Under the Sentence of Death

‘The families of the victims were always overlooked,” contends Coleen Davis, whose son was murdered and who now helps organize parents of other murdered children. “We were supposed to take our handkerchiefs and weep quietly in the corner. Well, we’ve had enough of that. We want to be heard too.’

These are the stories of three such families:

The Cimminos

‘You cannot relate the depth of the hurt. This guy took

your children away. . . . He took your existence, the main

reason you’re here on Earth.’

Lorie Cimmino loaded her husband’s hunting rifle, drove to a cemetery and waited to kill Duane Holloway, the man who had murdered her two daughters.

She had seen a death notice in the newspaper, the last name was the same and she assumed the funeral was for one of Holloway’s relatives. Cimmino had heard that jail authorities sometimes let inmates out briefly to attend family funerals

When she arrived at the funeral, she realized she had the wrong family.

Finally, after months of plotting against Holloway, Lorie Cimmino was persuaded by her husband that it was the state’s duty to punish Holloway, not hers. So instead of killing the man who murdered her daughters, she joined an organization called Crime Victims for Court Reform. She needed, she said, a forum for her anger.

The Cimmino daughters, Debra, 20, and Diana, 32, were murdered in March, 1983. Holloway, a high school acquaintance of Debra, is on Death Row and is appealing his sentence.

“No matter where you go you search faces in crowds, looking for them,” Cimmino said. “You can’t get away from it. You’re never going to find happiness.”

The Cimminos were a close family. The town house where the young women lived and were murdered is within walking distance of the family home in south Sacramento.

“They’d come in, open the refrigerator, stay for dinner,” Lorie Cimmino said. “They were here at the pool, sunbathing. Birthdays, we’d have a party.”

After the killings, Cimmino responded to the tragedy differently than her husband, Michael. He kept silent. When she tried to talk about it, he would snap that he did not want to listen.

He was able to hide his pain--most of the time. One day they went to the district attorney’s office to view photographs of the crime scene. That night at dinner he became terribly ill.

They are still making the payments on the town house Diana owned, because no one wants to buy a place where two murders occurred. And, as a result of the strain, Lorie Cimmino has not returned to work.

“You cannot relate the depth of the hurt,” said Michael Cimmino, 47, a butcher at the California Highway Patrol academy. “This guy took your children away. . . .

“And tortured them,” she said.

“He took your existence, the main reason you’re here on Earth,” he said.

Joined Anti-Bird Campaign

Lorie Cimmino has become active in Crime Victims for Court Reform, one of the groups campaigning to unseat Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird in next year’s election. Cimmino said she joined the campaign because she fears that the Supreme Court, which has overturned death sentences in 33 of the 36 cases decided, will reverse Holloway’s conviction. She wants to change the makeup of the court. Perhaps new justices would be more reluctant to overturn capital cases, she reasoned.

“I’m going to make sure the state does it (executes Holloway),” she said. “I want to see justice done for my girls.”

Four months before the murders, Holloway, now 23, was released from the state prison at Susanville. He was there for hitting a woman over the head with a claw hammer.

Debra, an office worker, had first met Holloway when they were high school classmates. They were casual friends, but she had hundreds of friends; 1,200 people attended the funeral.

Holloway had written letters to her from prison. Debra answered a few of the letters. When he got out he looked her up; she was not interested.

The Cimminos are not sure what happened on the night of March 20, 1983, and that makes the deaths harder to take. How did he get into the house? Diana, an executive secretary, had an intricate alarm system. They know Debra fought before she was strangled because she was bruised and had broken fingernails. But why was there no fight by Diana, an avid skier and racquetball player? She was found in her bed, stabbed and choked.

‘I Want to Know Why’

In search of answers, Lorie Cimmino sat through the eight-month trial. But when the trial was over she still was puzzled.

“I want to know why, why it happened, why when I was such an overprotective mother,” she said. “I wouldn’t give them balloons that would pop. No Lifesavers they could choke on. I drove them to school. Brought them home. If they were sick, I was up all night. I couldn’t sleep.”

At the end of the trial, Lorie Cimmino read a statement asking the Superior Court judge to sentence Holloway to death. She described her daughters’ ambitions and listed their accomplishments. Jurors, who had recommended death and returned to court for the sentencing, wept.

The Finneys

‘How about our rights? When this whole thing began I felt

like I was hit so hard I’d never get back on my feet again.

I didn’t want to get up in the morning; I didn’t want

to do anything.’

Dan and June Finney waited 2 1/2 years to bury their son. They waited until the body of the 6-year-old was found. They waited until the man who molested and killed their son, Malcolm Robbins, was captured. And they waited for his conviction before they could claim the remains from Santa Barbara County.

When Robbins was given the death penalty, the Finneys felt their waiting was over. They finally held a small funeral at the Goleta Cemetery on May 22, 1983, and buried Christopher.

But a few months ago, the Finneys were advised that the death sentence probably will be overturned as a result of a state Supreme Court decision that prosecutors must prove murder defendants intended to kill their victims. The Santa Barbara County district attorney’s office informed them, June Finney said, that a retrial is likely.

“We had to wait years for the funeral, and then we thought we could finally start putting this thing behind us,” said Dan Finney, 33, a maintenance technician at the Goleta Sanitary District. “But out of the blue we hear there may be another trial. . . .”

Finney took a few drags off a cigarette and then nervously began tapping the breakfast room table. “It’ll bring all the bad memories back and dredge up the unpleasant things all over again.”

The Finneys were satisfied with the performance of local law enforcement agencies and the prosecuting attorneys. But they are disturbed by the lengthy appeals process and said it should be “streamlined” to mitigate the prolonged suffering of the victims’ families.

Facing the death of a child is so traumatic that no parent, Dan Finney said, should have to endure several more years of appeals and retrials.

“Somebody has to take the feelings of the families more seriously,” he said. “These criminals are afforded the benefits of all this legal hocus-pocus, the endless appeals, the endless funds to pursue appeals.

“How about our rights? When this whole thing began I felt like I was hit so hard I’d never get back on my feet again. I didn’t want to get up in the morning; I didn’t want to do anything. A week after Chris was gone, our 2-year-old asked us where his brother is. How do you explain something like that to a kid?”

Senseless Crime

June Finney finds it so difficult to come to terms with the killing, she said, because the crime was so senseless and her son was so defenseless. Christopher was 4 feet tall and weighed 60 pounds. And Robbins, she noted, also has been convicted of the murder of two other boys in New Jersey and Texas in separate trials.

“If they have a death penalty, they ought to use it,” she said. “As long as he’s alive and in prison, there’s always a chance he will be released someday. And that’s not so farfetched. Society shouldn’t take that chance.

“He has food, a roof over his head and a place to sleep. He’s healthy and flourishing in prison, and my son is dead. That’s the thing that really torments me.”

The Fredricksons

‘The weight that had been lifted off our shoulders had been

dropped back down. We’re not free. It is not over.’

Next February, and every two years after that for the rest of their lives, Colleen and Darrell Fredrickson will drop whatever they are doing and drive to the prison that houses the man who murdered their daughter.

They will be frisked, and they will walk through a metal detector so sensitive that they will have to remove their shoes before they can pass through without setting it off.

They will sit in the same room as Charles Alan Green and tell the Board of Prison Terms that Karen had a closed casket because of what Green did to her. And they will ask the officials to keep Green behind bars for two more years. And two years later, they will return.

“There’s nobody left to stand up for Karen except us,” Colleen Fredrickson said.

Green was condemned to die for murdering Karen, 17, who had walked out on their marriage after one month. Green’s was one of the first of 33 death penalty cases to be overturned by the state Supreme Court since California reinstated capital punishment.

Eight years after the murder, the Fredricksons appear to be back to a normal routine. They work, he as a psychologist for the Sacramento schools, she as a teacher of handicapped children. And they no longer think of Karen constantly.

“I got my humanness back,” Darrell Fredrickson said. “I think that for a while I had lost it.”

The Fredricksons, who have one remaining daughter and two grandchildren, started a chapter of Parents of Murdered Children, a crime victims’ support group, in Sacramento. But three years ago they dropped out. Each parent had a tragedy and at each meeting it meant they had to relive their own.

“We just determined we were going to enjoy the rest of our lives,” Colleen Fredrickson said from the backyard of their Sacramento home. “That’s the only way you can survive.”

But, her husband added, there “is always a sadness, an emptiness.”

Karen was described by her parents as a free-spirited, independent girl. She broke from her parents, quit high school and married Green. She was gifted intellectually but didn’t want her friends--some were bikers, some sold drugs--to know for fear they might reject her. She tried to change, however. She planned to annul her marriage and was going back to school.

‘You’re My Property’

“He said, ‘You can’t do that; you’re my property,’ ” Darrell Fredrickson said.

Green and a friend drove Karen to an isolated spot on the Feather River. There, Green shot her with a sawed-off shotgun. The friend sat idly drinking beer.

When Darrell Fredrickson went to the county morgue to identify the body, he couldn’t be sure that it was Karen until he saw the mole in her navel, something he recalled from when he changed her diapers as a baby.

“ ‘Get him, just get him,’ ” he recalled telling the sheriff.

Green, now 34, was the first person sentenced to death in the state after the death penalty was reinstated. At the time no one knew what the high court would do with death penalty cases. But on April 24, 1980, a deputy attorney general called the Fredricksons to say the case had been reversed.

“The weight that had been lifted off our shoulders (when Green was sentenced to die) had been dropped back down,” Darrell Fredrickson recalled. “We’re not free. It is not over.”

They still do not understand why Green’s sentence was reversed. The words do not make sense. The court said the facts warranted only a conviction for first-degree murder, not murder plus kidnaping and robbery. And for murder alone, without “special circumstances,” the sentence is life in prison. That means Green is eligible for parole.

At the last parole hearing at the state prison in Vacaville, where Green is being held, an official told Colleen Fredrickson he hoped Green would serve 25 more years. If that is the case, Green will be 59 when he is freed. Karen would have turned 50. Colleen Fredrickson will be 78 and Darrell Fredrickson 82.

Next: The last man executed in California.