Ron Stadt met Ramon Rogers in the Navy, and when they left the service the two men moved to San Diego and shared an apartment. They were best friends. On June 24, 1993, Stadt disappeared from Imperial Beach. He was twenty-nine. His body has never been found, and there is still no established account of how he died.
Rogers had been born Ramon Jay Franks in Emmett, Idaho, in 1959 or 1960 depending on the account. He served in the Navy until 1982, worked a series of jobs through the late eighties, did some acting (he had a part in the television series Renegade), and by the mid-nineties was the resident manager of an apartment complex at 7007 Saranac in San Diego.
Rose Albano was living with him and was pregnant with his child. He did not want the child and demanded that she have an abortion and move out, and she refused both. She was last seen in the third week of December 1993, having taken more than four thousand dollars out of an account to go Christmas shopping. Rogers reported her missing five days later and gave police accounts that did not match each other.
On December 29, a trash bag was found about a mile and a half from his sister's house, in the Valley Center area of northeastern San Diego County. It held her left arm, her left leg and her jawbone. She was thirty-three.
He was questioned about that killing in early 1994 and told officers he had last seen her on December 21. Nothing came of it, and for two more years he continued as the manager of the building on Saranac.
Beatrice Toronczak, a Polish immigrant, had a five-year-old son with him. Late in 1995 he brought the boy back from Poland, and she arrived in San Diego on February 11, 1996 and moved into his apartment. She disappeared in February 1996, shortly before her birthday, and he told people she had run off. In March her relatives filed a missing persons report, and San Diego police officers came to the building.
They took him in first on a suspected drug offense. Then they searched the three storage areas underneath the apartments, and what they found there ended all three cases at once. A tote bag holding Toronczak's driver's license and her belongings. A yellow bucket containing what appeared to be human teeth and severed fingers. Torn women's clothing. Bloodstained flex cuffs. A butcher knife. A claw hammer with red staining. A bloodstained blue tarpaulin. A bloodstained handsaw. A length of four-by-four. Two pairs of branch clippers, one of them stained.
The severed fingers and parts of a jawbone were hers. She was thirty-two.
His trial opened in San Diego in 1997 and the three cases were tried together; the victims had known one another, and many of the witnesses had known all three. On June 30 the jury returned verdicts that separated the killings by degree. First degree murder for Albano and Toronczak. Second degree for Stadt. It also found the multiple-murder special circumstance true, and after a penalty phase beginning the following Monday it returned a verdict of death. He was sentenced that September.
The distinction the jury drew is worth understanding rather than smoothing over. First degree murder in California requires premeditation or one of a set of specified circumstances; second degree does not. For Albano and Toronczak the state had remains, a dismemberment, and a pattern of lies about where the women had gone. For Stadt it had a disappearance, a best friend who was the last person to see him, and no body at all. The jury convicted on all three and declined to call the first one premeditated.
The appeal to the California Supreme Court was automatic, and in 2009 the court affirmed the judgment of death. It made one modification, to the second degree count, which it fixed at fifteen years to life.
Three details about him are unsettled in the record. Some accounts give him three victims and some four, raising a possible earlier death in Idaho, though nothing supports a fourth. His birth year appears as 1959 and as March 13, 1960. His arrest is dated both March 11 and March 13, 1996. No source reports his death, and he would now be in his mid-sixties.