Robert Edward Maury was born in 1956 and lived at Happy Valley, near Redding in Shasta County, California. He had a history as a paid police informant.
Between 1985 and 1987 he strangled three women: Averill Weeden, who was his roommate, Dawn Berryhill and Belinda Jo Stark. He was also convicted of robbing one of them, of attempting to rape another, and of the forcible rape of a further woman.
The distinguishing feature of the case is what he did afterwards. Shasta County had a tip line called Secret Witness, set up by a local civic association, which paid rewards for information about local crimes on the recommendation of an advisory board of law enforcement officers. Over two years, someone telephoned it with the locations of the three bodies.
Police first looked at Maury when Averill Weeden disappeared in 1985. They could not prove then that he had killed her, or that he was the man who rang Secret Witness about a month later to ask what a reward for information about her murder might be worth. That caller never claimed it. The employee who took the call testified that the same person had also rung about one of the other murders and about several other crimes.
He gave his own name in some of the calls. Police watched him collect five hundred dollars from a designated pickup point, paid for having reported the location of the third victim's body.
The case against him was circumstantial. It included fingerprint evidence, testimony that he had boasted of strangling a woman, a bartender's identification of him as having been in the bar with the third victim, a woman he said he had never met in his life, and evidence that he had given a series of inconsistent accounts of Weeden's whereabouts after she vanished.
His defence was that Weeden had been killed by a man she was buying drugs with, and that the killer had made Maury strike her on the head with a rock after she was already dead. It disputed that he was the caller in her case at all. It accepted that he had rung Secret Witness about the later deaths, but argued that he had found the bodies rather than made them, and that calling the line was consistent with his history as an informant.
A Shasta County jury convicted him of everything charged in 1989. He maintained his innocence throughout. Then, at the penalty phase, he read the jury a statement telling them that since they believed he was guilty they should return a verdict of death. They did. Judge William R Lund refused the automatic motion to modify the sentence and condemned him on October 27, 1989.
On April 24, 2003 the Supreme Court of California affirmed unanimously. Justice Ming Chin wrote that there was ample circumstantial evidence of the murders. The court also rejected his argument that the police had breached the Fourth Amendment by recording some of his calls to Secret Witness without a warrant: the line was run by a private association not bound by the Fourth Amendment, and once the police had been told that a caller might be reporting crimes he had committed himself, he could not reasonably have expected them to respect his privacy. Citing the evidence of board members, the court said that guaranteeing anonymity to such a caller would defeat the purpose of the programme, which was to solve crimes.