O.C. Boy’s Killer Dies in Prison
Robert Jackson Thompson, a death row inmate convicted of the brutal murder of an Anaheim boy in 1981, died of a heart attack Saturday, leaving his victim’s mother still crying for justice.
“I’m angry and feel like I got robbed because he never got executed,” said Kay Brenneman, whose son, Benjamin, was sodomized and strangled by Thompson when the boy knocked on his apartment door to sell him a newspaper subscription.
Thompson, 60, had fought relentlessly through the years to stave off execution. But death caught up with him Saturday after he complained of chest pains Saturday morning and was taken to a hospital near San Quentin State Prison. He died at the hospital of an apparent heart attack, prison officials said.
He had been on Death Row since December 1983.
Brenneman, 62, said an official from the state attorney general’s office called her Monday morning with news of Thompson’s death, and she said it took a few minutes to understand what had happened. At first she thought the official was calling to update her on one of the many appeals Thompson had filed in federal court to avoid execution.
“At first I couldn’t react or get a hold of any emotion,” she said. “But I’m grateful that he’s dead. He’ll never be able to hurt anybody again.”
Thompson admitted kidnapping and sexually abusing Benjamin, but never admitted killing him. At the time of the killing, he had been out of prison three months after serving a three-year term for child molestation.
Brenneman, whose marriage collapsed after her son’s murder, said she did not want Thompson’s death to mark an end to the case. Justice has not prevailed, she said.
“I don’t want there to be any doubt that he killed Benjamin,” she said. “I’ve asked for DNA testing before, and I still want DNA testing of Benjamin’s clothes to prove Thompson killed him.”
Benjamin was an Orange County Register newsboy who disappeared Aug. 25, 1981, while seeking new subscribers in the 2200 block of West Broadway in Anaheim. His body was found the next day in an open field in Rancho Palos Verdes.
Thompson was arrested Aug. 27, 1981. He was on parole at the time for a 1978 conviction for the oral copulation and sodomy of a 14-year-old San Bernardino boy. He had previously been convicted in 1967 of a sex crime involving two boys in Long Beach.
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Times staff writer Garrett Therolf contributed to this report.
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