Shortly after midnight on March 27, 2001, in the converted gas chamber at San Quentin State Prison, Warden Jeanne Woodford asked Robert Lee Massie one last question. Did he still want to give up his appeals? He said yes and nodded. Three minutes later the drugs began to flow, and at 12:33 a.m. he was pronounced dead. Watching through the windows were the son of a woman he had shot outside her home in San Gabriel in 1965 and the children and grandchildren of a man he had shot in a San Francisco liquor store in 1979.
Massie was sentenced to death three times for those two killings. The first sentence was wiped out when the California Supreme Court struck down the death penalty in 1972, and the state paroled him in 1978. The second was reversed because he had pleaded guilty against his lawyer's advice. The third was carried out after he told the courts to stop trying to save him. His case touched several of the main turns in California's modern death penalty law, and his execution was the first in the state at which witnesses saw the whole procedure from beginning to end.
Most of what is on record about Massie's early life comes from the evidence his lawyers put before the jury at the penalty phase of his 1989 retrial, as summarized by the California Supreme Court in 1998. It was offered to argue for a life sentence, and the court described it without testing it further.
According to that evidence, Massie was born in Virginia to a 15-year-old mother. He was placed with five different sets of foster parents, and at times lived with his mother or with his grandparents. At one foster home he was disciplined by being whipped with switches and having his head held under water. Between the ages of four and six, while living with his mother, he was taken barhopping. At 11 he was sent to the Beaumont School, a Virginia institution for truant and runaway boys, where boys who misbehaved were whipped up to 40 times with a thick leather belt.
At 17, the evidence continued, he stole a car and was sentenced to an adult prison, where four older inmates gang-raped him. After that he feigned insanity and was committed to a prison psychiatric facility. A psychiatrist, Dr. Wesley Clark, testified in 1989 that people who have suffered violent trauma can become hypervigilant. The California Supreme Court's 1967 opinion, written long before any of this was put in evidence, referred only to Massie's "extensive criminal record."
None of the sources opened gives his exact date of birth. Newspapers in 2001 gave his age at execution as 59; the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation lists 60.
Between January 7 and January 15, 1965, Massie committed a series of robberies and shootings in Los Angeles County. The California Supreme Court described them in two opinions, in 1967 and 1998.
At about 9:15 p.m. on January 7, Franklin Boller (spelled Boiler in the 1998 opinion) was getting out of his car in front of his home in West Covina when Massie approached him. Massie struck him with a rifle and took his wallet and coin purse. As he did so he said, "Don't look at me, queer," and then fired a shot that grazed the side of Boller's head. Boller survived.
Shortly before 10 p.m., in San Gabriel, Morris and Mildred Weiss were coming home. According to the 1967 opinion, Mildred Weiss was on the front lawn directing her husband's car into their garage. Massie walked up to her, spoke to her briefly, shot her and ran to a car waiting several hundred feet up the street. He got in on the passenger side and the car drove off. Her son, Ronald Weiss, chased the car. Mildred Weiss died of the gunshot. In his taped statements to the police, Massie later said he had been trying to rob her.
The court records say almost nothing else about her. They give no age, no occupation and no account of her life beyond the fact that she was a wife and mother coming home with her husband on a Thursday evening. Her son Ron would still be following the case 36 years later.
Around midnight Massie walked into the Twin Gables Bar in Baldwin Park with a rifle, said "This is a stickup," and robbed two men there, Frank Muccia and Archie Bolivar. Eight days later, on January 15, he encountered Frank Patti at MacArthur Park in Los Angeles. When Patti fought back against a robbery, Massie fired three shots and fled. Two hit Patti in the stomach and one grazed his neck. The 1998 opinion does not say whether Patti survived; Massie was not convicted of a second murder in 1965.
Massie was arrested on January 20, 1965. He gave the police two tape-recorded statements in which he admitted all of the crimes. During the questioning he took a "benny," a Benzedrine tablet. He later claimed he had not been told his rights and had asked for a lawyer. The trial court believed the officer, named in the 1967 opinion as Officer Vietti, who testified that Massie had been warned and had not asked for counsel. At one point Massie told the officers, "I am going to tell you a whole lot of things." He also gave a television news interview, which the Supreme Court later found was "wholly voluntary."
In his confession Massie named the driver of the car in San Gabriel as John Robert Vetter, and said the car belonged to Vetter. Vetter was arrested on the strength of that accusation. He denied it. His defense was that he had lent Massie his car and was at home packing that night. Four witnesses gave identification evidence: Morris Weiss, who said Vetter "resembled the man in the driver's seat"; Ronald Weiss, who had seen only the back of the driver's head; John Billick, who could not make a positive identification; and Richard Nichols, who said he recognized Vetter.
Massie pleaded guilty. He and Vetter both gave up a jury, and their guilt and penalty were decided in one combined hearing before a judge. Massie was convicted of four counts of robbery, one of attempted murder and one of murder, and the judge sentenced him to death. Vetter was convicted of the murder and sentenced to life in prison.
On June 21, 1967, the California Supreme Court decided both appeals in one opinion, written by Justice Tobriner. It affirmed Massie's convictions and death sentence. It rejected his claims that his confessions were involuntary, that his guilty plea had been forced on him by marital trouble and high-security confinement, and that his lawyer had been inadequate. "We cannot find that Massie's trial approached 'a farce or a sham,'" the court wrote. It also held that an indigent defendant could not insist on a particular appointed lawyer.
For Vetter the result was different. By a vote of four to three, the court reversed his convictions, holding that he should have been tried separately because Massie's confessions, which named him, could not be edited to remove the references. The court called the evidence against Vetter "closely balanced." The sources opened do not say how Vetter's case ended after the reversal.
In 1967, according to the San Francisco Chronicle's 2001 account, Massie came within 16 hours of being put to death in San Quentin's gas chamber. Gov. Ronald Reagan granted him a reprieve so that he could testify at the trial of his co-defendant. The Chronicle and the Associated Press do not say what he said at that trial or how it ended.
The reprieve was followed by years of litigation over the death penalty in California and nationally, during which no one was executed in the state. On February 18, 1972, the California Supreme Court decided People v. Anderson. By a vote of six to one, in an opinion by Chief Justice Wright, it held that capital punishment was "both cruel and unusual" under the state constitution and that "death may not be exacted as punishment for crime in this state." The decision applied to every prisoner already under sentence of death. Massie's sentence, like the others, was commuted to life in prison. The AP put it plainly in 2001: his death sentence for killing Mildred Weiss was "commuted to life in 1972."
According to the evidence at his 1989 trial, Massie was a model prisoner while serving his sentence for the Weiss murder. Witnesses described him as cooperative with staff, a provider of "valuable clerical services," someone who got along with other inmates and who worked to ease tensions among them. The same evidence said he was stabbed in the back in a gang-related attack possibly linked to the Aryan Brotherhood, a prison gang, and that California prison authorities transferred him at various times to Kansas, Nevada and Washington for his protection.
In 1978 the state released him on parole. The Chronicle reported that he went to work as a law clerk for a San Francisco attorney. United Press International reported that he had been paroled about nine months before the killing that sent him back to death row.
Boris Naumoff, known as Bob, owned Miraloma Liquor, a small shop in the Twin Peaks area of San Francisco. According to the 1998 opinion, he had owned the store for about 30 years. He had children and grandchildren, several of whom would sit in the witness room at San Quentin in 2001. His grandson, Menck Rickman, said that the killing "ruined our family" and "ripped us apart," and that the execution was the first time some of the relatives had seen one another in 22 years. The sources opened do not give Naumoff's age.
On January 2, 1979, Massie robbed Yasphine Khashan, and on January 3 he robbed George Shatara, according to the charges listed in the 1985 opinion. The 1998 opinion describes these as robberies of two small markets in San Francisco not far from Naumoff's store.
On the morning of January 3, Massie went into the Twin Peaks Grocery three times without buying anything. On the third visit the proprietor, Grant Ridgeway, followed him out. Massie drove away in a Chevrolet Vega. Ridgeway had nothing to write with, so he asked a woman in a nearby house to take down the license number; she recorded part of it as "119 GL."
At about 1:45 that afternoon, a customer named Kenneth Ross was in Miraloma Liquor when Massie came in. Naumoff asked him, "Can I help you?" Massie said, "I'm just looking." About ten minutes after he left, Ross saw Massie outside making "nervous, jerky movements."
At about 3:45 p.m., Sandy Bateman-Collins walked into the store. She saw Naumoff behind the counter handing money to a man and dropping some of it on the floor. Then Naumoff came out from behind the counter and followed the man, saying, "A guy can't make a living any more." Charles Harris, who was due to work at the store that evening, heard a scuffle and turned to see Naumoff holding the man in a bear hug. As Harris walked toward them he heard three quick shots and then a fourth, felt a pain in his leg, saw the man holding a gun, and ran into the back room. Bateman-Collins ducked behind a counter.
Outside, a 13-year-old boy, Duffy Aceret, saw a man run from the store with a gun in his hand. Naumoff was found on the floor. He had been shot once in the right chest and twice in the heart. The medical examiner described the two shots to the heart as "near contact wounds," fired from inches away. Harris was wounded in the leg and survived. The Chronicle reported that the robbery netted $30.
That evening a woman named Laura Garnett-Young saw a car stop outside her home and its driver put a bloodstained shirt and jacket into her garbage can. She wrote down the license number as "119 TGL." The blood on the clothing matched Naumoff's blood type.
At about 10 p.m. the next day, January 4, San Francisco police officers Michael Pearson and Jeffrey Morlock saw a Chevrolet Vega driving with its headlights off. Its plate read "119 TJL," close to both numbers the witnesses had taken down. The officers followed it for about five minutes along an erratic route, then stopped it and arrested the driver, who was alone. He was Robert Massie. In his waistband was a loaded .357 revolver, and in his coat pocket a cocked and loaded .380 automatic pistol. Ballistics tests matched the .380 to the four bullets and casings recovered from the store. Several days later Duffy Aceret picked Massie out of a lineup.
Massie was taken to the Hall of Justice, where, shortly before midnight, Inspectors Frank Falzon and Herman Clark interviewed him. Falzon read him his Miranda rights. Massie said he wanted time to think, and about half an hour later agreed to talk. He said he had gone into the store, pulled a gun and told the clerk, "It's a holdup." The man gave him "$20 or $30," he said, but attacked him as he was leaving, and he shot him. He said he had been drunk and under the influence of cocaine.
Massie was charged with murder and robbery of Naumoff, with two special circumstances that made him eligible for death: a prior murder conviction and a murder committed during a robbery. He was also charged with assault with a deadly weapon on Charles Harris, the two market robberies, and possessing concealable weapons as an ex-felon.
After the court accepted police testimony about his confession at a pretrial stage, Massie said he wanted to change his plea. "I see no reason to pursue this, what is to me, a farce and a sham," he told the court. "But I just like the guilty plea to stand. I'd like a penalty trial period." His lawyer told the judge that the plea was "being done against the advice of counsel," but said Massie was "adamant" and that he did not see how they could go further given "my client's wishes." Massie pleaded guilty to everything and admitted both special circumstances.
At the penalty trial that followed, Massie waived a jury and represented himself. The court set the penalty at death. UPI and the corrections department give the sentencing date as May 25, 1979, and the department's records show he was received on death row on May 28, 1979.
California law sends every death sentence to the state Supreme Court for automatic review. Massie asked the court not to appoint a lawyer for his appeal and to dismiss it. The court refused. On December 23, 1985, in an opinion by Justice Kaus, a five-justice majority reversed his murder and robbery convictions in the Naumoff case, the special circumstance findings and the death sentence. Relying on a 1981 decision, People v. Chadd, it held that under Penal Code section 1018 "a capital defendant is no longer permitted to plead guilty in this state against the advice of his attorney," and that his lawyer's reluctant agreement did not amount to the independent consent the law required. The convictions for the other robberies, the assault on Harris and the weapons counts were left in place.
Justice Lucas, joined by Justice Mosk, dissented in part. He would have upheld the plea, noting that the case was "nearly seven years old" and that a new trial "should be entirely unnecessary."
Massie asked for a rehearing, asking the court to reinstate his conviction and death sentence, and argued that a retrial would amount to double jeopardy. He later complained that the court had "reversed his conviction over his objection." In its 1998 opinion the court answered that "a defendant sentenced to death is not free to decide whether or not to appeal."
The case went back to San Francisco for a new trial. On September 9, 1988, two months before jury selection began, a television program discussed the case. Inspector Falzon said on the broadcast that Massie had killed before, been paroled and killed again, and that he had "learned how to beat the criminal system." The program included the line, "This guy used to say he wanted to die. I hope he gets his wish." In October 1988, a state voter pamphlet for a ballot measure that would have let the governor overturn parole board decisions described a man paroled in 1978 who killed a "store clerk" in 1979. Massie three times asked the trial court to dismiss the charges because of the publicity. The court refused, and the Supreme Court later agreed, finding that "an overwhelming majority of the prospective jurors questioned knew nothing about the case."
Jury selection was under way by November 21, 1988. At trial Massie took the stand. He admitted killing Naumoff but denied that it happened during a robbery. He testified that Naumoff had shortchanged him and that he went back into the store to confront him. As he started to leave, he said, someone grabbed him in a bear hug and "slammed" him in the face. He said he thought his attacker was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, pulled a pistol from his jacket and fired without aiming. He said he had confessed to the robbery only to protect himself from the Aryan Brotherhood. The prosecution put on evidence of the two market robberies on January 2 and 3.
The jury convicted him of murder and robbery and found both special circumstances true. At the penalty phase the prosecution presented the 1965 crimes, including the Weiss murder. The defense presented the account of his childhood and prison years, Dr. Clark's testimony, and witnesses who said he had become a religious man who felt remorse for killing Naumoff. The jury returned a death verdict. The Chronicle's timeline dates the conviction and sentence to 1989.
On November 30, 1998, the California Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the conviction and death sentence. Justice Kennard wrote the opinion, joined by Chief Justice George and Justices Mosk, Baxter, Werdegar, Chin and Brown. The court rejected his claims on pretrial publicity, the makeup of the jury pool and the voluntariness of his 1979 confession, as well as his arguments that the 1985 reversal and retrial had violated his rights.
Massie began federal habeas corpus proceedings in June 1999. On August 25, 1999, a federal district court found him competent. In October 2000 he moved to dismiss his federal petition. At a hearing on December 21, 2000, the court found he was competent to do so and that his decision was "knowing, intelligent, and voluntary." Massie told the court, "Some people prefer to just go ahead and move on." The judge gave him until January 8, 2001, to reconsider. He did not, and the petition was dismissed.
In January 2001 the AP reported that Massie, then 59 and 21 years into his second stay on death row, would rather die than continue what he called a "lingering death" at San Quentin. His lawyer, Frederick D. Baker, said Massie "opposes any effort by any third party to intervene." San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan, an opponent of the death penalty, said he would not ask a county judge to set an execution date, and the state attorney general's office planned to meet with him to resolve the impasse. An execution was set for 12:01 a.m. on March 27, 2001.
On March 14, 2001, Massie published an article in the San Francisco Chronicle explaining his decision, according to UPI. He wrote that he had dropped his appeals to protest a process he believed was weighted against the accused, and that he hoped his death would "give life to a challenge to California's machinery of death." He criticized state-appointed appellate lawyers for pursuing minor technical points instead of strong constitutional claims, and said he was acting "not simply because I got a raw deal."
Michael Kroll, an Oakland writer and opponent of the death penalty who had corresponded with and visited Massie for about 15 years, tried to stop the execution as Massie's "next friend," a person allowed to sue on behalf of someone unable to act for himself. Kroll argued that Massie was no longer competent to give up his appeals, that the 1989 trial court should have held a competency hearing, that Massie had been incompetent at his 1965 trial, and that his appellate lawyers had been ineffective for raising only the claims Massie wanted.
Three state doctors examined Massie in February and March 2001, and each concluded that he understood he was about to be executed and why. On March 23, 2001, the California Supreme Court denied Kroll's petition, and the federal district court denied his motions the same day. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed in an unsigned opinion, holding that Kroll had not offered "meaningful evidence" that Massie was incompetent and so had no standing. The Chronicle reported that the three-judge panel found no evidence of a mental disease or disorder, and that the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed Kroll's petition the evening before the execution. Massie opposed all of it.
Massie's execution was also the occasion of a press-access fight. Until then, witnesses at San Quentin were let in only after the condemned prisoner had been strapped down and the intravenous lines inserted. In July 2000, in a suit brought by the California First Amendment Coalition and others, federal District Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that witnesses had "a constitutional right to view the entire execution process." On March 19, 2001, he refused to reconsider. Prison officials argued that full access endangered staff. On March 26 the Ninth Circuit and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, acting for the U.S. Supreme Court, both denied the state's emergency requests. Seventeen journalists were among the witnesses. The five members of the execution team removed their identification badges.
Charles Harris, the clerk wounded in 1979, told the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press before the execution, "I want to see the end of this thing."
At 6 p.m. on March 26, Massie was strip-searched, given new clothes and moved to a death watch cell near the chamber. For a last meal he had fried oysters and french fries with ketchup, a cola and two vanilla milkshakes. He spent his last hours with friends, his lawyers and a spiritual adviser. Prison spokesman Lt. Vernell Crittendon said he was "upbeat and laughing."
Shortly before midnight, five guards led him, shackled, into the pea-green chamber, and he was strapped to a padded gurney. At 12:15 a.m. medical staff placed intravenous lines in his left arm and then his right. He pumped his fists to raise his veins; witnesses described him as "surprisingly alert and interested." At about 12:17 Warden Woodford asked whether he still wished to abandon his appeals, and he said yes. His last words were: "Forgiveness: Giving up all hope for a better past." At 12:20 a.m. the injection began. As the first drug flowed, Frederick Baker gave him a salute. Massie stopped breathing at about 12:25 and was pronounced dead at 12:33.
He was the ninth person executed in California since executions resumed in 1992, the first executed for a San Francisco crime under the modern law, and, by the Chronicle's count, only the second California prisoner to volunteer for execution in that period. Outside the gates, death penalty opponents, some carrying white wooden crosses and signs reading "Thou shalt not kill," outnumbered victims' rights demonstrators.
Ron Weiss, whose mother had been shot on her front lawn in 1965, sat among the witnesses. The Chronicle did not report any statement from him.
Naumoff's son, Rick, said, "This execution marks an end to a sad and tragic chapter," and, "This execution corrects a wrong." He said Massie's death would let the family put the murder behind them. Menck Rickman, Naumoff's grandson, said, "I'm glad this is done," and added, "Hopefully, I'll get my family back."
Massie's 1979 confession and his 1989 testimony tell two different stories. In 1979 he told Inspector Falzon that he had held up the store and shot Naumoff when Naumoff attacked him. In 1989 he said there was no robbery, that he had gone back to complain about short change, and that he fired blindly at a man he believed was a prison gang member. The jury rejected the second account. The testimony of Sandy Bateman-Collins, who saw Naumoff handing over money, and Massie's own earlier statement supported the robbery finding.
John Robert Vetter's role in the San Gabriel shooting rests on Massie's confession and on identification evidence the Supreme Court called weak and "closely balanced." His conviction was reversed in 1967, and the sources opened do not say whether he was convicted at a new trial. He should not be described as Mildred Weiss's killer, and the evidence that he drove the car was never finally upheld.
Kroll's claim that Massie was mentally incompetent was rejected by every court that heard it, on the evidence of three state doctors and two earlier federal findings. Massie's own explanation, that he was protesting the appeals system, is his own statement of motive.
The early-life evidence was presented by the defense at a penalty trial and was not independently confirmed in the sources opened.
The case is closed. Massie was executed on March 27, 2001, as recorded in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's executed inmate summary and its table of executions since 1978. No further proceedings are possible.
Birth date not in sources: born in Virginia to a 15-year-old mother (1989 defense evidence).
January 7, 1965: Robs and shoots Franklin Boller in West Covina; shoots Mildred Weiss outside her San Gabriel home; robs the Twin Gables Bar in Baldwin Park.
January 15, 1965: Shoots Frank Patti at MacArthur Park, Los Angeles.
January 20, 1965: Arrested; gives two taped confessions naming John Robert Vetter as the driver.
1965: Pleads guilty; sentenced to death by a judge.
June 21, 1967: California Supreme Court affirms his death sentence and reverses Vetter's conviction.
1967: Comes within 16 hours of execution; Gov. Ronald Reagan grants a reprieve so he can testify at his co-defendant's trial.
February 18, 1972: People v. Anderson; his death sentence is commuted to life.
1978: Paroled; works as a law clerk for a San Francisco attorney.
January 2-3, 1979: Robs two San Francisco markets.
January 3, 1979: Shoots and kills Boris Naumoff and wounds Charles Harris at Miraloma Liquor.
January 4, 1979: Arrested in San Francisco; confesses.
1979: Pleads guilty against his lawyer's advice; represents himself at the penalty trial; sentenced to death (May 25, 1979, per UPI and the corrections department).
December 23, 1985: California Supreme Court reverses the Naumoff murder conviction and death sentence.
1988-1989: Retried in San Francisco; convicted and sentenced to death again.
November 30, 1998: California Supreme Court affirms unanimously.
June 1999: Files federal habeas petition.
October 2000: Moves to drop his federal appeals.
December 21, 2000: Found competent to do so; petition dismissed after January 8, 2001.
March 14, 2001: Publishes an article in the San Francisco Chronicle explaining his decision.
March 23-26, 2001: State and federal courts reject Michael Kroll's next-friend petition and the state's bid to limit witness access.
March 27, 2001: Executed by lethal injection at San Quentin; pronounced dead at 12:33 a.m.