Tiburcio Vasquez was executed in San Jose on March 19, 1875, for the murder of Leander Davidson. The victim was one of three men who died at Tres Pinos, a small settlement south of Hollister now called Paicines, on the evening of August 26, 1873, when Vasquez and the band he led came to the village. A San Jose jury returned its verdict on January 9, 1875, after a change of venue had taken the case out of Salinas. The prosecution had first charged him over two of the Tres Pinos deaths and then narrowed the case to the one it could prove with eyewitnesses. He told the jury he had never taken a life. He said the same, in one form or another, until the end.
Behind him lay close to two decades of trouble with the law in California, three terms in San Quentin that together came to about ten years, and a state reward that had climbed to $8,000. The Tres Pinos verdict was his fourth conviction. Between the evening in the village and the morning he was taken, eight and a half months passed, and the search for him drew in the sheriffs of four counties, the governor and the legislature. The case that ended his life was narrow all the same. It turned on one death, one key witness and one evening's evidence.
Vasquez was born in Monterey in 1835, while California was still a province of Mexico. He went to the public school in Monterey and learned English there, and as an adult he spoke and wrote it well.
He was a teenager when the American conquest and the gold rush remade Monterey. In a statement he gave a newspaper reporter while awaiting trial, he traced the start of his trouble to the dances and parties of the native Californians in about 1852, where, he said, newcomers forced their way in, pushed the local men aside and took over the floor. "A spirit of hatred and revenge took possession of me," he said, and he described a string of fights in defense of what he believed were his rights and those of his countrymen. He said he then drove a small herd of cattle north to Mendocino County and started out as a robber. He told a version of the same story to a newspaper publisher who interviewed him in Los Angeles after his arrest, and he told that man that his first exploit had been robbing peddlers.
By about 17 he was running a saloon, dance hall and gaming room in downtown Monterey. In September 1854 a brawl at a Monterey fandango hall ended in the death of the town constable. Vasquez was never charged in that death, but it made him a fugitive. He left Monterey at 19 and did not settle there again.
In the summer of 1857 he was arrested in Los Angeles County and indicted for grand larceny over horses taken from a rancher near the Santa Clara River, in the country around present-day Santa Clarita. He was convicted and sentenced to five years in San Quentin as the leader of the men who had taken the animals. He served out the term and was released in August 1863.
He was back in custody within a few years. In December 1866 the city marshal of Petaluma, acting on tips from informants, arrested him in that town. He was convicted of burglary and then pleaded guilty to grand larceny, in what appears to have been a bargain over the charges, and the sentences came to four years in all. A state law passed in 1864 allowed prisoners to earn time off for good conduct, and Vasquez earned it. He walked out of San Quentin a free man on June 4, 1870, and he never went back. Across three terms he spent about ten years of his adult life in the state prison, and by the early 1870s he was again leading a band of his own.
On the evening of August 26, 1873, Vasquez and several companions came to Tres Pinos, a settlement south of Hollister, where Snyder's general store stood. By the end of the evening three men were dead.
The first of the three lived at Tres Pinos, and his was the death for which Vasquez was later tried and convicted. The other two men were Bernard Bahury and George Redford. The courts dealt with each death separately. Vasquez was the only man tried for the death at the center of his case. The first of those two deaths was the subject of a separate trial and the conviction of another member of the band. Vasquez was first charged over the last of them as well, but that charge was dropped before his trial.
The governor answered Tres Pinos at once with a reward of $1,000 for the capture of any or all of the men responsible. The work of the chase fell to the counties. The sheriffs of Santa Clara and Monterey counties met at Hollister to raise a posse and found only six volunteers by late in the day. The Monterey County sheriff soon gave up the hunt and went home. The Santa Clara County sheriff went on south, following the band at a distance of about a day.
The ride wore out most of his posse's horses, and he pressed on with what he had and sent word ahead to the sheriff of Los Angeles County. The two sheriffs joined forces, raised a fresh posse and came up with the band near Little Rock Creek, on the desert side of the San Gabriel Mountains, on September 7, 1873. The band scattered. Vasquez got away into the mountains.
That fall the case acquired the witness it would later depend on. Abdon Leiva, a member of the band who had helped plan Tres Pinos and who had broken with Vasquez over a private matter, gave himself up to the two sheriffs and was taken into custody. He gave the authorities his account of the evening and named the other men who had been there. His information was valuable, but it did not put the lawmen any closer to Vasquez himself, who stayed at large through the fall and winter. The band was active again in Fresno County in November and at Kingston, in the San Joaquin Valley, on December 26, 1873.
By the turn of the year the hunt had outgrown the counties. The state raised its reward to $3,000 if Vasquez was taken alive and $2,000 if he was not, and the legislature set aside several thousand dollars to pay for a manhunt. The governor chose the sheriff of Alameda County, the best-known manhunter in the state, to lead it. He took the field with a posse of eight men.
The search ran for 61 days, the longest manhunt California had seen to that time. The early leads were false. The Alameda County sheriff later said he had covered some 2,700 miles on Vasquez's trail by the spring of 1874. When word finally came that Vasquez was in Los Angeles County, staying at an adobe in the hills west of the city, in what is now West Hollywood, the Alameda County sheriff doubted it and took his posse back north.
The Los Angeles County lawmen did not give up the lead. They kept the adobe under watch for about two weeks. During that time the state raised the reward again, to $8,000 for Vasquez alive and $6,000 for him dead, and the Los Angeles County sheriff offered the owner of the adobe a share of it. The man agreed to help.
On May 14, 1874, a posse organized by the Los Angeles County sheriff took Vasquez into custody at the adobe. The sheriff himself stayed in town that morning, so that Vasquez's informants in Los Angeles would see nothing unusual, and the posse went out under his deputies. He was taken to the jail in Los Angeles.
The Los Angeles jail became the first stage of what turned into a long public spectacle. Crowds came to see him, many of them bringing flowers. He talked freely with visitors and reporters about his career, posed for a photographer, and denied that he had ever killed anyone. The newspaper publisher who interviewed him there took down the account of his early life that he would repeat in other forms for the rest of his days.
Later in May he was taken by train to San Pedro and by steamer to San Francisco, and from there by train to Salinas, the seat of Monterey County, where the case was to be tried. The sea route kept him away from the crowds expected at Monterey. At Salinas some 3,000 people tried to see him.
His lawyers petitioned to move the trial out of Monterey County to San Jose, and the petition was granted. On July 10, 1874, the trial judge ordered him moved to the jail in San Jose, which was thought more secure than the lockups at Salinas or Hollister. He spent the rest of his life in the Santa Clara County jail.
The months in San Jose made him an attraction once again. Visitors came in large numbers to see him, and he posed for photographs and signed them. He sold portrait photographs of himself for a dollar each and put the money toward his legal defense.
The prosecution began with a broader case than the one it took to the jury. Vasquez was first charged over two of the deaths, and as an accomplice in the third. Before trial the charge was narrowed to a single murder, the one for which there were eyewitnesses.
The narrowing left the other two deaths to other proceedings or to none. Teodoro Moreno, another member of the band, was tried separately for the second death, with Leiva testifying against him. Moreno was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Vasquez took that sentence as a sign that he, too, would be spared the death penalty.
The trial took place in San Jose in January 1875. Leiva was the prosecution's principal witness. He gave the jury a long account of the planning of Tres Pinos and of what he saw that evening. A man who had been living at Snyder's store, and who knew the members of the band, identified Vasquez as the leader of the men who came to the village and as the man who caused the death at the center of the case. Several others who had been at Tres Pinos that evening also testified.
Vasquez took the stand himself. He told the jury that he had never killed anyone in his career. He laid the planning of the evening on Leiva and the death on another member of the band, and he told the jury that Leiva had not been at Tres Pinos at all, a claim the other witnesses contradicted. His statements to the press in the months before had not been consistent either: at first he said he had not been in Tres Pinos when the men died, and later that he had tried to stop the killing.
The case went to the jury on the evening of Saturday, January 9, 1875. The jurors returned within a short time with a verdict of guilty of murder. He was sentenced to death.
In the weeks after the verdict Vasquez spoke with a journalist in front of witnesses and said that "common sense compels me to realize the justness of the law." On the night before his execution he dictated a final statement turning against the outlaw life. He did not, in either statement, admit to the murder, and he maintained his innocence of murder to the end.
He was executed in San Jose on March 19, 1875, nineteen months after the evening at Tres Pinos.
Vasquez denied from the witness stand that he had killed anyone in his life, and he blamed the Tres Pinos murder on another member of the band. The jury rejected that account. No court ruled on his responsibility for the other two deaths: one charge was dropped before trial, and the third death was the subject of Teodoro Moreno's conviction for second-degree murder.
Accounts of the time linked him to the 1854 death of the Monterey constable, but he was never charged with it, and no court made any finding on it.
1835: Born in Monterey, Alta California.
September 1854: A Monterey constable dies after a brawl at a fandango hall; Vasquez is never charged and leaves Monterey.
1857: Arrested in Los Angeles County, indicted and convicted of grand larceny; sentenced to five years in San Quentin.
August 1863: Released from San Quentin.
December 1866: Arrested in Petaluma; convicted of burglary and pleads guilty to grand larceny; four years in all.
June 4, 1870: Released from San Quentin for the last time.
August 26, 1873: Three men die at Tres Pinos; the governor offers $1,000 for the men responsible.
September 7, 1873: Posses under the Santa Clara and Los Angeles County sheriffs overtake the band near Little Rock Creek; Vasquez escapes.
Fall 1873: Abdon Leiva surrenders to the two sheriffs and gives his account.
December 26, 1873: The band is active at Kingston, in the San Joaquin Valley.
Early 1874: The reward rises to $3,000 alive; the legislature funds a state manhunt under the Alameda County sheriff, which runs 61 days.
Spring 1874: The reward rises to $8,000 alive; Los Angeles County lawmen watch the adobe where he is staying.
May 14, 1874: Arrested near Los Angeles by a posse organized by the Los Angeles County sheriff.
July 10, 1874: Ordered moved from Salinas to the San Jose jail; the trial is moved to San Jose on a defense petition.
January 9, 1875: A San Jose jury finds him guilty of murder.
March 19, 1875: Executed in San Jose.