ABC7 in San Francisco reported on whether he could be connected to the 1984 disappearance of ten-year-old Kevin Collins. He has never been charged in that case.
One thing did come out of the first killing that had nothing to do with him. The Davies family became campaigners for missing and exploited children, and helped establish the Violent Crimes Information Center, which gave police agencies a way to share what they held on cases like their son's. The five years in which nobody could prove anything is the reason that mattered to them.