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Anthony Sully, the Former Millbrae Officer Condemned for Six 1983 Murders, Dies on Death Row at 79

California prison officials said the ex-police officer, on San Quentin's death row since 1986 for six killings tied to his Burlingame hangar, died of natural causes.

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Illustration: old stone prison walls on the edge of a bay at dusk

Anthony J. Sully spent 37 years on California's death row, in a state that had long since stopped carrying out executions. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced on Monday, September 11, 2023, that Sully, 79, a former Millbrae police officer condemned for six murders committed in 1983, had died of natural causes the previous Friday, September 8. He was pronounced dead at 2:21 a.m. at a medical facility outside San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, where he was held on condemned status. The Marin County Coroner's Office was to determine the official cause of death.

A San Mateo County court sentenced Sully to death on June 3, 1986, for the murders of Kathryn Barrett, 24; Barbara Searcy, 22; Gloria Jean Fravel, 24; Brendan Oakden, 19; Michael Thomas, 24; and Phyllis Melendez, 20. Five women and a man, they were killed over a span of about six months in 1983. He arrived on San Quentin's death row on June 15, 1986.

Sully was born in San Francisco and grew up in Millbrae, where he served on the police force from 1967 to 1974. In the late 1970s he left policing and became an electrical contractor, renting a hangar in Burlingame for the business. According to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, as reported by Bay City News, he also invested in an escort service, used sex workers and became addicted to freebasing cocaine. The hangar became the scene of many of the killings. Many of the others were shot in the back of the head as they came in. Some were placed in metal drums filled with concrete and dumped in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.

He pleaded not guilty at trial and went on appealing after it. His most recent loss came in 2013.

His death left 654 people under sentence of death in California, a state that had not carried out an execution since January 2006. Governor Gavin Newsom placed a moratorium on executions in March 2019.

The prison department's release names the 19-year-old victim as Brendan Oakden. Bay City News, reporting the same death, spelled the name Brenda Oakden. This page follows the department's spelling; the records available here do not settle which is correct.

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