Ryan Scott Blinston worked on a tree-trimming crew around Oroville in Butte County, northern California, and was thirty-eight at his sentencing in 2022. Three of the five people he attacked were clients of that crew. He had worked at their homes, and returned to them alone after the job 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. Prosecutors said cellphone location data showed him returning alone a few days later on what they called a scouting trip, and coming back again to cut both their throats. Loreen Severs died. Homer Severs survived his injuries and died in December 2020 of an unrelated illness.
On June 4, 2020 the crew worked at the Oroville home of Sandra George, eighty-two. Blinston returned alone after the others had left and killed her in the same way. Two days later Vicky Cline, fifty-seven, an acquaintance rather than a client, was last seen alive with him in downtown Oroville. Her car was destroyed by an arson fire that night, her body was found by a fisherman in the Feather River near Belden on June 21, and the damage to her throat matched the other attacks.
The case closed on June 14, 2020, in a way nobody planned. Blinston had met a fifty-year-old man that day and been allowed to stay the night in his motorhome at Brush Creek, a remote spot with no telephone signal. The man woke to being attacked with a knife and his throat cut, and managed to force Blinston out and lock the door. A Butte County Sheriff’s SWAT team was at that moment approaching the motorhome to arrest Blinston over the Cline arson. They found him trying to break back in with a hatchet. He fled and was taken after a struggle. The district attorney said afterwards that the team had probably saved the man’s life, because in that place his shouting would not have been heard.
The forensic case rested on blood and DNA from Cline recovered on and in Blinston’s car, and on cellphone location data. The killings crossed a county line, and the two district attorneys agreed to combine the Butte and Tehama charges before a single Butte County jury. It convicted on May 17, 2022 after a day’s deliberation, and he was sentenced on August 4.
A note on the dates, because the reporting is not consistent. Two accounts place the killings in May and June 2021. The individual dates given in all the detailed coverage are 2020, and Blinston was in custody without bail from June 2020, so 2020 is the year used here.