On May 7, 1984, Mauricio Rodriguez Silva walked out of Soledad State Prison after serving five years and two months for killing a man. Three weeks later, on May 28, he walked into the sheriff's station in Templeton, on the Central Coast, told the two deputies on duty that he was wanted for murder, and said he wanted to turn himself in. They checked and found a warrant for him. In his truck they found a loaded sawed-off shotgun and a knife. In the three weeks between those two days, three teenagers had died.
He had been born in Los Angeles on October 25, 1959, the elder of two sons of David Acosta Silva, an itinerant laborer from Chihuahua, and his Nicaraguan wife, Myrne Rodríguez, who had gigantism and unspecified mental problems. He inherited her condition, which left him at around seven feet tall and more than three hundred pounds, and he was born with a cleft palate and other defects. His father, a womanizer, left the family and was later killed by a co-worker in Alaska. His mother then left both boys with their grandmother in Mexico City while she had an affair with her employer, and had a daughter by him, Martha Kitzler. She died in a car accident in 1972.
The court records describe the grandmother's neglect. She locked the boys out of the house, and at one point they lived for days on a pumpkin and ended up in the hospital with stomach infections. Silva ran away and joined a gang of homeless children, sniffing glue and eating out of the garbage, and he later said he had seen friends sexually abused by older men and was too afraid to tell anyone. He spent the rest of his teens moving between foster homes in the United States and Mexico. He could not write and had trouble getting along with people. His cleft palate was repaired at White Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles.
In 1978, at eighteen, he argued with an acquaintance, Troy Allison Covella, also eighteen, pulled out a gun and shot him nine times. Charged with murder, he took a plea to voluntary manslaughter, and it was for that killing that he served his time at Soledad.
When he was paroled he moved into his half sister's house in Hollywood, where she lived with their uncle, Carlos Rodriguez, and his wife and two children. On May 18 he met Walter P. Sanders, a sixteen-year-old runaway from Lompoc, on a bus; he shot him five times with a shotgun in the Mojave Desert and left his body in the Antelope Valley. Six days later he picked up Monique Michelle Hilton, sixteen, at a bus stop on Santa Monica Boulevard. She was a runaway from Illinois who had hitchhiked to Hollywood hoping to meet Michael Jackson. He shot her twice and left her near the Palmdale airport.
Martha Kitzler was seventeen. She had $2,700 under her mattress, the money from selling her car, and she had told her uncle that her half brother was jealous of her boyfriend, Flavio Alvarez. On the morning of Monday, May 28, the uncle asked Silva to leave, because he did not want him in the house with Martha and his wife. Silva was gone by eleven, and by noon everyone had left except Martha. He came back. He strangled her, stabbed her eight times and cut her throat, and the $2,700 was gone. A warrant went out for him once her body was found, and it was that warrant the deputies in Templeton found.
He pleaded not guilty to all three murders. His lawyer offered a plea to life without parole, and the district attorney's office, through the prosecutor Lonnie Felker, turned it down. In April 1985 the jury convicted him of two counts of first degree murder with the multiple-murder special circumstance and one of second degree murder, but it could not agree on a penalty after the defense set out his childhood, and a mistrial was declared on penalty. A new jury heard the penalty case in 1986. The prosecution added that he might have raped Kitzler and that he had told the arresting officers he wanted to plead guilty and be sentenced to death to get it over with. The second jury returned a verdict of death, and he was sentenced on August 11, 1986.
On April 30, 2001, in People v. Silva, the California Supreme Court upheld the convictions and the special circumstance but set the death sentence aside because the prosecution had wrongly excused a Latino juror, identified as Jose M.; Felker said he had struck the man as aggressive and likely to favor life without parole. The death sentence was later reinstated. Silva is on California's death row, where no execution has been carried out since 2006, and he has argued that life without parole would be the harsher punishment. He has said he wants young people to speak up about sexual abuse.