On this date, January 9, 2013, 70-year-old Dennis Stanworth phoned the Police to confess that he had murdered his own mother. Keep in mind; he had murdered two teenage girls in 1966. Those murders had all happened in the State of California. The SAFE California and the A.C.L.U are as usual keeping quiet about it. Dennis Stanworth’s case is similar to the one of Robert Lee Massiewho had his death sentence overturned, only to be paroled to kill again in California.
I will post the story of Dennis Stanworth from several internet sources.
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Dennis Stanworth in 2013, left, and in the 1960s ( (Mike Jory/Times-Herald; Contra Costa County Sheriff's Office) |
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Dennis Stanworth. Police photo. (PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/blog/2013/01/11/released-killer-accused-of-murdering-own-mother/index.html) |
INTERNET SOURCE:http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/blog/2013/01/11/released-killer-accused-of-murdering-own-mother/index.html
Released Killer Accused of Murdering Own Mother
January 11, 2013 2:09 PM By Nastacia Leshchinskaya
In 1966, Dennis Stanworth shot and killed two teenage girls. He had seen Susan Box, 15, and Caree Collison, 14, walking in Pinole, Ca., and offered them a ride. He then forced them to walk away from the road at gunpoint and ordered them to undress. When Collison tried to escape, Stanworth told her that if she ran, he’d kill her friend. She came back, and he shot them both in the head. He then performed sex acts on Box’s body. Prior to the murders, Stanworth raped two adult women and one 17-year-old girl. In 1969, Standworth pleaded guilty to murder, kidnapping, rape and other charges.
Stanworth was sentenced to death. He had confessed to everything and, while in prison, was remorseful. He actively objected to an appeal on his behalf, stating“The fact is I did it and I am guilty as charged and there is no doubt to that fact. I had a fair and impartial trial and swear that the conviction, which has resulted in the sentence of death is valid.” However, state law requires automatic appeals of death sentences, even against the wishes of the defendant. Based on several issues, including the dismissal of numerous jurors who objected to capital punishment, Stanworth’s death sentence was overturned. In 1979, he was released on parole under the condition that he register as a sex offender. Now, decades later, he’s accused of killing his 90-year-old mother.
According to Vallejo police, Stanworth, 70, called 911 Wednesday claiming to have killed his mother, Nellie Turner Stanworth, known to friends as “Nellie Belle.” A neighbor in the American Canyon mobile home park where Nellie Stanworth lived believed that the woman had been dead for over a month, because, according to NBC, that’s what Stanworth had told him. Instead, say police, her body was found in Stanworth’s home in the Hiddenbrooke neighborhood of Vallejo.
A relative of Caree Collison had a feeling Stanworth would strike again, telling ABC, “I knew, I knew something was going to happen; he’s such an evil man.”
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Dennis Stanworth is led from San Mateo County Jail after he was arrested in the rape of a young woman in 1966. Photo: Barney Peterson (PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Vallejo-man-allegedly-kills-mother-90-Ex-Death-4181570.php#photo-4013396) |
INTERNET SOURCE:http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?id=9015836
1972 death penalty decision has lasting impact
Monday, March 04, 2013
It's a shocking case: a convicted double-murderer is released from prison, and later calls police to tell them he had killed again. Vallejo's Dennis Stanworth is one of dozens of California inmates released from death row in the years after a 1972 Supreme Court decision overturning the death penalty.
In 1966 Stanworth was sentenced to death for the brutal kidnapping, rape and murder of two 15-year-old Pinole teens, Caree Collison and Susan Box. Their family members are still haunted by the crime.
"He had them strip and Caree ran and he yelled at her if you don't come back, I'm going to kill your friend. She came back and he shot her in the head," a family member said.
Stanworth sat on San Quentin's death row for seven years. Then everything changed.
"The first step was when the California Supreme Court and U.S. Supreme Court determined that the death penalty was unconstitutional," Uncommon Law's Keith Whattley said.
That meant, by the mid-1970s, 174 death row inmates had their sentences reduced to life in prison. At the time, California did not have life without parole, so all were eligible for release.
Besides Stanworth, the group included Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan, who murdered Robert Kennedy in 1968. Manson and Sirhan were not released, but Stanworth and 50 others were eventually set free.
Among them was Robert Massie, who was convicted of murder in 1965 and sentenced to death. In 1978 he was paroled; eight months later, he murdered a San Francisco liquor store owner. In 2001, after the death penalty was reinstated, Massie was executed.
"Even if they're rehabilitated, they've already done something that can't be undone," Parents of Murdered Children spokesperson misty Foster said. "Those people are never coming back, so how do say their life is only worth 20 or 25 years?"
Stanworth was released in 1990. The parole board cited his good behavior and "excellent work record." Stanworth settled in Vallejo, re-married and lived a quiet life in a gated golf course community where some neighbors even knew of his past.
"I figured he had paid for his mistakes according to the law," neighbor Irving Vanderberg said.
But on Jan. 11, Vallejo police arrested Stanworth for killing his 90-year-old mother Nellie Stanworth at his home.
While the Stanworth case and a handful of others are certainly troubling, they are also the exception when it comes to death row inmates and convicted murderers who've been granted parole.
"I think it's hard for the public to grasp this," UC Berkeley Death Penalty Clinic Director Elisabth Semel said. "People who've been convicted of murder have a better rate of success, that is a lower recidivism rate, than individuals who commit other types of crimes."
A 2011 Stanford study found the recidivism rate for paroled murderers is less than 1 percent, much lower than the 49 percent rate for California parolees.
Keith Wattley is an Oakland attorney who represents lifers in prison, many of them murderers. He says several factors contribute to their success if they are released, much of it based on what they do, while behind bars.
"Decades of self-help and therapy programs, dealing with addictions and alcoholism from the past and finding support going forward," he said.
According to the California Department of Corrections, of the 107 death row inmates in Stanworth's "class of '72," 42 were paroled. Twelve of them committed new felonies.
Some worry the exceptions, like Stanworth's case, will prompt lawmakers to overreact by passing new laws to keep prisoners behind bars a lot longer. But those who've been touched by the violence of men like Stanworth say a sentence is a sentence.
"I know they don't have a lot of rooms there for them, but when they're that bad, put them in a 6 by 10 foot cage and forget about them; they're animals," Caree Collison's family member said.
Stanworth is awaiting trial for the murder of his mother. If convicted, he could receive the death penalty.
(Copyright ©2013 KGO-TV/DT. All Rights Reserved.)
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In 1968, Dennis Stanworth was on Death Row for killing two teenage girls he picked up hitchhiking in Pinole. Now 70, Stanworth has reportedly told police that he killed his 90-year-old mother. (PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Vallejo-man-allegedly-kills-mother-90-Ex-Death-4181570.php#photo-4013397) |
INTERNET SOURCE: http://www.timesheraldonline.com/ci_22354305/vallejo-suspects-violent-past-spans-46-years-two
Vallejo suspect's past spans 46 years, two rejected death sentences |
/By Jessica A. York and Tony Burchyns/Times-Herald staff writers Vallejo Times Herald |
Posted:01/11/2013 01:01:45 AM PST |
A Vallejo man who gladly accepted a death sentence after killing two Pinole teenagers more than 45 years ago, has been arrested at his home for killing his mother. Vallejo Police said that Dennis Stanworth, 70, called the Vallejo Police Communications Center about 11:55 a.m. Wednesday, and claimed during the span of about a seven- or eight-minute call with a dispatch supervisor that he had killed his own mother, Vallejo police Lt. Jim O'Connell said Thursday. Officers responded to Stanworth's home at 2500 block of Marshfield Road, near the Hiddenbrooke Golf Club, where the suspect directed them to an undisclosed area where they discovered the deceased victim. Police said a search warrant was obtained for the residence, a house Stanworth lives in with his wife and father-in-law, and a subsequent search revealed evidence of the crime. Police have refused to release details about where they found Stanworth's mother, Nellie Turner Stanworth, 90. It also remained unclear Thursday why Stanworth's mother was at the Vallejo home. American Canyon resident The victim had been a resident of the Olympia Mobilodge of Napa in American Canyon. Ronda Bensing, another park resident, told the Times-Herald that Stanworth had moved his mother out of the park about 10 weeks ago and told her she was going to be placed in an assisted living facility in Vallejo. Bensing said Stanworth's mother returned two weeks later, complaining about her new living situation. Later, Bensing said Stanworth told her he was taking her to live with her sister. Then, about six weeks ago, Stanworth visited the mobile home park and said his mother had passed away, Bensing said. "We have been so distraught," Bensing said. "We were friends and neighbors for eight years ... we are just trying to find closure ... it is just wrenching." Bensing said Stanworth had frequently visited his mother, taking her shopping and administering insulin shots in the afternoon. On Wednesday, detectives interviewed Stanworth, who O'Connell said was cooperative with police, and later arrested him on suspicion of murder. O'Connell declined to say how or where police believe the victim was killed or where her body was found. He said police investigators were still interviewing witnesses Thursday and did not want any news reports to influence their answers. As for motive, O'Connell would not speculate, but said police "have a couple different ideas" and expect witness interviews to flesh out the details. Violent background The suspect has a long and violent criminal history that had apparently ceased, at least since his arrival in Vallejo in the late 1990s, O'Connell said. Stanworth is apparently unemployed, and described as retired on his sex offender registration, O'Connell said. "Our registration detective talked to him every year, but no complaints regarding him had come in," O'Connell said of Stanworth. "(He did not stand out) other than for the nature of the crimes for which he was convicted. Those are fairly egregious." As Stanworth had completed his parole, he would not have been under police oversight if it were not for his sex offender status dating back more than four decades. O'Connell was referring to two murder convictions in 1966. Stanworth had pleaded guilty to kidnapping, raping and shooting two Pinole girls, both 15, on Aug. 1, 1966 after he picked them up hitchhiking. According to Times-Herald reports at the time, Stanworth, then 24, a Pinole house painter and cook, admitted killing and raping Susan Box and Caree Lee Collison at a Point Wilson beach area in Pinole. Their bodies were discovered two days after the attacks. Found at the crime scene in a coma with head wounds, Collison never recovered consciousness and died on Sept. 12, 1966. Months after the attacks, Stanworth also admitted abducting and raping at least four other women, including three in Contra Costa County and one in San Mateo County, court records show. He eventually was caught after raping one woman who, after briefly passing out during the attack and coming to, untied herself, and reported to police who arrested Stanworth several hours later in her car. When Stanworth testified during his trial's penalty phase, his defense attorney asked him why he had confessed to police about the killings. "I couldn't live with it no more... I just had to tell somebody," Stanworth replied in a sobbing voice. "I told them everything I done and wanted to get it all off my chest. I was always sorry after I got through and even apologized sometimes." Stanworth mounted no opposition to being sentenced to execution, and published reports at the time said that after the jury voted to send him to the gas chamber, he gratefully shook his lawyer's hand. Fought appeals Under California law, death sentences are automatically appealed. Stanworth, according to court records, wanted no part of an appeal, and said he wanted to die. He repeatedly said the state should waste no more money on him, that he had accepted his death sentence, and did not wish to contest it. In a letter to the courts, Stanworth, then 27, wrote: "I know that I will never see the freedom of the outside world again, I have dishonored my family's name ... I understand that I and I alone must suffer for my actions and I understand also that the law holds me to task for my actions. "I cannot continue living with cloud over my head, please be merciful and give me an endless sleep as soon as you cans...... all I want, is to die." Despite Stanworth's pleas the state Supreme Court reduced his death sentence to life imprisonment. The Aug. 20, 1969 ruling cited a number of grounds, including that prosecutors had rejected a dozen prospective jurors for cause because they expressed opposition to capital punishment. The justices held that under a U.S. Supreme Court decision, such opposition alone should not disqualify a juror from considering a death penalty decision. The following July, another Contra Costa jury sentenced Stanworth to death, but that sentence was reduced once again in June 1974 based on the state Supreme Court's ruling in 1972 that the state's gas chamber constituted "cruel and unusual punishment." He was eventually released on parole in 1990, according to the state Department of Corrections. Contributing to this article were MediaNews Group staff writer Matthias Gafni and Times-Herald staff writer Sarah Rohrs. Contact staff writer Jessica A. York at (707) 553-6834 or jyork@timesheraldonline.com. Follow her on Twitter @JYVallejo. |
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Dennis Stanworth in 1966 (Associated Press file photo) (PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.timesheraldonline.com/ci_22354305/vallejo-suspects-violent-past-spans-46-years-two) |
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