Authors: Caitlin Rother
Mathews said the Probation Department recommended that Wayne be required to pay $20,000 in restitution fines. It also agreed with the jury’s recommendation that he receive the death penalty.
In February 2007, Victoria sent an electronic voice file to John F. Berry, a reporter at the Riverside
Press-Enterprise,
in which Wayne spoke directly to the reporter.
Berry wrote a story on February 17, quoting Wayne as saying that the truth never came out during his trial.
“The fact I’m being executed doesn’t bother me one bit,” Wayne said. “But the fact the truth wasn’t told, and the people were hurt beyond what they should have been hurt, that bothers me.”
Trying to explain his actions, Wayne said, “It does not mean I was sitting there, enjoying myself, reviving them and torturing them. That never happened.”
Victoria told Berry that Wayne believed he had blacked out during the killings, a result of his old head injury.
“I got into the mind of a serial killer,” Victoria told Berry. “I should be respected for that.”
Based on another audio clip of Wayne’s voice that was posted on the Web site for Victoria’s documentary project—RoomZerotheMovie. com—it’s unclear what Victoria’s motives were in contacting Berry.
In the clip, Wayne said: “Is your recorder on? You have exclusive, you, Victoria Redstall, have exclusive on everything to do with me. I’m not talking to any other media source unless they go through you. Period. That’s all there is to it. I don’t care if it’s the president of the United States. I don’t have to talk to anybody and will not, unless they go through you first. And you tell me that you want me to talk to them. You have that on tape now? Don’t lose it.”
Victoria announced to the media that her documentary was set to go out for bid on March 16, 2007, the day of Wayne’s sentencing hearing. However, when that day came, she said she was still several months away from finishing. She said the same thing in an interview in August.
Seven months after the death penalty portion of his trial had concluded, the day of Wayne’s sentencing finally arrived, delayed in part because Mazurek had been appointed to the bench and another prosecutor had to take his place.
None of Wayne’s relatives came to the hearing, and of the victims’ families, only Lanett White’s attended.
A small group of photographers was finally allowed to film during the proceedings.
Wayne repeatedly stared at Victoria as she took video alongside the media, the click of camera shutters filling the courtroom.
Wayne sat calmly and emotionless for most of the hearing, his face blank until just before he received the sentence, when he clenched his eyes tightly, bracing for the impact of the judge’s final words, or perhaps fighting to hold back tears.
As Judge Smith read off the long list of mitigating factors, Lanett’s father, Bill White Sr., got up and left the courtroom, apparently worried that the judge was going to let Wayne off. Bill Sr. returned in time to utter an exclamation as the judge made his decision known.
Smith confirmed the jury’s finding for the death penalty and denied the defense’s motion for a new trial.
Reporters crowded around Bill White Sr. in the hallway after the hearing.
Bill nodded when a TV reporter asked if he felt a sense of justice.
“He’s a dog,” Bill said.
Asked if he would go to San Quentin to watch the execution, he said, “Sure would love to be there if at all possible. I’d like to see him hang.”
As for Lanett, Bill said, “I remember her the way she was—happy. Didn’t have no fear. No such thing. She’s looking at him [now] get what he deserved.”
Canty told the
Inland Valley Daily Bulletin
that he was pleased the judge seemed to take Wayne’s remorse into account. But, he said, “He couldn’t redecide the case for the jury. He could only decide whether there was enough evidence to support the verdicts.”
Deputy District Attorney Michael McDowell, who took over for Mazurek at the sentencing, predicted that Wayne would die of natural causes before he would be executed.
Forbush later said the defense team had felt that the jury might vote for a life sentence because Wayne had turned himself in, “but I don’t think we were lulled into a sense that we were going to prevail.”
Nonetheless, he said, he thought there were some very promising appellate issues to pursue.
Wayne Adam Ford was transferred to San Quentin soon after the hearing.
In a letter he sent to Rodney in June 2007, addressed, “Dear Big Brother, From My Bayside Villa,” Wayne wrote that he’d stopped taking Paxil, which had rendered him “not mentally gifted for the couch potato life with zero initiative as I have been for the last 8–9 years.”
However, he said, he would like to go back on the drug because it had helped by “leveling my unregulat-able [
sic
] emotional system and I’m once again being beat up by my own disfunctional [
sic
] electro-chemical brain chemistry.”
That said, he told Rodney that he felt he would be able to mask his dysfunction “until my eventual slaughter at the hand of the state. I can’t wait.”
Wayne said he would appreciate a visit from his brother once or twice a year, but he would understand if Rodney wasn’t comfortable doing that.
He said Victoria, whom he’d nicknamed “Speedy,” cared about him and “does all she can to help me be happy,” including buying him a TV and promising to get him a Sony Discman. In addition to the documentary, he said, she was going to help him publish a book he wanted to write.
“If this works out, maybe in a couple of years I can support myself. At least I hope.”
He enclosed a letter that he said Victoria had sent to him.
“I will kiss your eyes, drink your tears (if you have any) kiss every part of you that I can (without getting into trouble) hold your hand, kiss your hand, your arm, your fingers, your lips . . .” the letter said. “I love you like a drug that I cannot get enough of, and will prove that as soon as we can touch.”
So much for the “emotional” relationship.
In the letter, Victoria called Wayne “my baby, my perfect baby,” and said she would give him the shirt off her back. “I was going to say I would give you my right arm to make you happy, but that would have sounded like a bad joke!!!”
Wayne also sent Rodney some photos of Victoria in which she and another woman were posing, washing cars. Victoria was wearing a skimpy pink halter top, pink heels, and short shorts, bending over to show cleavage for the camera.
Wayne scribbled a note to Rodney on the same page on which she’d printed the photo from her computer, explaining that she’d taken these pictures at his request to pose in “Daisy Dukes,” which are extremely short, formfitting, denim cutoff shorts, named after the southern character Daisy Duke from the TV series
The Dukes of Hazzard.
Wayne wrote Rodney that she was “not sophisticated enough to be evil. She’s been careful to be respectful while making the documentary that may never get off the ground.”
Forbush, however, said he was concerned that the hours of conversations she had tape-recorded with Wayne could harm his chances of winning his appeals.
“The effect may be undermining everything that we tried to do throughout the whole trial,” he said. “It’s been borne out that she’s not helping Wayne, that she’s going to end up hurting Wayne.”
But, Forbush said, Wayne has pointed out to him that he might do the same thing if he were in his place, befriended by an attractive woman like Victoria, saying, “I mean, what do you want me to do?”
After his trial, Wayne told Rodney that he hoped his appeals would be successful, so he could go free.
But even if he lost his appeals, Wayne was still many years away from being executed—at least for the time being.
When he first arrived on Death Row at San Quentin, none of his fellow prisoners had been executed for more than a year, and only thirteen since the death penalty had been reinstated nationally in 1976.
In February 2006, the execution of Michael Morales was called off after a last-minute volley of appeals, because prison officials couldn’t find a medical professional to monitor the process. Doctors said to do so would have violated the Hippocratic oath, in which they vow to save lives, not take them.
Previously, doctors had only confirmed that a prisoner was dead, but a federal district judge, Jeremy Fogel, ordered the new requirement when he ruled that the state’s death-by-lethal-injection protocol had to be changed.
Fogel also ordered that the prison stick to barbiturates rather than the three-drug cocktail used previously. The first drug that was injected—through a tube that went through a wall and into another room so that the “executioners” could remain anonymous and hidden from view of the media and other witnesses watching on the other side—was the analgesic sodium pentothal. The second was pancuronium bromide, which paralyzes all muscles in the body, including the diaphragm, and stops a person from breathing. The third was potassium chloride, which stops the heart from beating and, without sufficient anesthetic, apparently causes a person to feel as though his veins are on fire.
Fogel’s actions had essentially instituted a temporary moratorium on executions in California, one of thirty-six states that had capital punishment on its books at the time. New Jersey had just eliminated it, and Colorado and Maryland were looking at abolishing it.
By 2007, the issue moved to a larger stage when the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to consider the appeal of two Kentucky inmates and the question of whether lethal injections violated the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment by being too painful.
By 2008, the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice was also reviewing the state’s death penalty system, considering in particular whether to narrow the definition of what constituted a capital crime. At the time, the law allowed for thirty-three “special circumstance” crimes that went along with first-degree murder, such as using poison, raping the victim, and committing multiple murders.
Meanwhile, as a way to close the state’s gaping budget gap, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed the release of 22,000 nonviolent prisoners at the same time the state was moving ahead with a $337 million project to build a new execution chamber and add hundreds of cells to Death Row.
California had the largest backlog of cases and Death Row population in the nation. Its death penalty system had been operating at such a slow pace that about fifty Death Row inmates had already died of natural causes before they could be executed, and more than thirty had seen their appeals go for longer than a quarter century.
That meant taxpayers had been paying to house these inmates for life terms, anyway—after already paying the higher cost of prosecuting them as death cases and subsidizing the appeals that went along with that. (The annual cost to house a regular prisoner is $34,000, and presumably more for an inmate on Death Row, which is made up of single cells.)
“That is the most expensive possible system imaginable,” said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, an organization that says it is critical of the death penalty, but not on moral grounds. “It’s the worst of both worlds.”
E
PILOGUE
In October 2007, years after Gene and his second wife had adopted a dozen disabled children, he and Rodney agreed to meet for an interview for this book in Sacramento. This was the first time since Wayne had turned himself in that Gene or Rodney had agreed to talk to someone other than the family and defense team about the case (outside of court, that is).
In light of Victoria’s documentary and conflicting statements by Wayne’s mother and other people, Gene said he felt it was important to state his version of events.
“I’m really proud of Rodney. I’m not so proud of Wayne anymore, but at one time, I was very proud of him,” Gene said.
When he first heard what Wayne had done, Gene said, “I felt betrayed, felt he betrayed the family, got the family involved in his sordid lifestyle. It really bothered me. I tried to clean up the mess,” he said, explaining that he retrieved the family’s vehicles, including the trailer, to make sure no one could buy them to make money off Wayne’s notoriety.
So far, neither Gene nor Rodney had gone to visit Wayne at San Quentin, saying they were angry he was trying to manipulate them from behind bars through letters and phone calls, asking them for money, and urging them to talk to Victoria for her documentary.
“I said I want nothing to do with her,” Gene said, adding that he’d told Wayne that twice, before and after he’d been transferred to San Quentin.
“I love him, but I don’t like what he’s done,” Gene said. “I’m disappointed in him, but he’s still my son.”
Gene said he thought Wayne was in the best place he could be, where he couldn’t escape. “I don’t want him on the street again.... He’s made his bed, he’ll sleep in it, and I’ll start visiting him when I’m in the right frame of mind.”
Looking back, Gene said he didn’t think he could have done anything different in raising his boys. “You raise them the best you can, with the experience you have. When you have children, they don’t come with a manual.”
Rodney said he didn’t have a clue why Wayne committed these crimes, but he speculated that he “dislikes women so much that something inside of him snapped. He has a very low approval of women that, I think, are prostitutes, wanton women, who are sluts or whatever.”
Rodney and Gene said they believe Wayne may have killed the first victim accidentally and didn’t know what to do with her body, so he cut her up because he was scared and wanted to get rid of the evidence.
“After that, if he was displeased, you can’t burn twice for murder, so it didn’t make it probably such an obstacle to kill one, two, or three,” Gene said.
Gene and Rodney shared the belief that Wayne turned himself in because he couldn’t live with the guilt or the pain of what he’d done.