Robert Wayne Danielson was born in 1947 at Lowell, Oregon. He was convicted of manslaughter there in 1970 and won parole in 1981.
Within a year he had stopped reporting to his parole officer at Eugene, and Oregon issued warrants for parole violation, passing bad cheques and driving with a suspended licence. More serious charges followed, and he became a suspect in at least six killings and two attempted murders.
The first to die were Harold Pratt, sixty, and his wife Betty, fifty-five, on December 10, 1981. They were from Tucson and were camping in the Arizona desert about seventy-five miles south-east of Phoenix when they were robbed and shot in the back of the head, and their bodies were left where scavenging animals could reach them.
Arthur Gray Jr, sixty-two, was killed in the same way on June 25, 1982 at the Twin Springs campground, eighty miles east of Eugene, Oregon.
The following month Benjamin and Edith Shaffer, both in their sixties and both from Arizona, were robbed and shot dead in Mendocino County, California. Their bodies lay undiscovered until December 1983.
Ernest Corral, thirty-eight, was shot in the same manner in November 1982 and left in a desert ravine near his home town of Apache Junction, Arizona.
Two people lived, and they are the reason he was identified. Edwin and Ida Davis, both sixty-four, said they had befriended a younger couple near El Cajon, California in March 1982. On March 22 the two of them were overpowered by those friends, injected with a powerful horse tranquilliser and left to die. They were found in time for doctors to save them, and while they were recovering both picked Danielson out from mug shots as one of their attackers.
An all-points bulletin was issued on February 9, 1984, together with a federal warrant charging unlawful flight to avoid prosecution in Oregon. He was formally charged with the Gray and Shaffer killings and remained a suspect in the others. Two months later, on April 7, FBI agents traced him to his job with a travelling carnival, which was then playing at Odessa, Texas. He was arrested without incident and returned to Oregon for trial, where the most he could receive was life imprisonment because the state had abolished the death penalty.
He was sentenced to life in Oregon in 1985. California tried him for the Shaffer murders in the Mendocino County Superior Court and sentenced him to death on November 13, 1986. The Supreme Court of California decided his appeal in 1992.
The count here is the six killings he was suspected of, the two attempted murders, and the 1970 manslaughter for which he had already been convicted, kept separate because they are three different things. He was formally charged with three of the six.
The sequence is what the case is about: one killing, a manslaughter conviction, parole after eleven years, and six deaths in the year that followed.
One source note. The reference work that carries the narrative calls him Daniels in places and Danielson in others; the court record gives Robert Wayne Danielson.