Stephen A. Nash was a 33-year-old drifter, a former inmate of San Quentin with no regular work and no fixed address, when he was arrested in Los Angeles on the afternoon of November 29, 1956. In the second half of that November he had attacked a man who survived, killed a man named John Berg in Long Beach, and killed a 10-year-old boy, Lawrence Rice, at Ocean Park. A jury convicted him of both murders in the first degree and of two assault counts, found him sane, and fixed the penalty at death for each killing.
He told police and psychiatrists that he had killed 11 people in all, beginning in December 1955, as revenge on society. Police confirmed five of those homicides, according to the California Supreme Court. He refused to identify the other victims or where they died unless someone paid him. The two killings he was tried for are the only ones on which a court ruled.
His case is also part of California's legal history. On appeal his lawyers asked the state Supreme Court to abandon the M'Naughton test of insanity, the rule that asks whether a defendant knew what he was doing and knew that it was wrong. On April 24, 1959, the court refused, holding that any change was for the Legislature. In 1978 the same court changed course in People v. Drew, and both sides of that decision argued over what Nash's case had meant.
What is known of Nash's early years comes from his own accounts to psychiatrists and his testimony, as summarized by the California Supreme Court in 1959. He did not remember his natural parents and believed he had been born to unmarried parents. He was raised by foster parents. He described his foster father as weak and his foster mother as cruel, and he said that both she and the parochial schools he attended disciplined him harshly and without cause. He came away, he said, with a contempt for Christians, whom he regarded as hypocrites, and with the view that charity always carried a price tag.
By the time he reached public high school he was, in his words, an emotional wreck, and he left after less than a year. He then spent more than a year in the Civilian Conservation Corps, which he said suited him because it had just enough discipline and just enough freedom. After that he worked at various jobs in several states for more than a year.
He enlisted in the Army right after the attack on Pearl Harbor and, by his account, was a good soldier for about a year. Then his instability, as the court put it, surfaced. After he went absent without leave twice, he told the Army he was homosexual in order to avoid being imprisoned, and he was discharged. He later called that statement one of the greatest mistakes of his life.
After the Army, Nash drifted between odd jobs. He told psychiatrists he committed a series of strong-arm robberies for which he was never caught, and he was jailed several times on suspicion of robbery and for minor offenses.
In 1945 he was held for five days at Los Angeles County General Hospital for psychiatric examination and then spent 28 days in a Veterans hospital. He was released as mentally sound. He later complained that he had been railroaded into the Veterans hospital.
In 1948 he was convicted of grand theft from the person and sent to San Quentin. He resented the term, which he considered longer than a first offender usually received. He was paroled in 1953. About six months later, after an argument with his parole officer, he was returned to San Quentin as unadaptable to outside conditions. He was released again in 1955.
While he was in San Quentin, Nash later told psychiatrists, he decided to take revenge on society by killing people. He considered derailing a train and rejected the idea as too impersonal; he wanted, he said, to know his customers. He drew up an order of preference: sailors first, then children, then girls of about 15 to 20. After his release in 1955 he tried and failed to join the Merchant Marine, and then, by his own account, began to carry out the plan.
The victims he actually described were men he met casually on the street, and the Rice boy. He said he was especially pleased when a victim had something to live for.
He placed his first killing in December 1955. Within days of it he was arrested for assaulting another man he had met in the same way. He was convicted of a misdemeanor and served six months. Two psychiatrists examined him during that case and concluded that he was not a sexual psychopath. He later explained to the psychiatrist Douglas M. Kelley how he had fooled them.
On November 16, 1956, in the skid row district of Los Angeles, Nash quarreled with a man he had met that day over five dollars and stabbed him. The man survived and testified at the trial. A warrant was issued for Nash's arrest.
For the next ten days Nash moved around Los Angeles and nearby cities. On November 26, in Long Beach, he killed John Berg, a man he had met that day, in Berg's apartment. From Long Beach he went to San Diego and then returned to the Los Angeles area.
Little is known of John Berg himself beyond his name and the place where he lived.
Three days later, on November 29, at Ocean Park, Nash killed Lawrence Rice, who was 10. Nash took a bus back to Los Angeles and returned to skid row.
Nothing more of Lawrence Rice's life is on record than his name, his age and the place where he met Nash.
Nash was caught that same afternoon, and not for the killing of the boy. Police officers making an arrest in the skid row district noticed him standing nearby. They stopped him, checked their records and found the outstanding warrant for the November 16 assault. He was taken into custody on that warrant.
After his arrest he described 11 homicides, the two later charged among them. Police were able to confirm five, the California Supreme Court said. The rest went unconfirmed because he would not say who the victims were or where they died. Nobody, he said, would pay him for that information.
Money ran through almost everything Nash said to detectives, doctors, reporters, the judge and the jury. He treated questions about his reactions and feelings as money questions and declined to answer them without payment. Officials, psychiatrists and newspapers, he said repeatedly, ought to pay him for disclosing what he had done and what he thought.
He also described a fantasy that, shortly before his execution, a high official would pay him a large sum in a televised ceremony. He wanted to spend the money on a Catholic funeral and burial, to show, as he put it, that for enough money the church would do anything.
Nash was charged with two counts of murder, for John Berg and Lawrence Rice, and two counts of assault for the November 16 attack. He pleaded not guilty. The questions of guilt and of sanity were tried separately.
At the guilt trial the defense offered no evidence. The prosecution relied on the testimony of the surviving man and on Nash's own statements. Three experienced psychiatrists appointed by the court, Dr. Marcus Crahan, Dr. Karl Von Hagen and Dr. Robert Wyers, testified about his state of mind. In their opinion he had formed the intent to kill before the attacks on Berg and on the boy, and had planned in advance to kill whenever he found a suitable victim he believed he could get away from.
The jury found him guilty of first-degree murder on both murder counts and guilty on both assault counts. It fixed the penalty at death for each murder.
At the sanity trial the defense itself called the three court-appointed psychiatrists and a fourth, Dr. Frederick Hacker, also appointed by the court. All four testified that Nash was legally sane under the M'Naughton test. The prosecution called Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, a psychiatrist who had become interested in Nash and had talked with him without Nash knowing he was a physician. Kelley also found him legally sane.
Nash testified, and he agreed with them. Any seven-year-old child, he said, knew that under the law his killings were wrong and carried the death penalty. By his own standard, he insisted, he had been justified. When the prosecutor asked whether it was fair to say that he could not and would not obey the rules of society, Nash agreed emphatically and added that he did not have to, with a knife in his hand.
The jury found that he had been sane at the time of every offense.
Nash appealed from the judgment and from the order denying him a new trial. His court-appointed lawyers were Richard S. Buckley and George T. Davis. Maxwell E. Greenberg filed a brief as a friend of the court on his side. Attorneys General Edmund G. Brown and Stanley Mosk and Deputy Attorney General Norman H. Sokolow appeared for the state.
The appeal did not argue that Nash was insane under the M'Naughton test. It asked the court to replace the test. His lawyers proposed a rule like those of New Hampshire and of the Durham case in the District of Columbia, under which a defendant is not responsible if the unlawful act was the product of mental disease or defect, and they asked the court to appoint forensic psychiatrists to help it. The friend of the court proposed instead the formula written by the American Law Institute for its Model Penal Code, which asks whether, because of mental disease or defect, the defendant lacked substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct or to conform it to the law.
On April 24, 1959, the court, sitting In Bank, affirmed in an opinion by Justice Schauer, with Chief Justice Gibson and Justices Shenk, Traynor, Spence and McComb concurring. The court refused to change the rule. A verdict on insanity, it said, was more than a choice between medical diagnoses; it also reflected long-held public views about punishment, deterrence and retribution, and any reexamination should be made by the Legislature, which was equipped to gather facts. It noted that California had never accepted irresistible impulse as a defense. It found the jury instructions adequate. And it said that the evidence that Nash met the existing test was overwhelming.
Justice Peters wrote a separate concurrence. He said he had once been dissatisfied with the rigid application of the M'Naughton rule and with older decisions that limited evidence of a defendant's mental condition at the guilt trial, but that those limits were no longer the law, since such evidence could now be heard on the question of intent. He agreed that any change in the test itself belonged to the Legislature.
People v. Nash remained a California authority on the insanity test until 1978. On September 26, 1978, in People v. Drew, the California Supreme Court abandoned the M'Naughton test and adopted the American Law Institute standard, the formula the friend of the court had urged in Nash's case. Justice Tobriner's majority opinion described Nash as resting on the theory that the Legislature's failure to overturn M'Naughton protected the rule from revision by the courts, and rejected that view. Justice Richardson, dissenting, relied heavily on Nash and on its statement that reexamination should be left to the Legislature.
The change did not last. In June 1982 California voters approved Proposition 8, which wrote a version of the M'Naughton test into the Penal Code. In People v. Skinner, decided September 16, 1985, the Supreme Court held that the measure had restored the test as it stood before Drew. Skinner, quoting an earlier case that relied on Nash, repeated the principle that a person cannot be convicted for acts performed while insane.
Nash's claim of 11 homicides rests on his own statements. The California Supreme Court recorded that police confirmed five of them, but its opinion names only the two victims in the charged killings, John Berg and Lawrence Rice, and gives no names, dates or places for the other three confirmed cases or for the six he would not identify. None of those other deaths was tried in the case that reached the Supreme Court. His December 1955 killing, which he called his first, is likewise described in the opinion only as his own account, with no victim named.
His motives are also known mainly from his own words. He gave conflicting versions of the November 16 attack, and his statements about Berg's conduct before the killing went untested by any other witness. The court-appointed psychiatrists' view of his intent was expert opinion offered at trial.
1945: Held five days for psychiatric examination at Los Angeles County General Hospital, then 28 days in a Veterans hospital; released as mentally sound.
1948: Convicted of grand theft from the person; sent to San Quentin.
1953: Paroled; returned to San Quentin about six months later as unadaptable to outside conditions.
1955: Released from San Quentin.
December 1955: The first of the killings he later claimed; days later arrested for assaulting another man, convicted of a misdemeanor and jailed for six months.
November 16, 1956: Stabs a man on skid row in Los Angeles after a quarrel over five dollars; the man survives.
November 26, 1956: Kills John Berg in Long Beach.
November 29, 1956: Kills Lawrence Rice, 10, at Ocean Park; arrested that afternoon in Los Angeles on the warrant for the November 16 assault.
After his arrest: Describes 11 homicides; police confirm five.
Trial: Convicted of two first-degree murders and two assaults; death fixed for each murder; found sane at a separate sanity trial.
April 24, 1959: California Supreme Court affirms in People v. Nash, declining to replace the M'Naughton test.
September 26, 1978: People v. Drew adopts the American Law Institute test and discusses Nash.
June 1982: Proposition 8 restores a M'Naughton test by statute.
September 16, 1985: People v. Skinner holds that the pre-Drew test is restored.