The bodies turned up in the irrigation system. Fresno County is cut through with canals and ditches carrying water to the orchards, and between 1981 and 1984 four women were found in them or beside them. Investigators called the man they were looking for the Ditchbank Murderer.
Wilbur Lee Jennings was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, on February 28, 1940, and grew up in Selma, in the San Joaquin Valley. He had a criminal record for violent sexual offenses going back to the early 1960s and had spent much of his adult life in prison, out again by the start of the decade in which the killings began.
Karen Robinson, twenty-one, was killed in August 1983. Jacqueline Frazier, twenty-six, was killed in July 1984, Olga Cannon, twenty-three, in August, and Linda Johnson, twenty-eight, in September. Linda Johnson was found seminude in a canal outside Fresno. The women were raped and robbed, beaten or drowned, and left in the water.
He was arrested on September 13, 1984. The case the prosecution built was not forensic in the modern sense, because in 1984 it could not be: it rested on physical objects belonging to the dead women, identified in court by their families, and on the testimony of Jennings's own relatives, friends and acquaintances alongside the victims' friends. Among the objects were a baseball bat and a pipe with blood on them, which investigators put forward as the likely weapons.
The trial ran in 1986 at Fresno County Superior Court before Judge Mario G. Olmos. The jury convicted him of the first-degree murders of Linda Johnson, Olga Cannon and Jacqueline Frazier, and of the second-degree murder of Karen Robinson. It also convicted him of a long list of further felonies against those four women and three others who survived: forcible sexual assaults, robberies, arsons, and a kidnapping for robbery.
The degree distinction is not a technicality. A second-degree conviction means the jury was not satisfied the killing was premeditated or committed in the course of a qualifying felony, and Karen Robinson is the one victim of the four whose death the jury declined to treat that way.
The jury sustained eight special circumstance allegations, finding that Johnson, Cannon and Frazier had been killed during a robbery, that Johnson and Cannon had been killed during a rape, and that Jennings had been convicted of more than one murder. On November 20, 1986 it returned a verdict of death. The court added life without parole for the kidnapping, fifteen years to life for the second-degree murder, and a determinate term of forty-nine years and eight months for the remaining counts.
Jennings maintained his innocence. He accused the prosecutor of pressuring witnesses into false testimony, and he never accepted the verdict.
The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment on April 11, 1991, in an opinion by Chief Justice Lucas. Three justices joined a separate opinion by Justice Mosk concurring in part and dissenting in part, so the court was not unanimous on every question.
DNA reopened two older deaths. In October 2005 Fresno investigators linked Jennings to the killing of Clarice Reinke, seventy-six, raped and murdered in Fresno in June 1983, and of Debra Chandler, seventeen, raped and murdered in July 1981; one account says she was from Sacramento, and her body was found by an irrigation ditch. Reinke's case held a complication: a second man's DNA was also found, and it was matched to Alvin Johnson, sixty-four, then imprisoned for a rape-murder in Utah. Some reports date the announcement of the Chandler link to 2008. Jennings called the results falsified.
Neither case reached a verdict. By then he had prostate cancer and diabetes, and the trial was postponed again and again. The Chandler prosecution began in late 2013, and Jennings was moved from death row at San Quentin to the Sacramento County jail, where he died of complications of his illnesses on February 11, 2014, at seventy-three, twenty-eight years after he was condemned. The two later deaths rest on DNA matches and charges that no court ever tried.