On November 29, 1956, Lawrence Rice was playing on the beach at Ocean Park. He was ten. A man bought him soft drinks and hamburgers and walked with him along the sand and in under the Santa Monica pier, and there stabbed him several times in the abdomen and about eighteen times in the back. Some of the wounds were inflicted after he had pulled the boy's clothes down. Then he took a bus back to downtown Los Angeles.
He was arrested that same afternoon, and not for the boy. Stephen A. Nash happened to be standing nearby on skid row when police made an arrest that had nothing to do with him. The officers stopped him, checked their records, and found a warrant for an assault thirteen days earlier.
That assault began on November 16, when Nash, thirty-three, of no occupation and no fixed address, met a man named Dennis Butler on skid row. They drank beer together at Nash's expense and went back to his hotel room for whiskey. The two men later told different stories about a five-dollar bill: Butler said it was a loan offered when Nash learned he was broke; Nash said it was payment for sex that Butler then refused. Butler ran. Nash chased him two or three blocks, took the money back, and when Butler would not come back to the room, stabbed him once in the abdomen with a hunting knife. He then helped him into the hotel lobby. While the clerk was calling the police, Nash knocked Butler down and kicked him twice, breaking his collarbone, and fled. Butler survived and testified.
For ten days Nash wandered Los Angeles and the cities around it. On November 26 he met John Berg on a street in Long Beach and went home with him for a place to sleep. In the morning, annoyed by Berg's advances, he stabbed him once in the abdomen and six times in the throat, washed, searched the apartment for money and found none, put on one of Berg's suits and left. He described the weapon later as his favorite kind of hunting knife, ninety-eight cents, very cheap and very good, and said he had gone through about three of them. From Long Beach he went to San Diego and back, and three days later he was on the beach at Ocean Park.
Nash was born in New York in 1924, did not know his natural parents, and believed he was illegitimate. He told the psychiatrists about a weak foster father, a foster mother and parochial schools that disciplined him harshly, and a deep contempt for Christians as hypocrites. He left high school within a year, spent more than a year in the Civilian Conservation Corps, and enlisted in the Army right after Pearl Harbor. A year later, after going absent without leave twice, he declared himself homosexual to avoid prison and was discharged, which he afterwards called one of the greatest mistakes of his life.
He drifted after that, committing strong-arm robberies he was never caught for. In 1945 he spent five days under psychiatric observation at Los Angeles County General Hospital and twenty-eight days in a Veterans hospital, and was released as sound. In 1948 he was convicted of grand theft from the person and sent to San Quentin. Paroled in 1953, he was sent back after six months as unadaptable to outside conditions, and was released again in 1955.
In San Quentin, by his own account, he decided to take revenge on society by killing. He considered derailing a train and rejected it as too impersonal; he wanted, he said, to know his customers. Sailors would come first, then children, because their deaths would destroy their parents' hopes for them, and then young women. The victims he actually described were men he met as pickups, and the Rice boy. He said he was especially pleased when a victim had something to live for.
The first killing, he said, was in December 1955. Wikipedia names that victim as William C. Burns, twenty-three, of Santa Cruz. A few days afterward Nash was arrested for assaulting another man he had picked up, was convicted of a misdemeanor and served six months. Two psychiatrists examined him then and found he was not a sexual psychopath. Later, talking to a psychiatrist in jail, he explained how to go about fooling them.
He claimed eleven killings in all, the two he was tried for among them. Five he described in enough detail for the police to confirm. The rest he would not identify, because, he said, nobody would pay him for the information. Money ran through everything he said to detectives, doctors, reporters, even the judge and jury: his thoughts and feelings were money questions, and he wanted to be paid for them. His last fantasy was that some high official would pay him a large sum on live television shortly before his execution, and that he would spend it on a Catholic funeral and burial, for the pleasure of showing that the Church would do anything for enough money.
At trial he offered no evidence on the charges. Three court-appointed psychiatrists, Dr. Marcus Crahan, Dr. Karl Von Hagen and Dr. Robert Wyers, testified that when he killed Berg and the boy he intended to obtain sadistic sexual gratification, to torture and to kill, and that he had planned beforehand to kill whenever he found a suitable victim and thought he could get away. On the sanity phase, those three and a fourth, Dr. Frederick Hacker, were called by the defense itself and said he was legally sane. So did Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, a psychiatrist who talked with him without Nash knowing he was a doctor.
Nash agreed. Any seven-year-old child knew, he said, that under their laws his killings were wrong and carried the death penalty; by his own reckoning he was perfectly justified in every carcass he got. Asked by the prosecutor whether it was fair to say he could not and would not conform to the rules of society, he answered, "That is correct! Exactly it! I don't have to, with a knife in my hand."
The jury convicted him of the first-degree murders of Lawrence Rice and John Berg and of two assault counts for Dennis Butler, found him sane at the time of every offense, and fixed death on both murder counts. On appeal his lawyers, Richard S. Buckley of the Los Angeles public defender's office and George T. Davis, asked the California Supreme Court to replace the M'Naughton test for insanity with a broader standard. On April 24, 1959, the court declined in an opinion by Justice Schauer, holding that any such change was for the legislature, and called the evidence of his sanity overwhelming.
He was executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin on August 21, 1959. He was thirty-five.