On the morning of June 18, 1986 Morris Solomon Jr unlocked the front door of an abandoned duplex on Fourth Avenue in Oak Park, went inside, and came back out shouting that he had found a corpse. He had been the only worker on the building since May and the only person with keys, and the owner had arranged to meet him there that morning to go over the job. Officers answering the 911 call found Yolanda Johnson in the closet of the upstairs apartment. She was twenty-two and had been missing for three days. There were ligature marks on her neck and wrists, and the way she lay suggested her hands had been tied behind her back and the binding pulled off.
Police questioned him at the scene. He gave his name as Ernest Carl Padilla, which was his brother's, and said he did not recognize the dead woman. When a television reporter asked whether she was a prostitute, as people in the crowd were saying, he answered that it would not be right to call her a working girl. That night he gave his real name, explained he had lied because of outstanding warrants, and admitted he had known her as Yo Yo, had once paid her for sex in a camper outside his house, and that she had stolen twenty dollars from him. Johnson's mother told police her daughter had seen him in the houses he was renovating. He gave fingerprints and a blood sample, and blood grouping showed he could have been the source of semen on her body. He was not arrested.
A month later, on July 20, Angela Polidore was found. She was twenty-five, bound and partially nude.
Solomon was a familiar figure in Oak Park. He liked the company of the women who worked the streets there, socially and sexually; some of them thought of him as a gentle friend who gave them money and a safe place to sleep when they needed one, and some had found him rough. He called women generally, and prostitutes in particular, bitches, whores and tramps. Around the time of the first deaths he had a short affair with a woman named Rosella Fuller, who moved into his house with a crack habit that cost two hundred dollars a day, and the drug habit he took up with her ruined him.
He moved often, and the moves are the map of the case. In November 1985 he was hired to remodel a fire-damaged house on Broadway and lived in it until he was evicted for unpaid rent on June 18, 1986, the day he reported Johnson's body. In August he rented the master bedroom of a house on 19th Avenue, until he and the others there were evicted on October 23. He then lived out of his car near a job site for several months, and on December 15 moved with a friend into a vacant house on 44th Street, across the road from his mother, until the end of February 1987.
On March 19, 1987 workers digging a ditch in the back yard on 19th Avenue uncovered Maria Apodaca. She was eighteen, a heroin addict who had last been seen alive on September 8, when she was released after a prostitution arrest. She lay about three feet down under a sheet of plywood, bound in a fetal position with a cloth belt holding her wrists behind her knees, wrapped in a bed sheet inside black plastic. The next day, asked by police where he had lived, Solomon left the 19th Avenue house off the list.
On April 20 Detective Pane came to his job site to question him again, and Solomon agreed to let officers search a Ford Maverick he had abandoned outside the house on 44th Street. While they searched it they noticed a depression in the back yard. Cherie Washington was in a shallow grave beneath it. She was twenty-six and had last been seen on February 6. Neighbors remembered her standing at the front door of that house, and one said Solomon had introduced her in his living room before she followed him into his bedroom. The court record describes her as a rock cocaine addict who sometimes sold sex to pay for it; her husband told reporters at the time that he would have known if she had been a prostitute, though he did not deny her drug problem.
Two days later, on April 22, police dug up the back yard on Broadway and found two more women. Linda Vitela, twenty-four, had last been seen in February 1986 and had been dead about a year; she was clothed and wrapped in a blanket tied with electrical wire. Sheila Jacox, seventeen, had been missing since March 20, 1986. She was wrapped in bedding bound with duct tape, and more tape held a balled-up sock in her mouth. A neighbor told police she had seen Solomon digging in five places in that yard, and that he told her he was working on a sewer line and planting a garden. He was arrested that day. Asked how many people he had murdered, he answered, "None. None. N-O-N-E, sir."
On April 28 police went back to the 19th Avenue yard and found Sharon Massey, twenty-nine, who had last been heard from on September 14 (some accounts date the discovery April 29). She had worked at a hospital clinic. Her body was wrapped in a sheet and a bedspread, her legs and ankles tied with a severed electrical cord and her wrists with a braided strap, a stereo speaker cable around her neck and two socks in her mouth, one forced deep into her throat.
In every case decomposition kept the pathologists from fixing a cause of death, but asphyxia was possible in each. Nearly all the women had been bound, and all had used drugs. Two living women came forward after his arrest, and they explained the bindings. Melissa H. said that in early June 1986 he seized her in the vacant apartment where she took clients, held a knife on her, beat her with his fist and a table leg, tied her wrists behind her back, raped and sodomized her, stuffed a sock in her mouth, and tied her feet to the bed with an electrical cord that ran up her body and around her neck. He held her for about five hours and ran when her boyfriend began pounding on the doors. Sherry H. said that in October 1986 he took her to the 19th Avenue house and tried to strangle her from behind with a shoestring; she got her fingers under it.
The prosecution's case was circumstantial. DNA testing was too young to help, but all but one of the women had been found at a house where he had lived or worked. His palm print was on the closet door where Johnson lay. An acquaintance, Vernell Dodson, testified that in March 1986 Solomon watched Johnson walk past and said he was going to kill her over the theft of his stereo equipment. Housemates said the sheet around Apodaca came from his bed and that he had dug in the yard on 19th Avenue. He denied knowing Apodaca or Washington, and his accounts of where he had dug changed from one interview to the next.
He was charged with seven murders. The jury convicted him of six: the first-degree murders of Johnson, Apodaca, Jacox and Massey, and the second-degree murders of Washington and Vitela, with a multiple-murder special circumstance and the sexual assaults on the two survivors. The Polidore count ended without a conviction; published accounts say it was dropped.
The jury deadlocked on penalty and Judge Virga declared a mistrial. A new jury, before Judge Mering, heard the prosecution's case again, and then evidence of what he had done before Oak Park. Mary K. was eighteen and working the street in Oakland when, on September 19, 1969, he cut her thigh with a curved knife; the wound took twenty-three stitches. On January 12, 1971 he forced Virginia J. into his car on MacArthur Boulevard in Oakland at gunpoint and raped her in the hills. On May 17, 1971 he picked up Dale W., a junior college student hitching home from Berkeley, drove her to a dirt road and kicked her in the face when she ran; he was convicted of assault to commit rape. On October 18, 1975, in a trailer in San Jose, he choked Connie S. unconscious with a chain, bound her and raped her through the night; he was convicted two years later of aggravated assault and false imprisonment.
On December 6, 1976 he choked eighteen-year-old Darlene G. unconscious on Stockton Boulevard in Sacramento, dragged her to a house, and kept her tied in a closet overnight. She burned through the bindings at a gas stove and escaped with a knife. He was convicted in April 1977 of assault with intent to rape and false imprisonment and sent to San Quentin, where he became lead inmate in the furniture factory, drove a forklift in the detergent plant, and was rated excellent by his supervisor. He was paroled in 1980. He had also been charged with the rape and murder of a masseuse near San Jose and acquitted when a witness failed to appear, and had been held in a state hospital as a mentally disordered sex offender and released as no longer dangerous. In 1984 he was convicted of three counts of grand theft in Arizona.
The defense, led by Peter P. Vlautin III and Constance Gutowsky, called eighteen witnesses over seven days. Solomon was born on March 15, 1944 in rural Georgia, at Albany by one account. In 1945 his parents moved in with his grandmother Bertha and then left, leaving him and his older brother behind. Bertha beat the boys daily, for wetting themselves, for mispronouncing words, for crying while she beat them. She made him strip and stand on a stool in the corner while she whipped his bare body, genitals included, with an electrical cord or switches he had to cut and bring to her, sometimes until he bled, and once tied his hands around a bedpost with an extension cord so that he could not back away.
He saw little of his parents until he was thirteen, when the family moved to Isleton, a farming town forty miles from Sacramento, into a poor section known as Cannery Row or Tinpan Alley, one of a handful of Black families there. His parents beat and sexually assaulted each other in front of him. School friends remembered an average student who played in the marching band and ran track, gentle and outgoing, who never invited anyone home. He went to community college and worked as a carpenter, a mechanic and a bus driver.
He served a year in Vietnam from the summer of 1966, running convoys between his camp and fire bases toward the Cambodian border. His platoon sergeant, Carrol Crouse, testified that Solomon saved his life during a mortar attack, and another soldier that he risked his life to pull four injured men from a tank that had hit a mine. Both said prostitutes were cheap and everywhere, and that he used them. He came home to Isleton in 1967 distant and short-tempered, and ducked at loud noises. A fiancee broke off their engagement; he moved to the Bay Area, married, had a daughter, divorced, and eventually came back to Sacramento. The psychologists Brad Fisher and John P. Wilson told the jury the childhood abuse, compounded by the war and by cocaine, drove the crimes. The second jury voted unanimously for death in July 1992.
He was sentenced on September 16, 1992, the three hundred and forty-second person condemned in California, and the California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment on July 15, 2010. He denied all of the killings and never stopped denying them.
On August 1, 2024, medical staff pronounced him dead in his cell at the California Health Care Facility at Stockton. He was eighty. He had been on condemned status for thirty-one years and eleven months, and at the time of his death there were six hundred and thirty-three people in California prisons under sentence of death.