In the American River "jungles," the undeveloped ground near Sacramento where migratory workers camped, Lloyd Gomez stole two cans of beer from another man living there, Warren Hood Cunningham. On November 11, 1950, Cunningham caught up with him, accused him of the theft and brandished two knives. Gomez ran, and Cunningham gave up the chase. Cunningham died soon afterward, and a man camping nearby, John Kapusta, was the one witness to the killing. For fourteen months nobody connected Gomez to it.
He was born on December 6, 1923, in Caliente, Nevada, to Native American and Mexican parents. His mother died when he was very young. He left home in 1939 with little schooling and spent the rest of his life poor, working the crops as an itinerant farm hand when there was work, sleeping rough when there was not, and in and out of jails. He sometimes used the name Harry Jenks.
On January 15, 1952, after he had escaped from a county road camp, Sacramento police arrested him. He then confessed to killing nine men between 1950 and 1951, all of them middle-aged transients in the camps along the rivers and rail lines of northern California. He said he had taken a total of $62.26 from them. Most were beaten to death with a rock, a board or a bottle as they slept. One, found about a hundred yards from the rail yards near Stockton in 1951, was clubbed with a rock and a plank in the tall grass and robbed of $20 from his coat; he has never been identified, and neither have Gomez's first and eighth victims. "Murdered Nine Men For $62, Vagrant Admits," the Madera Tribune reported on January 25.
Sacramento County tried him for one death, Warren Cunningham's. He pleaded not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity. The defense had evidence of very low intelligence, an IQ reported as 61, and a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and before trial his lawyers, Peter Mannino and C. K. Curtright, tried to have proceedings suspended over his sanity. In June 1952 the jury convicted him of first-degree murder and fixed the penalty at death, and then found that he had been sane when he killed. On June 19, 1953, the California Supreme Court affirmed.
Those who wrote about him afterward described a man worn down to nothing, who had come to hate being alive and treated his confession as a way to end it. He walked to the gas chamber at San Quentin on the morning of October 16, 1953, composed and without visible emotion, the same calm he had shown at his trial, and was pronounced dead at 10:12. He was twenty-nine. Six hundred and thirty days had passed since he confessed.
The press called him the Phantom Hobo Killer. Only one of the nine killings he described was ever tried, and several of the men he said he killed have never been named.