Ryan Scott Blinston worked on a tree-trimming crew around Oroville in Butte County, northern California. He was born in California on August 26, 1983. At twenty-two, in 2006, he stole a black Ford Explorer in Hanover, New Hampshire, kept it for three days and was convicted of felony theft. Back in California, in 2013, he burglarized three homes and took three guns and a Lexus, and served time for it at Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga. Three of the five people he attacked in 2020 were clients of the crew he worked on. He had been at their homes on the job, and he went back to them alone after it was finished.
Loreen Severs, eighty-eight, and her husband Homer, ninety-one, lived at Los Molinos in Tehama County. Blinston was part of a crew that worked at their home on May 18, 2020. Cellphone location data showed him driving back alone on the evening of May 22, on what prosecutors called a scouting trip, and returning home to Oroville. The next morning, May 23, he drove to Los Molinos again, forced his way into the house and cut both their throats. Loreen Severs died. Homer Severs survived his injuries and died in December 2020 of an unrelated illness.
On June 4 the crew worked at the Oroville home of Sandra George, eighty-two. After the others had left, Blinston went back by himself and cut her throat inside the house. She was found at five the next afternoon.
Two days later, on June 6, Vicky Cline, an acquaintance rather than a client, was last seen alive with him in downtown Oroville. Most reports give her age as fifty-seven, at least one as fifty-six. That night her car was set on fire with an accelerant between Pine and Robinson streets. On June 21 a fisherman found her remains in the Feather River near Belden, and her throat had been cut like the others.
By then Blinston was in custody. A Butte County sheriff's SWAT team, looking for him over the burning of Cline's car, tracked him before dawn on June 14 to a motorhome in the woods at Brush Creek, a remote spot with no telephone signal. Its owner, Robert Alan Smith, fifty, had met Blinston that day and let him stay the night. He woke to Blinston attacking him with a knife and cutting his throat, forced him out and locked the door. Blinston went off, came back with a hatchet and was trying to break in again when the team arrived; they heard a man's muffled screams inside and loud banging on the outside. Blinston ran into the woods, would not drop the hatchet, and was taken after a short struggle with a stun gun and pepper spray. The district attorney said afterward that the team had probably saved Smith's life, because in that place nobody would have heard him.
The forensic case rested on blood and DNA from Cline recovered on and in Blinston's car, and on cellphone location data. Prosecutors did not offer a motive, except to say that robbery was not one. On May 13, 2021, Butte County charged him with the three murders and the attempted murder of Homer Severs on top of the Brush Creek case; he was thirty-seven. Because the killings crossed a county line, the Butte and Tehama district attorneys agreed to try all the charges before a single Butte County jury.
The trial opened on May 2, 2022. The prosecutors, Deputy District Attorneys Niels Bringsjord and Mark Emmons, called thirty-five witnesses, among them experts on DNA and cellphone location, forensic pathologists and an anthropologist, and put in hundreds of photographs, diagrams, phone records, business records and surveillance videos. Blinston did not testify. On May 17, after a day's deliberation, the jury convicted him of three counts of first-degree murder, two of attempted murder, arson and resisting arrest. "The entire trial he was like a gargoyle," said Vicky Cline's daughter, Shandella Clark. "I mean, he was a statue."
At the sentencing on August 4 he received three terms of life without parole, two of seven years to life and sixteen years and eight months. The Severses' nephew, Frank Severs, addressed the court, and so did Robert Alan Smith. "I have to wake up every morning and look in the mirror and see the scar on my neck," Smith said. "In a sense, it's a life sentence for me." The Butte County district attorney, Mike Ramsey, said that looking into Blinston's eyes he saw "pure evil" and "dead eyes." He was held first at North Kern State Prison and later at Pleasant Valley.
A few accounts place the killings in May and June 2021, the year he was charged. The individual dates given in the court record and the prosecutors' statements are all in 2020.