The first word of it to reach the Reno police department came over the radio, from an officer walking her beat downtown. Lieutenant Richard Kirkland had just arrived to run the Thanksgiving swing shift and had not made it through the front door when he heard Pam Engle shouting that there were bodies everywhere. Kirkland got down to the corner of Second and Virginia and found people lying the length of the block. His first thought was that a bomb had gone off.
It was a car. Just before three o'clock on the afternoon of November 27, 1980, a Lincoln Continental left North Virginia Street at the curb in front of the Club Cal Neva, crossed onto a sidewalk packed for the holiday and the city's Thanksgiving parade, and kept going at roughly forty miles an hour past Harrah's and on toward Commercial Row before swinging back into traffic. Police estimated more than a thousand people were on that stretch of Casino Row. Contemporary wire copy described the car as black; later accounts, including an Associated Press story written for the twenty-fifth anniversary, call it a blue 1974 model. Estimates of how far it ran on the sidewalk go from about a hundred feet to the better part of a block.
The driver did not get far. Blocked by traffic at North Virginia and Fifth, five blocks from where she had jumped the curb, she stopped and was taken into custody without resisting. She was fifty-one years old, five foot three, about a hundred and ten pounds, and she wrapped gifts at a downtown department store. A coworker, asked about her the next day, said she had seemed an intelligent, sharp, nice person. Her name was Priscilla Joyce Ford.
Washoe County Coroner Vern McCarty named five dead that night: Paul A. Nitzel of Sunnyvale, California; Josephine Starkey, fifty-three, of Sparks, Nevada, whose first name the wire copy that carried it first spelled Josaphine; Jolene Cranmer, twenty, of New York; Iva Britain, eighty, and John Koschella, sixty, both of Reno. A sixth victim died afterward of injuries and has never been publicly named. The convictions were returned on six counts of murder, and five of the dead are identified in the reporting.
The injured were counted at twenty-six the following morning and at twenty-three by the time the case was charged out. Twenty-three is the figure the convictions rest on.
Two of them were Dan and Anna Massingham of Fall Creek, Oregon, who were a few seconds from walking into the Cal Neva for dinner when the car came up onto the sidewalk behind them. Dan Massingham, sixty-six, said the sun was directly behind it and he barely saw it coming; it knocked him down and broke a bone in his foot. Anna Massingham, sixty, was thrown into the air and landed on the sidewalk, and hurt a knee and a hip. Both testified at the trial.
Bob and Shirley Haun, ranchers from Emmett, Idaho, had been in Reno less than an hour. They had driven in off Interstate 80 at the end of a trip down the Pacific coast and were walking north looking for somewhere to eat when the Lincoln came through the crowd in front of Harrah's. Shirley Haun was caught between the headlight and the radiator with a leg dragging under the car. Bob Haun, badly hurt and bleeding internally, crawled down to the corner where she lay and thought she was dead until she opened her eyes. He was taken to Washoe Medical Center in critical condition and a nurse was told to keep him awake. A quarter of a century later the Hauns were still carrying the injuries. Shirley Haun also said something that belongs in the record: the only reason they were not killed outright, she believed, was the man walking directly behind them, who was struck first.
Ford was booked that night on five counts of murder, twenty-six counts of attempted murder and twenty-six counts of battery with a deadly weapon, and held on five hundred thousand dollars bond. Police Captain Don McKillip said he could offer no explanation for the act beyond the apparent aim of killing as many holiday visitors as possible. Kirkland, then a lieutenant, put it more carefully to reporters: it would be very difficult to believe the thing had been an accident.
John Oakes, a junior deputy district attorney who caught the holiday call and reached the scene within five minutes, rode with her afterward. By his account she asked twice how many people she had killed. Told it was five or six, she said, good, and added that there might be more. The district attorney's office had taken delivery of its first videotape machine two weeks earlier, and it was running while she was booked. She called the people she had hit beasts and pigs. Another officer reported that in custody she said, "The more dead, the better."
The question of alcohol moved in the opposite direction from most cases. On the day after, a police source said he knew of no evidence of drinking, while Captain McKillip allowed that there were indications and that the tests were not back. The tests, when they came, put her blood alcohol at .162 by most later accounts and at .15 by at least one, in either case above the Nevada limit of the day. Nobody at the trial argued that drink explained what she did.
She gave a reason herself, repeatedly, and it never changed. In 1973 Washoe County juvenile authorities had taken custody of her daughter. She told a department store employee she had lived in Reno seven years earlier when the girl was taken, that she had left town, and that she had come back three weeks before. She told an attorney, before the attack, that the people of Reno would pay for taking her daughter, and she was specific that she meant violence.
The daughter was Wynter Scott, born in 1962. Ford was arrested for trespassing and assault when the girl was eleven, and the child welfare office removed her and eventually placed her with Ford's relatives in Los Angeles. In every psychiatric record and every account of her state of mind from that point on, the loss of her daughter is the fixed point.
Ford was born on February 10, 1929, in Berrien Springs, Michigan, and grew up there. She went to public schools, trained as a teacher, and taught for some years in New York. She married twice and had three children, two sons and a daughter. In 1957 she shot her second husband, saying he had beaten her, and then shot herself and survived. That episode reached the 1982 trial through a witness named John Rickman, called by the defense to testify that he had seen the husband hit her.
The teaching career is the part of her life that makes the rest legible. The Death Penalty Information Center, summarizing the contemporary Reno coverage, described her as a gifted teacher until her illness surfaced around 1970. What surfaced was serious and repeatedly documented. She was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia with religious and violent features. She was treated at and released from seven different hospitals before she came back to Reno. She would not stay on the medication that controlled the condition.
She told people she was Christ. She told them she was the reincarnation of the founder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and that she had powers of her own and would strike down those who crossed her. During the year she spent in custody awaiting a competency finding she reported hearing the voices of Joan Kennedy and of the broadcaster Barbara Walters.
None of that was in dispute at any stage of the case. The state did not contest that she was mentally ill. What the state contested, and what the jury was asked to decide, was whether she had known what she was doing when she aimed the car.
Her public defender, Lew Carnahan of the Washoe County Public Defender's Office, had two psychiatrists interview her and both found her incompetent to stand trial. On January 29, 1981, the district court agreed and stayed the proceedings, and she was sent to Lake's Crossing, the state's facility for mentally disordered offenders. On April 29, 1981 she was ordered to submit to treatment, including drug therapy.
The first appellate decision in the case came out of that period and it went her way. In Ford v. District Court, 97 Nev. 578 (1981), the Nevada Supreme Court held that because she had been determined competent to stand trial she could not be compelled to take psychotropic medication. The point mattered later: she argued on subsequent appeals that the finding of competence had rested on the drugs, and that once she won the right to refuse them nobody revisited the question.
The district court found her competent on August 6, 1981, according to the Nevada Supreme Court's own recitation of the record in its 1989 opinion. Several secondary accounts give August 4. The two-day discrepancy has never been resolved, and the court's date is the better sourced of the two.
Carnahan concluded that the only defense with any prospect was insanity, and he committed to it. He traveled to Idaho, Michigan and New York to interview witnesses who could speak to her history. He put on four psychiatrists and nineteen other witnesses, and entered her hospitalizations, arrest records, medical history, schooling and employment. He deliberately did not interview the surviving victims or the families of the dead, on the view that nothing they could say would help her.
He also declined to run the alternative defense, that a mechanical fault in the car had caused it, and he did not have the Lincoln examined until the trial was two months old. The investigator found nothing wrong with it. An expert hired by the district attorney had examined it within days of the attack and found nothing wrong with it either. Both of those decisions were attacked for years afterward as incompetence, and both were upheld as tactical choices.
The trial was the longest ever held in northern Nevada. Accounts of its length run from just under five months to six; ninety-three witnesses testified and more than five hundred exhibits went in. The jury was seven women and five men. District Attorney Calvin Dunlap called Ford evil personified. Carnahan asked the jury for a life sentence served in a secure mental institution where she could be treated.
In February, against her lawyer's advice, Ford insisted on taking the stand. She testified that she was the incarnation of Jesus Christ and therefore incapable of sin. Under cross-examination Dunlap took her through her books, her private writings and her opinions on a long list of subjects, an examination the defense had opened the door to by walking her through her own life story. Those writings and the attitudes in them followed the case through two more decades of appeals.
On March 19, 1982, after about thirteen hours, the jury convicted her of six counts of first-degree murder and twenty-three counts of attempted murder. It then deliberated five days on penalty and returned a verdict of death. Sources differ on the date of the penalty verdict: one gives March 28 and the New York Times, reporting on March 30 that the jury had voted that day for death, points to March 29. The formal judgment and sentence were entered on April 29, 1982.
The jury found two aggravating circumstances. Ford became the only woman under sentence of death in Nevada, and stayed the only one for the rest of her life.
The Nevada Supreme Court affirmed on April 8, 1986, in Ford v. State, 102 Nev. 126, 717 P.2d 27, in a unanimous opinion written by Justice Thomas Steffen. The court rejected every ground: the denial of a change of venue, the handling of challenges for cause and peremptory challenges, the refusal to order a fresh psychiatric examination during trial, the decision to put her competency to the jury, the sufficiency of the evidence for the two aggravators, and proportionality. It noted that for all her strange behavior she had displayed a mind of above-average intelligence.
The same opinion carried a footnote that is more interesting than the holding. The court said the case was not among the brightest stars in the judicial firmament, and that the just and better course would have been the defendant's permanent sequestration. It also observed that the state would go on paying to determine the point at which Ford would be competent to receive her punishment, for as long as the death sentence existed. Having said so, it affirmed the sentence anyway, on the ground that it was not for the court to reduce a punishment fixed by a jury because of a conflict in the evidence about the defendant's mental condition.
Execution dates were set for August 5, 1987, and November 18, 1987. Both were stayed.
Competency to be executed became its own litigation. In October 1986, District Judge Charles McGee, who inherited the case when the trial judge John Barrett retired, ordered Ford evaluated at a facility for the criminally insane before he would consider whether she could be put to death, saying that executing her while she suffered a gravely incapacitating mental disability would be senseless and would vindicate neither the justice system nor the families. McGee at one point found her incompetent and later reversed himself after hearing a Lake's Crossing administrator testify. Published accounts of that sequence do not agree on how it interleaved with the 1986 affirmance.
Her first post-conviction petition, alleging that Carnahan had been ineffective, was dismissed and the dismissal affirmed in Ford v. State, 105 Nev. 850, 784 P.2d 951, decided December 28, 1989. The court held that the failure to examine the car earlier was harmless because all the evidence pointed to intent, that the decision not to interview victims and their families was a reasonable tactical choice, and that trial counsel's inexperience in capital cases did not by itself establish a constitutional violation.
A second state habeas petition was dismissed on September 3, 1993, without a hearing and without appointed counsel, and that dismissal was affirmed in Ford v. Warden, 111 Nev. 872 (1995). Ford argued through counsel that her writings and her private opinions should never have been put before the jury, relying on the United States Supreme Court's decision in Dawson v. Delaware. The Nevada court distinguished Dawson on the ground that her beliefs had been elicited by her own lawyer in the guilt phase and were relevant to the only defense she had run. It declined again to reduce the sentence, and noted that the case raised no question of guilt or innocence at all.
Federal habeas proceedings were filed and were stayed while the state courts finished. They were still unresolved when she died.
Priscilla Ford died at 11:05 in the morning on January 29, 2005, at the Southern Nevada Women's Correctional Center in North Las Vegas. She was seventy-five. The cause was emphysema; she had been a heavy smoker for decades. A state prisons spokesman, Fritz Schlottman, said she had been quiet for years and that he could not remember her breaking a rule. She had been under sentence of death for twenty-two years and nine months, and her death left eighty-three men on Nevada's death row and no women.
Had the sentence been carried out she would have been the first woman executed in Nevada since Elizabeth Potts was hanged at Elko alongside her husband in 1890, and the first Black woman executed in the state's history.
One factual question about the case has never been settled in the published record. The Nevada Supreme Court's 1989 opinion states twice, as a finding of fact, that Ford killed seven people. A United Press International report in 1986 says seven. Contemporary reporting on the night said five, and the count in general use, then and now, is six. The convictions are unambiguous: six counts of first-degree murder. What no published source settles is whether a seventh death was attributed to the attack and left uncharged, or whether the court's opinion simply carried an error forward.
Washoe County Assistant District Attorney John Helzer, told of her death, said it had been a sad case and a tragedy for a great many people, and that the families had been made to relive it appeal after appeal. That is the durable thing about the case, and it is the thing the trial court and the state supreme court both saw at the time. The psychiatric history was extensive, documented and uncontested by either side; the jury was told to decide sanity and decided against her; the supreme court that affirmed her death sentence wrote in the same opinion that locking her up permanently would have been the better course. Then the state spent twenty-two years and a great deal of money establishing repeatedly that she was too ill to execute, until emphysema settled it.