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California Executes Robert Lee Massie, the Killer Who Spent 30 Years Asking to Die

Massie, 59, sentenced to death three times for murders in 1965 and 1979, dropped his appeals and was put to death at San Quentin for killing Boris Naumoff.

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Illustration of a prison visitor gate under an overcast sky. Not an actual scene from the case.

For more than thirty years Robert Lee Massie asked the State of California to execute him. Early on Tuesday, March 27, 2001, it did.

Massie, 59, was put to death by lethal injection at San Quentin State Prison and pronounced dead at 12:33 a.m., after more years on San Quentin's death row than any other condemned man then held there. He had dropped his appeals, and a federal judge had found him competent to do so. Asked by Warden Jeanne Woodford one last time whether he wanted to go ahead, he said yes, and then gave his final words: "Forgiveness: Giving up all hope for a better past."

He had killed twice. On January 7, 1965, Massie shot Mildred Weiss, 48, a mother of two, outside her San Gabriel home during a botched robbery. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to death, and by 1967 he had ordered his last meal before Gov. Ronald Reagan stayed the execution so that he could testify against an alleged accomplice. In the years that followed he became known in the press as the "Prisoner Who Wants to Die." When the U.S. Supreme Court barred executions in 1972, his sentence was commuted, and in the summer of 1978 the parole board let him go. On January 3, 1979, only months after his release, he shot and killed Boris Naumoff, 61, in the San Francisco liquor store Naumoff owned. A clerk was wounded.

Massie pleaded guilty again and was again sentenced to death, but the California Supreme Court overturned that conviction because he had pleaded against his lawyer's advice. He was convicted of the murder a third time in 1989, and the state Supreme Court upheld the death sentence in 1998. In all, he was sentenced to die three times for the two murders. Over the years he called his pursuit of his own death "a mission" to expose the automatic appeals in California capital cases. On the eve of the execution, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court turned away last efforts by death penalty opponents to stop it, which were made over Massie's objections.

Naumoff's children and grandchildren were among the witnesses, and the execution was the first at San Quentin in which witnesses could watch the procedure from beginning to end. "The hurt for my family will never stop," said Naumoff's son. "We continue to deal with the loss of a husband, a father, a grandfather."

The Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle gave Massie's age as 59; the state corrections department's execution table lists 60.

Sources