In December 1983 road workers in Manchester, in Mendocino County, California, dug up two bodies in a ravine off Mountain View Road. Dental records identified them as Benjamin Shaffer, sixty-nine, and his wife, Edith, sixty-two, who had vanished in July 1982. Their credit cards had been used by a man whom detectives identified as Robert Wayne Danielson Jr., and their camper had been abandoned in Reno. Detectives found his companion, Lenora Hart Johnson, who confessed that she had been involved and said Danielson had planned the killings. She told them about another murder in Oregon and about others he had confessed to her.
Danielson was born in Iowa on August 25, 1946. He had struggled with depression and drugs. On June 23, 1970, after a roadside encounter near Marcola, Oregon, he argued with Thomas Elroy Davis, twenty-one, pulled a gun and shot him dead. Charged with first-degree murder, he got a mistrial when the prosecution presented improper evidence, and the charge was dismissed; in November 1970 he pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and other charges, maintaining that he had fired in self-defense, and was sentenced to twenty-five years.
After eleven years at the Oregon State Penitentiary he was paroled and released in November 1981. On December 9 he confronted Harold Pratt, sixty, and his wife, Betty, fifty-five, of Tucson, at a desert campsite in Arizona, tied their hands with rope, shot both in the head and took their pickup truck. Their bodies were found the next day and the truck turned up abandoned in Yuma.
Living in Springfield, Oregon, he took up with Johnson, who was fourteen and later called it a kind of common-law marriage. On June 21, 1982, the two of them attacked Arthur Gray, sixty-two, who had gone fishing at a park in Eugene; Danielson tied him up and shot him once in the back of the head, and a youth group found the body on June 25. In July, at a park in Manchester, they came upon the Shaffers. Johnson bound their hands with twine, and Danielson told her to walk the couple's dog away; when she was far enough off, he shot them both. In November he killed Ernest Corral, thirty-eight, the same way at Apache Junction, Arizona.
Charged with two murders, he became a fugitive. On April 6, 1984, he was found working for a traveling carnival in Odessa, Texas, and arrested. California tried him first. During the trial his mother, Mary Ann Bishop, tried to pass him a loaded revolver as he entered the Mendocino County courthouse; she was caught and sentenced to three years. In July 1986 a jury of eight men and four women found him guilty of the Shaffer murders. He pleaded for his life, saying he was disgusted with himself, and his lawyers pointed out that Charles Manson, Juan Corona and the Hillside Stranglers were serving life, but two months later the jury sentenced him to death.
He was then sent to Oregon, where in February 1987 he was convicted of Arthur Gray's murder. The state's death penalty had not been in force when Gray was killed, and on February 22 the jury gave him life. He returned to death row at San Quentin, where he underwent a religious conversion. On September 7, 1995, a corrections officer found him hanging from a white tube sock in his cell, and he was pronounced dead.