Joseph Martin Danks stabbed six homeless men to death in Los Angeles County over less than four weeks, from Christmas Eve 1986 to January 20, 1987. All of them were street people, and each was stabbed in the back, some of them as they slept. Two other men survived. Danks was himself a transient, a 26-year-old drifter from Michigan who had been sleeping rough, and he told detectives that he did not like the homeless men he called "bums." He was caught on the day of the last killing, when a companion of the dead man followed him and flagged down help.
He pleaded guilty to the six murders in December 1988 and was given 156 years to life. In September 1990, less than a month after he arrived at the California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi, he strangled his 67-year-old cellmate, Walter Holt, and then told a guard what he had done. A Kern County jury convicted him of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death in 1993. The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment in 2004 despite finding that two jurors had committed misconduct by consulting their pastors. His federal habeas case has been pending since 2011, and he remains under sentence of death.
The state has conceded in federal court that he has suffered from a serious psychotic illness since adolescence. Whether that illness explains his crimes, and whether it should bar his execution, has been the main question in his appeals.
Danks was born in 1962 in Bay City, Michigan, two months premature, weighing 3 pounds 15 ounces, and spent four to six weeks in an incubator. The account of his early life comes from the defense evidence at his 1993 penalty trial, as summarized by the California Supreme Court. His biological father, Edward Whyte, was a wealthy man and a heavy drinker who had blackouts. His mother, Karen Walls, had worked as the Whyte family's babysitter and was about 25 years younger than Whyte.
In 1966 Karen married Leroy Danks, who adopted the boy. The family moved to South Dakota and then to Wyoming. Leroy left in December 1970. Witnesses described neglect in these years: the boy was often left alone and crying, and Dora Howard, a housekeeper who helped care for him, testified that his mother once put him in a dresser drawer and shut it, and that he was given paregoric, a sedative. Danks later told Leroy that a man named Gene Walls had beaten and verbally abused him.
At about 13 he lived with the Whytes in a trailer, where he was exposed to drugs; his half brother Michael Whyte said that Danks sold drugs for him at school. Edward Whyte eventually told him to leave and not return. At 14 he lived for about a year with Leroy Danks. In his own testimony he said he began using drugs at 11 and never graduated or held steady work.
His mother testified that schizophrenia ran in her side of the family. She said a doctor had told her in 1977 that her son had "some sort of psychiatric disturbance." After his arrest she told a reporter in Gaylord, Michigan, that he was a loner whose life had been damaged by drugs and that she had believed for ten years that he needed psychiatric help. "He was living on the streets," she said. "He chose it."
From 1979 to 1982 Danks hitchhiked for long stretches. At 16 he was arrested in Mexico, and Edward Whyte negotiated his release. In July 1982, on a motorcycle trip, he told a Dr. Robert Jackson that he feared he was under surveillance and that his food was poisoned, and said he "particularly liked clean people." In October 1982 he walked into an elementary school in New Jersey in shredded clothes, and his mother had him involuntarily committed in Michigan. He later walked away from psychiatric facilities in Michigan and Florida.
He had two felony drug convictions, in 1984 and 1985. In 1985 he rode along with Leroy Danks on a trucking route, carrying a steak knife and saying that old people were chasing him. Peggy Walkowiak, a Michigan probation officer who dealt with him in June 1986, described him as paranoid. He was placed on probation in September 1986 and absconded within two weeks. By the end of the year he was in Southern California.
Six men were killed, according to the charges filed in January 1987. Prosecutors listed them as Edwin Trujillo, killed on December 24, 1986; Christopher Forsblade, 40, killed on January 6, 1987; Isaac Davis, 58, and John C. Coble, 55, both killed on January 14; a man killed on January 16 whom police could not identify; and a second unidentified man killed on the day of Danks's arrest. The first killing took place in Santa Monica. The rest were in and around Koreatown, west of downtown Los Angeles. None of the victims was Korean.
All six were living on the streets. The surviving reports from 1987 and 1988 give little more than their names and ages, and two of the men had no names at all when the charges were filed. What is recorded is how they were living when they died: sleeping outdoors, searching through trash or walking along the street. Danks did not know any of them. He did not rob them; the prosecutor who charged the case said there was no evidence of robbery in any of the attacks.
Two other men were stabbed and survived. One was 64 and was attacked the Sunday before the arrest; the other, 58, was stabbed on the day of the arrest. Later reports did not say what became of either man.
Deputy District Attorney Norman Shapiro summed up the pattern when he filed the charges. "All of them are stabbings," he said. "All of them are street people. All of them were in the back." Danks later described the attacks to a detective: he had stabbed men who were sleeping, men who were digging through garbage, men who were fighting with others, and men who were simply walking by. Testifying in 1993, he said he had stabbed "bums" in the back of the neck and in the side while they slept.
The killings came close together. Two men died on January 14 alone. Police in Los Angeles were investigating a series of stabbings of transients in Koreatown when the last attack took place on January 20, 1987.
Danks was caught shortly after the last killing. A companion of the dead man followed him and waved down a passing car, and the people in the car hailed a police patrol. When officers stopped him, Danks threw down a shirt. Inside was a rolled-up newspaper, and inside the newspaper was a knife that appeared to have wet blood on it.
He was taken in for questioning that day. Danks waived his Miranda rights and was interviewed by Detective Addison Arce about the stabbings, and detectives tape-recorded what he said. He told Arce that he did not know the people he had stabbed, and he called them "bums" or "transients." "It ain't nothing, man, three or four bums," he said. He told the detective that he did not believe anyone had died.
By the end of the day he had admitted five killings and two attempted killings in and near Koreatown. The next day, according to Shapiro, he also confessed to the fatal stabbing of a homeless man in Santa Monica the previous month. Shapiro said Danks "copped out to every incident in detail" and had mentioned other crimes, which police were investigating; officers believed those included one more killing and one more attempted killing. No further charges from that inquiry were reported.
No one has offered a full explanation for why Danks chose homeless men. Shapiro told reporters in January 1987 that Danks had said he did not like homeless people. "He does not regard himself as a bum," the prosecutor said, although Danks had been living on the streets. United Press International reported in December 1988 that Danks had told a psychiatrist why he killed the men, but that the reasons were withheld on grounds of confidentiality.
What Danks said in later years was shaped by his illness. After killing his cellmate in 1990 he told officers that he was "on a mission from God to take and to kill these transients," that he was "supposed to kill old people," and that he was "God's own voice on earth." At his 1993 penalty trial he said he had not set out to kill old men and "had no idea that these bums were old."
On the Thursday after the arrest, Shapiro filed six counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder, with a special-circumstance allegation of multiple murders that made Danks eligible for the death penalty. At his arraignment in Municipal Court that day he pleaded not guilty, and Judge Glenette Blackwell ordered him held without bail.
The case moved slowly. Deputy District Attorney Christopher Darden prepared it for trial. In March 1987 the public defender offered a plea bargain, which Darden turned down because he had not yet reviewed the psychiatric reports; those reports went back to 1977. At some point in the proceedings Danks attacked his public defender in court with a knife made from a toothbrush and a razor blade, causing minor injuries. A defense psychiatrist later identified that lawyer as Larry Rivetz, who represented him in the Los Angeles case.
In December 1988, during jury selection before Judge Raymond Mireles in Los Angeles Superior Court, Danks pleaded guilty to the six murders. In exchange, prosecutors dropped the special-circumstance allegations that would have allowed a death sentence. United Press International, reporting on December 3, 1988, said sentencing was set for December 23 and that the plea would keep him in prison for life. Danks was 27. Court records later described the sentence as six consecutive terms of 25 years to life plus one year, a total of 156 years to life.
The Los Angeles case did not end cleanly with the plea. A psychiatrist, Dr. John White, was appointed in March 1989 and found Danks incompetent, and from June 1989 to March 1990 he was held at Atascadero State Hospital, where the California Supreme Court opinion says he was treated after being found incompetent to stand trial on the Los Angeles murder allegations. He was found competent once he was medicated. The 2004 opinion refers to the six Los Angeles murder convictions as 1990 convictions. The published record does not explain how the December 1988 plea and the 1989 to 1990 competency proceedings fit together.
At Atascadero, on November 19, 1989, Danks attacked another patient, Donald McCully. He tried to suffocate him, stabbed him with a pencil and tried to gouge out his eyes. McCully survived, which Danks found irritating. Dr. Robert Hill, who treated him at the hospital, later described him as delusional and "an extraordinarily dangerous individual."
In 1990 Dr. White examined him again in the Los Angeles County jail. On August 23, 1990, Danks was received at the California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi, in Kern County, to serve his term of 156 years to life.
Walter Holt was 67 years old and an inmate at Tehachapi. Little else about him has been made public: neither the 2004 opinion nor the federal court orders say what he had been convicted of, how long he had been in prison or whether he had family outside. Danks referred to him only as "an old man." Holt had been in his cell before Danks was assigned to it on the evening of September 20, 1990.
Danks was placed in Holt's cell between 5 and 6 p.m. He told investigators that he decided to kill his cellmate as soon as he was put in with him. "They put me in with this guy," he said.
He waited about three hours. Then, according to a statement written down by an officer that night, he tore a sheet, wrapped it around Holt's head and neck and pulled, squeezing "till it stopped," and then tied a second sheet around Holt's neck and pulled it tight. The Kern County pathologist, Dr. John Holloway, gave the cause of death as hypoxia leading to asphyxia due to ligature strangulation and found that Holt probably lost consciousness in under a minute. The federal court later placed the killing between midnight and 1 a.m. on September 21; Danks's own account put it about three hours before he reported it.
At about 1 a.m., Danks told Correctional Officer Daniel Escobar, "I murdered my cellie." He said he had told the floor officer five minutes earlier, but she had not believed him. Escobar notified Officer Kathleen Brown and Sergeant Courtois. He wrote a report, he said later, even after Sergeant Avery twice asked him not to, because he was the one who had called it in.
In a tape-recorded interview, Danks called the Los Angeles charges "fake" and said he had been given "a dumb deal for six life sentences, consecutive." He wanted to show "that I really finally did kill somebody," he said, "even if it was just an old man." He said he felt nothing afterward. Officers described him as excited and sweating.
Danks was charged in Kern County with first-degree murder and with assault by a prisoner serving a life sentence, with force likely to produce great bodily injury, resulting in death. Six prior-murder special circumstances were alleged, one for each Los Angeles conviction, which made him eligible for death.
He stayed at Tehachapi while the case was prepared, and the prison recorded a string of incidents. On November 12, 1991, officers found a sharpened plastic weapon hidden in his mattress. On January 23, 1992, as an officer removed his restraints, he stabbed another inmate, Renaldo Navarez, in the head with a piece of metal. Three days later he set fire to papers and newspapers in his cell. On April 17, 1992, officers found a homemade knife; Danks told them he had hidden others, and two more were found in his mattress. On May 12 officers found a razor blade, copper wire and a sharp metal weapon. On July 12 he knocked a cup of coffee from an officer's hand, burning the officer's leg, and struck him.
His lawyers, Mr. Eyherabide and Michael E. Dellostritto, sought continuances and psychiatric evaluations. Dr. Michael Coburn, consulted by the defense in 1991, thought Danks might be incompetent and recommended further evaluation. Danks objected to the delays. At a hearing on September 23, 1991, after a continuance was granted over his objection, he asked, "What about going pro. per.?" At a hearing in February 1992 on his request for new lawyers he said, "I want a trial. I want to defend myself and go pro. per.," but also said he would work with his attorneys. The trial court did not treat these remarks as a request to represent himself, and it said it had no doubt that he was competent to stand trial.
The case was tried in Kern County Superior Court as case number SC 44842. At the guilt phase the prosecution relied on Danks's own statements and the autopsy. The defense called Officer Brown, whose report had not mentioned Officer Escobar. The jury found Danks guilty of first-degree murder and of assault by a life prisoner resulting in death. In a separate proceeding it found true all six prior-murder special circumstances.
At some point in the proceedings Dellostritto was stabbed in the face. The date and the circumstances were not reported. What the record does preserve is that Danks, testifying in the penalty phase, asked why Dellostritto "got stabbed in his face" and said he would do the same to his other lawyer "if I had a chance," and that the Los Angeles Daily Journal later reported that Danks had threatened to stab Dellostritto, who went on to become a Kern County Superior Court judge.
The penalty trial set the two sides of Danks's history against each other. The prosecution presented the Los Angeles killings, the January 1987 statement to Detective Arce, the attack on McCully at Atascadero, the 1984 and 1985 drug convictions and the incidents at Tehachapi.
The defense presented his family and his doctors. His half brothers Michael and Peter Whyte, the housekeeper Dora Howard, Leroy Danks and Karen Walls described his childhood. Dr. Jackson, Peggy Walkowiak and Deputy Nick D'Angelo, who had watched him in the Los Angeles jail in 1987 cleaning his cell obsessively and insisting his food was poisoned, described his paranoia. A Tehachapi inmate, Daniel Grajeda, testified that guards taunted Danks with claims that his food had been contaminated.
Mental health experts testified on both sides. Dr. Eugene Kunzman diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia and antisocial personality disorder. Dr. Hill described his delusions at Atascadero. Dr. John Riley measured his IQ at 106 and said the schizophrenia was in remission with medication. Dr. William Wirshing said treatment reduces symptoms but does not cure the illness. Dr. White diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia. Dr. Robert Bittle, who examined him in 1992, diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia and a personality disorder, noted a cyst in his brain and possible mild brain dysfunction, and called him a "sadist." Hill and Bittle both said he would remain extremely dangerous even with treatment. For the prosecution, Dr. Theodore Badgley found antisocial personality disorder but no schizophrenia and no organic brain damage, and suggested that some of Danks's behavior might be an act.
Danks also testified. He said he would have pleaded guilty "the very first day" and that "I would not change a thing that I did in my life." He said that even if he were released, "I ain't going to stop," and told the courtroom that he "would do it to you too." He called himself "a slime ball, a grease ball, a scum bag," said he was "born a bastard," and denied that he was insane, saying he could read, write and handle his own affairs. "I did stab them bums in their back," he said.
The jury returned a verdict of death on both counts on February 9, 1993, at 3:20 p.m.
Within weeks the defense learned what had happened in the jury room. A defense investigator, Pat McGregor, contacted one juror, identified in court papers as K.A., on March 9, 1993, and she met McGregor and Eyherabide the next day. Her husband had shown her a passage from the Book of Numbers, chapter 35, and she had photocopied two pages of her study Bible, highlighted the verses and passed the copy around during penalty deliberations. She had also spoken with her pastor. A second juror, B.P., had asked her pastor whether anything in the Bible spoke against the death penalty; she said she had already made up her mind, and the pastor told her that in her place he would not hesitate to vote for death, though he was not sure which case she was sitting on. The defense moved for a new trial on March 15, 1993. The trial court denied it.
CDCR records give April 2, 1993, as the date of the death sentence.
His appeal went automatically to the California Supreme Court, which decided People v. Danks on February 2, 2004 (32 Cal.4th 269). Justice Brown wrote the majority opinion, which affirmed both the conviction and the death sentence.
The court found that both jurors had committed misconduct, by bringing the Bible passage into the jury room and by speaking with their pastors. But it held that the misconduct was not prejudicial. The passage, it said, was not "inherently and substantially likely" to have biased the juror, the pastors' remarks were not shown to have biased the jurors, and no one in the jury room had argued that Danks should die because of the Bible. The majority relied on the strength of the penalty evidence.
The court rejected his claim that he had been denied the right to represent himself, finding that his remarks were equivocal and "born primarily of frustration" over his lawyers' requests for delay. It assumed that his claim about the 1987 interview with Arce, in which he said police ignored his request for a lawyer, could be raised, and found any error harmless, since he did not challenge the Los Angeles convictions and had himself testified that he stabbed the men. It also held that each of the six prior murder convictions could be charged as a separate special circumstance.
Justices Kennard and Moreno each wrote opinions concurring in part and dissenting. Justice Moreno concluded that the two jurors had been actually biased; the majority answered that his opinion rested on misstatements of the record and speculation. The United States Supreme Court denied review later in 2004.
Danks filed his first habeas petition in the California Supreme Court in December 2003, raising 32 claims. The court denied it on September 15, 2010.
In February 2011 he opened a federal habeas case in the Eastern District of California, and the Habeas Corpus Resource Center was appointed to represent him. That July, after Danks threatened a female correctional officer, the corrections department sought an order to give him antipsychotic medication against his will; an administrative judge granted it on September 1, 2011. The department's psychiatrist diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia and antisocial personality disorder and described long-standing delusions about conspiracies by the government, the media and the prison, along with a refusal to engage with treatment.
His lawyers used that evidence, and the United States Supreme Court's 2011 decision in Brown v. Plata on California's prison mental health care, to argue that Holt's death was a foreseeable result of the state's failure to treat him. The state had conceded that Danks has suffered from a serious psychotic illness since adolescence and that medication can control it. On October 14, 2011, Judge Lawrence J. O'Neill found that the new evidence was not merely repetitive, but said Danks had exaggerated the state's concession, which was not an admission that inadequate medication caused the killing. The judge dismissed as premature a claim that Danks is incompetent to be executed, since no execution date had been set, and put most of the remaining claims on hold while Danks returned to state court.
His second state petition, filed in September 2011, was sent to the Kern County Superior Court in 2019 and denied on September 10, 2021. The Court of Appeal and the California Supreme Court declined to take it further, and on October 3, 2022, the United States Supreme Court denied review of his question whether the Eighth Amendment bars executing a seriously mentally ill prisoner whose violence was a foreseeable product of his illness and the state's failure to treat it.
The federal case then resumed. Briefing has been extended repeatedly. On August 28, 2026, the court refused an unopposed request for a further twelve months, finding no adequate explanation for that much delay, and ordered a new status report by December 31, 2026.
On March 13, 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order imposing a moratorium on executions in California. It gave a reprieve to everyone sentenced to death, repealed the lethal injection protocol and closed the execution chamber at San Quentin, but did not change any conviction or sentence. California's last execution had been in 2006.
Proposition 66, approved by voters in 2016, allowed the state to move condemned prisoners out of San Quentin to other secure prisons. After a pilot program, permanent rules took effect in January 2024, and transfers began on February 26, 2024, to two dozen prisons with electrified fences, where condemned men live among other prisoners under close custody. Whether or where Danks was moved has not been reported.
Danks remains under sentence of death. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation lists him on its condemned inmate list, updated October 2, 2026, with a sentence date of April 2, 1993, Kern County as the trial county and an age of 64. He does not appear on the department's list of condemned prisoners who have died. In his federal habeas case, as of August 2026, the respondent is the warden of San Quentin Rehabilitation Center.
Santa Monica killing. Some later accounts say police could not confirm the Christmas 1986 killing in Santa Monica. The 1987 charges listed Edwin Trujillo, killed on December 24, among the six murder victims, and in 1988 the prosecution described the Santa Monica killing as the first of the six. On the charging and plea record, the Santa Monica killing stands as one of the six.
Further crimes. In January 1987 police were investigating at least one more killing and one more attempted killing that Danks had mentioned. No charge from that inquiry has been reported.
The date of the Los Angeles convictions. United Press International reported the guilty plea in December 1988, with sentencing set for December 23, 1988. The 2004 opinion refers to the convictions as 1990 convictions and describes a finding of incompetence on the Los Angeles allegations in 1989. The record does not explain how these fit together.
The date of Holt's death. CDCR gives the offense date as September 20, 1990; the courts place Danks's report of the killing at about 1 a.m. on September 21, and the federal court put the killing itself between midnight and 1 a.m. that day.
Mental illness. The defense experts in 1993 and the state's own psychiatrist in 2011 diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia; the prosecution's expert in 1993 did not. Whether his illness should bar his execution has never been decided, because no execution date has been set.
1962: Born in Bay City, Michigan.
1966: Adopted by Leroy Danks, who leaves the family in December 1970.
1979 to 1982: Hitchhikes for long periods; arrested in Mexico at 16.
October 1982: Involuntarily committed in Michigan after an incident at a New Jersey school.
1984 and 1985: Felony drug convictions.
September 1986: Placed on probation in Michigan; absconds within two weeks.
December 24, 1986: Edwin Trujillo killed in Santa Monica.
January 6, 1987: Christopher Forsblade, 40, killed.
January 14, 1987: Isaac Davis, 58, and John C. Coble, 55, killed.
January 16, 1987: An unidentified man killed.
January 20, 1987: An unidentified man killed; Danks arrested and confesses on tape.
January 1987 (Thursday after the arrest): Charged with six murders and two attempted murders; pleads not guilty.
December 1988: Pleads guilty to six murders during jury selection; death penalty removed.
June 1989 to March 1990: Atascadero State Hospital; attacks a patient on November 19, 1989.
August 23, 1990: Received at Tehachapi, serving 156 years to life.
September 20 to 21, 1990: Strangles cellmate Walter Holt, 67.
1991 to 1992: Further assaults and weapons found in his cell.
February 9, 1993: Kern County jury returns death verdict.
April 2, 1993: Sentence date of the death judgment (CDCR).
February 2, 2004: California Supreme Court affirms (People v. Danks).
September 15, 2010: First state habeas petition denied.
February 2011: Federal habeas case opened.
September 1, 2011: Involuntary medication order granted.
March 13, 2019: Governor Newsom's execution moratorium.
September 10, 2021: Second state habeas petition denied.
October 3, 2022: U.S. Supreme Court denies review.
February 26, 2024: CDCR begins moving condemned men out of San Quentin.
August 28, 2026: Federal court orders new status report by December 31, 2026.
October 2, 2026: Listed on CDCR condemned inmate list.