On June 19, 1985, a man called the Shasta County Secret Witness line with information about Averill Weeden, a forty-eight-year-old woman who had vanished from Redding, California, in late May. Before he said anything more, he wanted to know how much he would be paid. On August 8 he called again. He had found her body, he said, and would lead investigators to it for the reward. Shirley Landreth, who took most of the calls on the line, agreed, and he gave precise directions to a wooded area along Bechelli Lane near South Bonnyview Road. Weeden was there. She had been Robert Edward Maury's landlord.
Secret Witness had been set up by a local civic association to take information from citizens about crimes in the county, and it paid rewards on the recommendation of a board of law enforcement officers. The man who knew where Averill Weeden was lying never collected. Maury, born in 1956 and living at Happy Valley outside Redding, had worked as a paid police informant. Detectives interviewed him when Weeden disappeared, and he denied any part in it. They suspected him, but they could not prove he had killed her or that he was the caller.
In 1986 Maury called Secret Witness about a reward for an unrelated burglary and gave his name. Landreth thought she recognized the voice. A week later the same man rang again and asked for immunity in the Weeden case. Then the calls stopped. In the spring of 1987, angry that his name had been leaked as an informant in a robbery trial, Maury telephoned Detective Mundy and taunted him that he would never really know what had happened to Weeden, and would take her death to his grave.
On June 20, 1987, Maury struck up a conversation with a woman identified in court as Jacqueline H., and later raped her. At the end of that month two more women, Belinda Jo Stark and Dawn Berryhill, disappeared. In August the calls to Secret Witness began again. On August 17 a tip led police to Stark's skeletal remains in a thicket near the corner of Palm Avenue and Monte Vista Road in Happy Valley. On September 22 the same caller sent them back, and about 250 yards away they found Berryhill. Both women had been strangled. When the caller went to a designated spot to pick up his five-hundred-dollar reward, police were watching and photographed him. It was Maury. Confronted, he made statements that led to his arrest.
The case against him was circumstantial and, in the words of the California Supreme Court, fact-intensive: it tied together three murders and the rape of a fourth woman. It included fingerprint evidence, testimony that he had boasted of strangling a woman, a bartender who placed him in a bar with Stark, a woman he claimed never to have met, and a series of shifting accounts he had given of where Weeden had gone. His defense was that Weeden had been killed by a man she was buying drugs with, who had forced Maury to strike her with a rock after she was already dead. It accepted that he had called Secret Witness about the later deaths, but said he had found the bodies rather than made them, and that calling the line was what an informant would do.
A Shasta County jury convicted him of the three murders, the robbery of Berryhill, assault on Stark with intent to rape, and the rape of Jacqueline H. He maintained his innocence throughout, and then, at the penalty phase, read the jury a statement telling them that since they believed him guilty, they should return a verdict of death. They did. Judge William R. Lund denied the automatic motion to modify the verdict and sentenced him to death on October 27, 1989.
On April 24, 2003, the California Supreme Court affirmed unanimously, with Justice Ming Chin writing that there was ample circumstantial evidence of the murders. The court rejected his argument that recording some of his Secret Witness calls without a warrant had violated the Fourth Amendment. The line was run by a private association, and once police had been told that a caller might be reporting crimes he had committed himself, he could not reasonably expect them to respect his privacy. Guaranteeing anonymity to such a caller, the court said, citing the program's board members, would defeat the purpose of the program, which was to solve crimes. California has carried out no execution since 2006.