Between June 1986 and April 1987, seven women were found dead in Sacramento, most of them in the Oak Park area. Police came to focus on Morris Solomon Jr, a carpenter and handyman who was well known in Oak Park. He was questioned after the first death, gave a false name, and was released. He was not arrested until April 22, 1987.
A Sacramento jury convicted him of six murders, four of first degree and two of second degree, and of sexual assaults on two women who survived. It could not agree on the seventh death, that of Angela Polidore, and that count was later dismissed. The first penalty jury also deadlocked. A second jury, hearing the case again in 1992, returned a death verdict, and the California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment in July 2010. Solomon never admitted any of the killings. He died in August 2024, at 80, still under sentence of death.
Solomon's early life was laid out by the defense at his penalty retrial and summarized by the California Supreme Court. He was an infant in 1945, when his parents moved in with his grandmother, Bertha, in rural Georgia. At some point the parents moved away and left him and his older brother behind. For roughly the first 13 years of his life he had little contact with them.
Relatives described a frightening childhood. Bertha beat the children every day, for wetting themselves, for mispronouncing words, or for crying. She made the boy strip and stand on a stool while she beat him with an electrical cord or with switches, sometimes until he bled, and once tied his hands to a bed post with an extension cord.
He rejoined his parents when the family moved to Isleton, a small farming town about 40 miles from Sacramento. They lived in a poor, run-down section known as Cannery Row or Tinpan Alley, among a handful of Black families. His parents fought and assaulted each other in front of him, and his mother and grandmother beat him and abused him verbally, sometimes in public.
At Isleton's high school, former classmates remembered him as outgoing and gentle. He could be pesty and sometimes acted inappropriately toward girls, they said, but he was never violent. He was an average student who played in the marching band and ran track. He never talked about his parents, though his friends knew that his mother and grandmother were hard on him. He went on to community college and worked as a carpenter, a car repairman and a bus driver. Witnesses described him as generous, a man who bought women presents.
Solomon served a year in Vietnam, from the summer of 1966 to the summer of 1967. His platoon sergeant testified that Solomon ran convoys near the Cambodian border, where mines and gunfire were constant, and that he saved the sergeant's life during a mortar attack. A fellow infantryman testified that Solomon risked his life to rescue four soldiers hurt when their tank struck a land mine. Both men described him as brave and trustworthy.
He came home changed. Witnesses said he was distant, untruthful and ill-tempered, and that he ducked at loud noises. He had been engaged to a woman he had known before the war; she broke off the engagement, and he moved to the Bay Area. He later married another woman, had a daughter, divorced, and in time returned to Sacramento.
By the time he came back to Sacramento, Solomon had a long record of violence against women. The prosecution laid it out at the penalty retrial.
In 1969, in Oakland, he injured a woman during a dispute over money. In 1971 a woman testified that he had assaulted her in Oakland, and that same year he attacked another young woman near Berkeley, a case in which he was convicted. In 1975, in San Jose, he was convicted of aggravated assault and false imprisonment over an attack on a woman. In April 1977, over an attack on a woman in Sacramento the year before, he was convicted of false imprisonment, with other charges, and sent to San Quentin.
There he did well. He was lead inmate in the prison furniture factory and drove a forklift in a detergent plant, and his supervisors rated his attitude and work habits as excellent. In 1984 he was convicted of three counts of grand theft in Arizona. Few people in Oak Park knew he had already been to prison twice for attacks on women, the Sacramento News and Review later wrote.
Back in Sacramento, Solomon remodeled houses and moved often. He was evicted twice in 1986, in June and in October, and for a time afterward he lived in his car.
Witnesses told the jury he was a familiar figure in Oak Park and spent much of his time with the women he would later be accused of attacking. Some of them considered him a generous friend. Others said he could be rough with the women he "dated," and he spoke of women in demeaning terms. Around the time of the earliest deaths he had a brief affair with a woman who moved in with him, bringing a serious crack habit. The relationship led him into a costly cocaine habit of his own that ruined him financially.
The seven women whose deaths were charged were young. The California Supreme Court, summing up the trial record, said all of them had used drugs, and in upholding the verdicts it relied in part on what they had in common.
Linda Vitela was 24. She was last seen alive in February 1986.
Sheila Jacox was 17. She had been missing since March 20, 1986.
Yolanda Johnson was 22. Friends knew her as "Yo Yo." She had been missing for about three days when she was found on June 18, 1986.
Angela Polidore was found on July 20, 1986.
Maria Apodaca was 18. She was last known to be alive on September 8, 1986, when she was released from custody after an arrest.
Sharon Massey was 29. She worked at a hospital clinic. She was last heard from on September 14, 1986.
Cherie Washington was 26. She was last seen alive on February 6, 1987.
On June 18, 1986, Yolanda Johnson was found dead in Oak Park. Solomon was questioned the same day.
The day before, he had told several people he was looking for her. A woman who lived with him later testified that he had been out searching for Johnson that day, and she first told Detective Pane that he had said he would beat her, a remark she later described differently.
Solomon first gave police his brother's name and said he did not recognize the dead woman, and during the day he gave differing accounts of when he had last seen her. In the evening he gave his real name, explaining that he had used his brother's because of outstanding warrants, and went to the police station for a taped interview. He said he knew Johnson as "Yo Yo," that he had once "dated" her, and that she had once stolen $20 from him. He said he had no idea how she had died.
Johnson's mother told police that her daughter had told her she had spent time with Solomon in the houses he was renovating. Over the following days Solomon gave fingerprints and a blood sample and spoke to police several times by phone. Blood grouping tests on evidence from the Johnson investigation did not rule him out. No cause of death could be determined. Solomon was not arrested.
A month later, on July 20, 1986, Angela Polidore was found dead in Sacramento.
Solomon remained free through the rest of 1986 and into 1987, though the Sacramento News and Review later wrote that he had been under intense scrutiny from the time the first woman was found. He attacked one woman in October 1986, and another woman said he attacked her in February 1987.
On March 19, 1987, Maria Apodaca was found dead in Sacramento. The next day, March 20, detectives asked Solomon where he had lived. He left one former address off his list and admitted living there only when asked directly, and he claimed, falsely, to have moved out in September 1986. He told police he did not know Apodaca and had never seen her.
On April 20, 1987, Detective Pane questioned Solomon again about Apodaca. That day Cherie Washington was found dead in Sacramento. Solomon denied killing anyone.
Two days later, on April 22, 1987, Linda Vitela and Sheila Jacox were found dead in Sacramento.
Solomon was arrested that day. Through a long interview he kept denying any part in the deaths. Asked how many people he had murdered, he answered that he had murdered none. Asked a second, narrower question, he again said none. Yet the detectives found his accounts full of contradictions. He said Johnson had often visited him and had stolen an expensive ring from him, which he said did not anger him. Police learned that he had once told an acquaintance, as Johnson walked past, that he was "going to kill that bitch" over her part in the theft of his stereo equipment. A palm print recovered in the Johnson investigation matched his, and his explanation of it contradicted what he had said earlier. Other parts of his account also changed from one interview to the next.
On April 28, 1987, Sharon Massey was found dead in Sacramento.
In none of the six deaths for which Solomon was convicted could a cause of death be determined.
The prosecution's case against Solomon was circumstantial. Prosecutors relied on his links to the women, his changing statements to police, and witness testimony. Former housemates said Apodaca had visited him several times. A neighbor testified that Solomon had introduced her to Cherie Washington, though he told police he had never seen Washington. Another witness said he had seen Apodaca with Solomon.
The acquaintance who described the threat against Johnson testified that it was made around March 1986, months before her death. He had not gone to police until a year after Johnson died, when he was himself in prison for a parole violation. The defense presented no evidence at the guilt phase.
The jury found Solomon guilty of the first degree murders of Yolanda Johnson, Maria Apodaca, Sheila Jacox and Sharon Massey, and of the second degree murders of Cherie Washington and Linda Vitela. It found the multiple-murder special circumstance true, which made him eligible for the death penalty, and found him guilty of sexually assaulting the two surviving women attacked in June and October 1986. On the murder of Angela Polidore, the jury deadlocked; the court declared a mistrial on that count, and the charge was eventually dismissed. The jury also deadlocked on the attempted murder and assault counts involving the woman attacked in February 1987, and those counts were later dismissed. For the noncapital crimes he received 30 years to life for the second degree murders and a determinate term of 55 years, plus 10 years for two serious felony priors, on the sexual assault counts.
The first penalty jury could not agree, and Judge Virga declared a mistrial. A second jury was chosen for a penalty retrial before Judge Mering in 1992. The prosecution presented the circumstances of the six murders again, much as at the guilt trial, and added the evidence of Solomon's earlier crimes against women in Oakland, Berkeley, San Jose and Sacramento.
The defense called 18 witnesses over seven days. Its theme was that his crimes came from a psychopathology rooted in childhood abuse and made worse by Vietnam and by cocaine. Relatives described the beatings in Georgia and Isleton; classmates described the gentle teenager in the marching band; the platoon sergeant and the infantryman described the soldier. Brad Fisher, a clinical forensic psychologist, and John Wilson, a specialist in stress and trauma, testified that the abuse he suffered as a child had produced the disorder that drove his crimes, and that in his assaults he was reenacting that abuse, with his victims standing in for his grandmother. Leon Marder, a specialist in addiction medicine, testified that cocaine heightened violence and paranoia in people already prone to violence.
The second jury returned a verdict of death. Solomon was taken from Sacramento County into state prison on September 23, 1992, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The Sacramento News and Review reported that he was the 342nd person sentenced to death in California, and he was held on death row at San Quentin.
Because the sentence was death, the case went directly to the California Supreme Court on automatic appeal. On July 15, 2010, the court affirmed the judgment.
Solomon argued that there was not enough evidence of premeditation to support the four first degree murder verdicts. The court disagreed. It found that the victims' shared circumstances, together with his stated contempt for women like them, gave him a motive to harm and kill them, and that the evidence of how the women had died and the number of similar killings supported an inference of a preconceived plan. The question on appeal, the court said, was whether the evidence reasonably supported the verdicts, not whether it could also support another conclusion.
He challenged the use of a taped exchange from his interrogation in which he said he "talk[s] shit" to women and, when pressed, accepted that the detective could assume he had lied. The court held that he had forfeited the claim by not making a specific objection at trial, and that in any case no reasonable juror would have taken the exchange as an admission of guilt. It rejected a series of challenges to the jury instructions on circumstantial evidence, motive, false testimony, note-taking and the defense's duty to present evidence, and found that the prosecutor's closing argument on premeditation stated the law correctly.
On the penalty retrial, he argued that two prospective jurors had been wrongly excused because of their views on the death penalty. One had believed the sentence was carried out in the electric chair; at the time of the 1992 retrial, California used lethal gas. The court found that both women's answers, and in one case her long pauses, supported the trial judge's finding that they could not fairly consider a death verdict. It also upheld the judge's limits on questioning prospective jurors about his earlier assaults, his prior prison term and the condition of the victims' bodies, noting that the jurors had been told of the six murders and two sexual assaults and asked about pretrial publicity and autopsy photographs.
Solomon spent the rest of his life under sentence of death. In the summer of 2024, The Epoch Times reported, he was hospitalized after what the department described as a physical altercation with a fellow prisoner, and he returned to the prison on July 29.
Solomon died in custody at the California Health Care Facility in Stockton on August 1, 2024, aged 80. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced the death the next day and said the Office of the Inspector General had been notified. The San Joaquin County Coroner was to determine the cause of death, which had not been made public in August 2024. At the time, the department said 632 people in California were under sentence of death.
A former corrections lieutenant told The Epoch Times that the department's announcement that Solomon had "passed away" was an attempt to play down violence in the prison, and that its internal system listed the death as natural; the newspaper said it could not verify that claim.
Angela Polidore's death was charged against Solomon, but the jury could not reach a verdict and the count was dismissed. He was never convicted of it.
The attack on a woman in February 1987 was also charged and also ended in a deadlocked jury and dismissal.
John Cabrera, a retired Sacramento police detective who worked the case, told The Epoch Times in 2024 that he believed at least four other missing young women might be linked to Solomon. No charges were brought over any other death.
Solomon denied every one of the killings, from his first interviews in 1986 to his death in prison in 2024.
1945: Solomon, an infant, is living in rural Georgia with his parents and grandmother; his parents later leave him in her care.
Early teens: rejoins his parents in Isleton, California.
Summer 1966 to summer 1967: serves a year in Vietnam.
1969 to 1976: a series of attacks on women in Oakland, Berkeley, San Jose and Sacramento.
April 1977: convicted of false imprisonment, with other charges, and sent to San Quentin.
1984: convicted of three counts of grand theft in Arizona.
About November 1985: living and working in Oak Park, Sacramento.
February 1986: Linda Vitela, 24, is last seen alive.
March 20, 1986: Sheila Jacox, 17, goes missing.
Early June 1986: attack on the first surviving woman.
June 18, 1986: Yolanda Johnson, 22, is found dead in Oak Park; Solomon gives a false name and is questioned but not arrested.
July 20, 1986: Angela Polidore is found dead in Sacramento.
September 8, 1986: Maria Apodaca, 18, is last known alive.
September 14, 1986: Sharon Massey, 29, is last heard from.
October 1986: attack on the second surviving woman.
February 1987: attack on a third woman (charges later dismissed).
February 6, 1987: Cherie Washington, 26, is last seen alive.
March 19, 1987: Apodaca is found dead in Sacramento.
March 20, 1987: Solomon leaves one former address off his list of residences.
April 20, 1987: Washington is found dead in Sacramento.
April 22, 1987: Vitela and Jacox are found dead in Sacramento; Solomon is arrested.
April 28, 1987: Massey is found dead in Sacramento.
Guilt trial: convicted of four first degree and two second degree murders and two sexual assaults; jury deadlocks on the Polidore count, later dismissed.
First penalty trial: jury deadlocks; Judge Virga declares a mistrial.
1992: second penalty jury, before Judge Mering, returns a death verdict.
September 23, 1992: taken into state prison from Sacramento County.
July 15, 2010: California Supreme Court affirms the judgment.
Summer 2024: hospitalized after an altercation with another prisoner.
August 1, 2024: dies in custody at the California Health Care Facility in Stockton, aged 80.