Steven David Catlin was a mechanic from Kern County, California, who outlived three women in his own family in the space of eight and a half years. His fourth wife, Joyce Catlin, died in Bakersfield in May 1976. His fifth wife, Glenna Kay Catlin, died in March 1984. His adoptive mother, Martha Catlin, died in Bakersfield nine months later, at the age of 79. Joyce Catlin's death certificate gave a natural cause, and nine years passed before anyone was charged with her murder.
Two juries in two counties later found that he had murdered all three. A Monterey County jury convicted him of Glenna's murder in 1986, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole. In June 1990 a Kern County jury convicted him of two counts of first degree murder for the deaths of Joyce and Martha, found that he had killed his mother for financial gain, and fixed the penalty at death. Catlin testified in his own defense and denied that he had killed anyone. More than three decades of appeals followed, through the California Supreme Court, the federal courts and two petitions to the Supreme Court of the United States, and every one failed. In November 2026, with his death sentence still in place, his name appeared on a list of 548 condemned prisoners whose sentences Governor Gavin Newsom said he would commute to life without parole.
Catlin was adopted as an infant by Martha Catlin. His early life was barely touched on at his trials. Years after his conviction, his habeas lawyers described a troubled background: birth parents with difficulties of their own, a family that fell into what they called a "downward spiral," mistreatment by his adoptive mother, abuse by a family friend who died before the Kern County trial, and hard conditions in a juvenile camp, a California Youth Authority school and a California state prison. A neuropsychologist who examined him in 2000 diagnosed brain damage. Two doctors who had examined him in 1986 had found none. The state answered that nothing in the trial record supported most of these claims, and the federal appeals court that reviewed them in 2024 found them largely unsupported or of limited value.
What the record does show is a man who married often. The courts counted at least five wives. In 1966, in a jealous rage, he assaulted his first wife, and she testified to it decades later at the penalty phase of his Kern County trial. His marriage to the woman who became his third wife was void from the start, because his divorce from his second wife was not yet final when they wed. That technicality would matter at trial, when the defense tried and failed to keep her from testifying under the marital privilege. Joyce was his fourth wife and Glenna his fifth. A later relationship, with a woman he was dating at the end of 1984 and later married and divorced, also reached the courtroom, where she appeared as a witness for the defense.
He earned his living with his hands. In 1976 and 1977 he worked as a mechanic for a large agricultural enterprise in Kern County, and he later ran an automotive business with a former father-in-law. By early December 1984 he was living and doing business in Fresno.
Joyce Catlin had a son from before the marriage, a boy who later testified for the prosecution. Her age and the date of the wedding have not been reported.
Joyce Catlin died in Bakersfield on May 6, 1976. In the weeks before her death, Catlin told his sister that credit insurance would clear the couple's loans. Credit life cover cleared a car debt of $6,741, and the benefits of a $5,000 life policy were paid to him.
Her death certificate gave a natural cause. The doctors who treated her had suspicions, and so did the woman who had been married to Catlin before her.
In 1976, within months of Joyce's death, Catlin's third wife went to the Kern County District Attorney's Office and accused him of killing her. The office's chief investigator assigned the matter to one of his staff. One of the physicians who had treated Joyce shared the suspicion and believed he had passed it to the district attorney; another suspected the same cause but had no proof. In 1977 the Kern County coroner's office sought an outside opinion, but the cause of death could not be confirmed. No charge was filed.
The suspicion did not go away. In 1978 or 1979 another of Catlin's former wives took her own concerns to a sergeant in the Kern County Sheriff's Office, who passed the matter to the district attorney. Again nothing came of it. In 1982, after Martha Catlin suffered a stroke, the third wife warned Martha's physician that she believed the older woman was in danger from her son. The doctor examined his patient and found nothing to support the warning.
Material preserved from Joyce's case was kept by the coroner's office longer than was usual. It was destroyed when a new coroner took office. Years later the defense would argue that its loss had cost Catlin the chance to prove his innocence. The California Supreme Court found no bad faith on the part of the county and nothing to suggest that the material would have helped him.
Glenna Kay Catlin was Catlin's fifth wife. She had a half brother, who later recalled a conversation with Catlin in 1977, years before her death. When the marriage took place, where the couple lived and her age have not been reported.
In February 1984 Catlin and Glenna argued in public. She died on March 14, 1984. Catlin received $56,785 in life insurance after her death, a figure the state's appellate lawyers later rounded to $55,000.
Glenna's case was the first to reach a jury, and it was tried in Monterey County. The reason it was heard there has not been reported. The trial court in Monterey made three rulings that shaped what followed. It kept evidence of Joyce's death out of the guilt phase, finding that the prosecution had not proved it even by a preponderance of the evidence. It barred the prosecution from using Martha's death as aggravation at the penalty phase, finding that it had not been proved beyond a reasonable doubt. And on a defense motion under Penal Code section 1118.1 it found the financial-gain special circumstance not true. Separate juries heard the guilt and penalty phases. In 1986 Catlin was convicted of the first degree murder of Glenna Kay Catlin, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole.
Martha Catlin had raised the boy she adopted, and in old age she depended on him. She had suffered a stroke in 1982. By 1984 she was 79, living in Bakersfield, and Catlin was the sole beneficiary of her will. A witness at trial said he had grown tired of caring for her and wished she "would hurry up and die." In November 1984 money was drawn from her account for a down payment on a property. The purchase was never made, and the money appears to have stayed with her son.
On December 2, 1984, Catlin visited his mother with the woman he was then dating. That woman later testified that he was never alone with Martha that day. Martha Catlin died in Bakersfield on December 9, 1984.
This time the Kern County coroner's office did not leave the question to the death certificate. It opened an inquiry, and this time the cause of death was established.
Catlin was arrested in Kern County in 1985 for the murder of his mother. On December 23, 1985, the Kern County District Attorney filed an information charging him with two murders under Penal Code section 187: the 1976 murder of Joyce Catlin and the 1984 murder of Martha Catlin. For Martha's murder the information alleged special circumstances of financial gain, multiple murder and a further special circumstance under Penal Code section 190.2(a)(19), the provision for murder carried out by a particular means. A torture-murder allegation was also charged and later dismissed. Nine and a half years had passed since Joyce's death.
While he was held in the Kern County jail awaiting trial, Catlin met another prisoner who later became a prosecution witness. That man testified that Catlin had asked him to help intimidate the third wife so that she would not testify. On September 7, 1988, after the Monterey conviction, the information was amended to allege that Catlin had been previously convicted of murder, the killing of Glenna Kay Catlin. In August 1988 the court heard a defense motion to recuse, which the defense later abandoned.
Trial began on April 23, 1990, in Kern County Superior Court before Judge Lewis E. King. Catlin was defended by Dominic Eyherabide and Michael Dellostritto. He asked for the two counts to be tried separately and for separate juries at the guilt and penalty phases. The court refused both.
The case against him was circumstantial and medical. A succession of physicians and specialists testified for the prosecution on the cause of each death. Because the Monterey court's ruling did not bind Kern County, the jury also heard evidence of Glenna's death, admitted to show identity and a common plan. The prosecution called witnesses from across his marriages. Joyce's son recalled a warning Catlin had given him in 1975. Glenna's half brother described the 1977 conversation. The third wife, who had made the first accusation fourteen years earlier, testified against him. The defense suggested she had pursued a vendetta. The jail informant told the jury that Catlin had said he killed the women. Under cross-examination that ran to some thirty pages of transcript, he was evasive about the charges dropped in his favor and admitted that he had "basically got out of jail" through his deal with the prosecution.
During the guilt phase the same informant appeared to follow one of the jurors for several blocks after court adjourned for the day. She reported it to the judge and the bailiff. Judge King spoke with her in front of other jurors but without defense counsel present, told her "this won't be tolerated," and later assured her that the man "was supposed to be taking the bus to Fresno" and that nothing would happen to her. None of it was entered in the transcript. The exchange became the basis of the claims that came closest to success on appeal two decades later.
Catlin testified at length. He denied killing any of the three women. He denied making the remarks the prosecution witnesses attributed to him. He denied that his mother had threatened to cut him out of her will. His lawyers argued that the timing made it impossible for him to have harmed Martha or Glenna. A roommate testified that he had returned to Fresno on the night of December 6, 1984, and other evidence placed him in Fresno on December 3, 4, 6 and 7. The defense challenged the physical evidence offered against him. Three defense experts cast doubt, to differing degrees, on the cause of death the prosecution alleged.
The jury asked on May 30, 1990, to have expert testimony read back, and the reading took place the next day. On June 1, 1990, it returned verdicts of guilty on both counts of first degree murder. It found true the special circumstances alleged for Martha's murder: financial gain, multiple murder and the special circumstance under section 190.2(a)(19). Catlin then admitted the special circumstance of a prior murder conviction.
At the penalty phase he stipulated to the Monterey conviction, and his first wife described the assault of 1966. The defense presented a man of value. Members of a family he had guided and mentored spoke for him. A woman said he had saved her son's life. A psychology professor predicted that he would adjust well to a life term, on the strength of his conduct since 1986. A prison sergeant called him "a model prisoner," and two prison supervisors praised his work habits, his labor in the prison furniture unit and his influence on other inmates. The jury deliberated for less than two and a half hours. On June 6, 1990, it fixed the penalty at death for the murder of Martha Catlin. Judge King denied the automatic motion to modify the verdict, and judgment was entered on July 6, 1990: death for Martha's murder and life without possibility of parole for Joyce's.
Every California death judgment goes directly to the state Supreme Court. Catlin's appeal took eleven years. On July 16, 2001, the court affirmed in an opinion by Chief Justice Ronald M. George, joined by Justices Kennard, Baxter, Werdegar, Chin and Brown.
The opinion's central question was time. Catlin argued that the nine-year gap between Joyce's death and the charge had denied him a fair trial, because witnesses had faded and the material from her case had been destroyed. The court weighed the prejudice against the reasons for the delay and found the prejudice weak. It held that the delay was justified because the means of establishing the cause of her death had not existed in 1976, and that the prosecution had gained no tactical advantage by waiting.
The court rejected the remaining claims one by one. It held that the counts were properly tried together, because the evidence of each death was admissible to prove the other. It found that the prosecutor had given race-neutral reasons, supported by the record, for striking jurors who were reluctant to impose death. It held that the Monterey court's rulings did not bar the Kern County prosecution from offering evidence of Glenna's death, because the not-true finding on financial gain was not an acquittal of anything Kern County had to prove. Catlin had never been acquitted of Joyce's or Martha's deaths, so the Monterey rulings on those deaths did not bind Kern County either. The void marriage meant that the third wife could not claim the marital privilege. The trial judge had erred in the timing of his ruling on separate juries, but the error was harmless. Catlin had also asked the court to read the Monterey trial record, and it declined.
Several questions were left for another day. A claim that the prosecution had presented inconsistent expert testimony in the two trials, and claims that trial counsel should have investigated Catlin's adoption and childhood, depended on facts outside the appellate record, and the court said they belonged in a petition for habeas corpus. The opinion closed: "The judgment of death is affirmed in its entirety." The court modified the opinion and denied rehearing on September 26, 2001, and the Supreme Court of the United States denied certiorari on April 1, 2002.
Catlin's first state habeas petition had been filed on August 9, 2000, while the direct appeal was still pending. The California Supreme Court denied it summarily on September 25, 2007, rejecting some claims on procedural grounds.
In August 2007 his habeas lawyers went back to the Kern County Superior Court with a motion under Penal Code section 1054.9, a 2003 statute that lets prisoners sentenced to death or life without parole obtain discovery materials they would have been entitled to at trial. The motion covered all three of his murder convictions. The trial court denied it as untimely, filed four and a half years after the statute took effect. The Court of Appeal for the Fifth Appellate District refused to intervene in August 2008, and the California Supreme Court granted review. On January 27, 2011, in an opinion by Justice Joyce L. Kennard, the court held that the statute "lacks any language allowing a trial court to deny such a motion as untimely." Concerns about delay, it said, belonged in the evaluation of any later habeas petition, not in a refusal of discovery. It reversed and sent the matter back.
A second state habeas petition, filed on June 15, 2009, was denied on March 27, 2013. Most of its claims were held barred as untimely, successive or repetitive; several were denied on the merits.
Federal proceedings had opened in the Eastern District of California on October 5, 2007, and Catlin filed his petition under 28 U.S.C. section 2254 on September 24, 2008. It ran to sixty-nine claims. In April 2009 the court stayed the case so that he could exhaust his remaining claims in state court. On December 16, 2019, Chief Judge Lawrence J. O'Neill denied every claim, refused an evidentiary hearing and denied the petition. He granted a certificate of appealability on seven claims, chief among them the judge's private exchange with the frightened juror and the effectiveness of trial counsel at both phases.
A panel of the Ninth Circuit, Judges Milan D. Smith Jr., Ryan D. Nelson and Patrick J. Bumatay, heard argument in San Francisco on September 26, 2024. Judge Smith's opinion, filed on December 24, 2024, affirmed. The state court had reasonably found that the conversation with the juror did no harm. Counsel had impeached the informant substantially, and the other evidence was strong. At the penalty phase the defense had chosen to present Catlin as a man of good character who posed no danger, a strategy consistent with his denial of guilt. Evidence of a damaged childhood and brain injury would have cut against it, and the panel found the choice a reasonable one. It declined to widen the appeal to claims about the informant's undisclosed benefits and mental health. Rehearing and rehearing en banc were denied on April 10, 2025.
Catlin's lawyers filed a third petition for certiorari in July 2025, arguing that the Ninth Circuit had misapplied federal law on penalty-phase counsel. The Attorney General of California opposed it. The Supreme Court of the United States denied it on October 20, 2025.
California has carried out no execution since January 2006, and in March 2019 Governor Newsom imposed a moratorium on executions, withdrew the state's execution protocol and closed the execution chamber at San Quentin. The state later dismantled its separate death row and moved condemned prisoners into the general prison system. Catlin is held in the California state prison system.
On November 5, 2026, the Governor announced that he would commute every death sentence in California to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Catlin's name appears on the list of intended recipients, with the date of his 1990 Kern County judgment. It carries the mark given to prisoners with more than one felony conviction. For them the state constitution forbids a commutation without the recommendation of the California Supreme Court, with four justices concurring. The commutations would not alter any conviction or restitution order and would release no one. The state's victim services office told registered victims and families that it could not say when the legal steps would be complete. As of November 2026, Catlin's sentence of death for the murder of his mother remains in force while the court considers the request.
The law that allowed Catlin's prosecution nine years after Joyce's death is a matter of constitutional balance. A long delay before charge can violate due process, and a court weighs the prejudice to the defendant against the reasons for the wait. The California Supreme Court's answer in Catlin was that a delay caused by the limits of medical science, coupled with a county's mistaken destruction of evidence rather than any design, was justified. Put plainly, a nine-year gap between a death and a murder charge is justified where the cause of death could not be established when the death occurred.
The special circumstance under section 190.2(a)(19), which made Martha Catlin's murder punishable by death, also drew a constitutional challenge. Catlin argued that it failed to narrow the class of murders eligible for death. The court held that because it requires an intentional killing, it does narrow the class, and that it does not violate the Eighth Amendment.
The clemency procedure that now governs his sentence is older still. Article V, section 8 of the California Constitution gives the Governor the power to commute sentences, but it bars a commutation for anyone "twice convicted of a felony" except on the recommendation of the Supreme Court, four judges concurring. Of the 548 people under sentence of death in November 2026, 382 fell into that class. The Governor's office described the court's role as deciding whether a grant would be an abuse of power, not judging its merits.
Catlin has denied every one of the three murders, from the witness stand in 1990 through more than thirty years of appeals. No court has accepted his denials.
The cause of Joyce Catlin's death was never confirmed in the way Martha's was. It rested on the opinions of experts who reviewed her records years later, and three defense experts disputed it in differing degrees. The Monterey court found her death not proved even by a preponderance of the evidence, while the Kern County jury, hearing the case with Martha's, found it proved beyond a reasonable doubt. The California Supreme Court held that the evidence was sufficient.
The Monterey jury found the financial-gain special circumstance not true in Glenna's case. The Kern County jury found it true in Martha's.
The accounts of Catlin's childhood, including his adoptive mother's treatment of him and abuse by a family friend, come from habeas pleadings and were never tested at a trial. Catlin himself denied part of them on the stand in 1990. The federal courts found the claims largely unsupported by the record. His habeas lawyers also claimed that the prosecution had withheld information about the jail informant's benefits and mental health, a claim the Ninth Circuit declined to review.
1966: Catlin assaults his first wife, as she later testifies at his penalty phase.
1975: Catlin gives the son of Joyce Catlin a warning later recounted at trial.
1976 and 1977: Catlin works as a mechanic for a large agricultural enterprise in Kern County.
May 6, 1976: Joyce Catlin, his fourth wife, dies in Bakersfield.
1976: His third wife accuses him of Joyce's murder to the Kern County District Attorney's Office.
1977: The Kern County coroner's office seeks an outside opinion on Joyce's death; no charge follows.
1978 or 1979: Another former wife reports her suspicions to a Kern County sheriff's sergeant.
1982: Martha Catlin suffers a stroke; her physician is warned and finds nothing amiss.
March 14, 1984: Glenna Kay Catlin, his fifth wife, dies.
December 9, 1984: Martha Catlin, 79, dies in Bakersfield.
1985: Catlin is arrested in Kern County for his mother's murder.
December 23, 1985: Kern County files an information charging the murders of Joyce and Martha Catlin.
1986: A Monterey County jury convicts Catlin of the first degree murder of Glenna Kay Catlin; he is sentenced to life without possibility of parole.
September 7, 1988: The Kern County information is amended to allege the prior murder conviction.
April 23, 1990: The Kern County trial begins before Judge Lewis E. King.
June 1, 1990: Guilty of two counts of first degree murder; special circumstances found true.
June 6, 1990: The jury fixes the penalty at death.
July 6, 1990: Judgment is entered.
August 9, 2000: First state habeas petition is filed.
July 16, 2001: The California Supreme Court affirms the judgment of death in its entirety.
April 1, 2002: The Supreme Court of the United States denies certiorari.
September 25, 2007: The first state habeas petition is denied.
September 24, 2008: Catlin files his federal habeas petition.
January 27, 2011: Catlin v. Superior Court holds that a post-conviction discovery motion cannot be denied as untimely.
March 27, 2013: The second state habeas petition is denied.
December 16, 2019: The federal district court denies habeas relief.
December 24, 2024: The Ninth Circuit affirms.
April 10, 2025: Rehearing en banc is denied.
October 20, 2025: The Supreme Court of the United States denies certiorari.
November 5, 2026: Catlin is named among the intended recipients of commutation of all California death sentences to life without parole, subject to California Supreme Court review.