The Region - News from May 25, 1986

A Redlands man was convicted in San Bernardino Superior Court of first-degree murder in the course of raping a young Japanese woman, who came to his door selling Easter eggs to raise money for the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. David Spooner, 23, told a psychologist after his arrest in the April, 1985, killing that he was afraid Mayumi Komatsu, 22, would try to brainwash him and ordered her to leave. He said that when she did not he flew into a rage, struck her over the head with a rifle butt, raped her and beat her. Thinking she was dead, he put her in the bed of his pickup truck and was driving her away to bury her when--apparently still alive--she either climbed out or fell into the street and was run over by a car. She died at the scene.