Killer Makes Bid to Avoid Execution

SACRAMENTO —  She was only 4 years old when Donald Beardslee fired a sawed-off shotgun point blank into her mother’s head.

“I have only a couple of very vague memories of her,” Renee Geddling, now 28, said in a statement read Friday before the state Board of Prison Terms. “Donald Beardslee does not deserve to live.”

Beardslee, 61, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection Wednesday at San Quentin Prison for the grisly 1981 slayings of Patty Geddling, 23, and Stacey Benjamin, 19, during a drug dispute in Redwood City. It would be the first execution in California in more than three years and the 11th since capital punishment was reinstated following a moratorium in 1977.

Earlier Friday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco rejected the latest appeal from Beardslee’s attorneys, who had argued that lethal injection would violate his 8th Amendment right not to be subject to cruel and unusual punishment.

The Board of Prison Terms clemency hearing Friday was a formal plea by defense attorneys and Beardslee family members asking Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for mercy in the case. It is the second capital case to come before Schwarzenegger since he became governor in November 2003.

Schwarzenegger rejected clemency for convicted killer Kevin Cooper, who was sentenced to death for the 1983 hacking deaths of four Chino Hills residents, including two children. However, the 9th Circuit blocked Cooper’s execution at the last minute, sending it back to lower courts to consider new DNA evidence.

In general, Schwarzenegger has proved much more lenient in prison and parole issues than his predecessor, Gray Davis. Since taking office, Schwarzenegger has granted three pardons and has become the first governor since Jerry Brown to commute a prison term.

The governor’s legal affairs secretary, Peter Siggins, said this week that Schwarzenegger would review the Beardslee case and the prison board recommendation this weekend before making his decision on clemency early next week, probably Tuesday.

The last governor to grant clemency in a capital case was Ronald Reagan in 1967.

“I urge you to follow former governor and President Reagan’s example in this case,” said defense attorney Michael Laurence, a San Francisco capital punishment specialist.

Laurence argued that Beardslee’s life should be spared because jurors who considered his case did not have access to scientific evidence about the effects of brain damage that Beardslee suffered as a child and young man. A former juror, Robert Martinez, has said he might not have agreed to the death penalty if he had had more information about Beardslee’s purported brain damage.

Laurence also presented testimony that Beardslee has been a model prisoner for 21 years on San Quentin’s death row.

Daniel Vasquez, warden of San Quentin from 1983 to 1993, issued a “strong and unreserved appeal for clemency” in a statement read at the hearing. Vasquez is a private consultant and expert witness in court cases.

Joining those calling for mercy were Beardslee’s brother and sister. Both siblings depicted their brother as a weak-willed man and “easy mark.”

Richard Beardslee, a retired police officer, said his brother spent “his entire life as a scapegoat or patsy.” He blamed the killings on Frank Rutherford, one of several people at Donald Beardslee’s Redwood City apartment when the plot to kill the two women was hatched.

Appearing in favor of the execution were San Mateo prosecutors and members of the victims’ families not only in this case but also from an earlier murder conviction Beardslee received in Missouri, for which he served 11 years of an 18-year sentence. All three of Beardslee’s victims were women.

San Mateo County Assistant Dist. Atty. Martin Murray described in detail how Beardslee drove the first of the victims, Geddling, to a remote coastal area of the county and shot her twice with a shotgun. Hours later, Beardslee and Rutherford drove Stacey Benjamin to an isolated spot in Lake County, where Beardslee slit her throat with a knife. The two men pulled down the teenager’s pants to make the crime look like rape.

“He is a murderer. He murdered my baby sister. He butchered her,” said Benjamin’s stepbrother, Tom Amundson. “Now is the time to say goodbye to Mr. Beardslee and close the pages on a dark chapter in our family history.”

Those arguing for the death penalty pointed to the Dec. 27, 1969, killing of a 52-year-old woman in St. Louis, Beardslee’s hometown, as one of the most compelling reasons his life should not be spared.

After meeting Laura Griffin in a bar, Beardslee slit Griffin’s throat and left her nude body in a bathtub, where it was discovered by her son-in-law. The son-in-law later committed suicide.

In a letter read during the clemency hearing, Griffin’s daughter, Sandra Curry, said she believed “the memories of what he saw contributed to his depression and subsequent death.”

“I’m now 62 years old,” Curry wrote, “10 years older than my mother when Mr. Beardslee decided her life was worthless.”

The Beardslee case has not garnered the attention the Cooper case did last year when actors Sean Penn and Mike Farrell, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson and boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter joined international leaders in calling for a stay of execution.

On Friday, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of the Los Angeles Archdiocese urged the governor to grant clemency to Beardslee.