10 Years After Murderous Rampage, Campus Killer Says He Is Now Sane

It happened 10 years ago this week, and it took 10 minutes. It was Orange County’s worst homicide.

On July 12, 1976, Edward Charles Allaway, a janitor at Cal State Fullerton, made history as a mass murderer. Using a .22-caliber rifle, he shot nine co-workers at close range, killing seven. Left dead were two fellow janitors, a photographer, a retired professor, a graphics artist, a library assistant and an audio technician.

He was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Jurors could not reach a verdict in the sanity phase of the trial, so Orange County Superior Court Judge Robert P. Kneeland, now retired, ruled that Allaway was insane. Kneeland said he doubted that Allaway would ever be released from a mental hospital.

Today, after a decade of treatment, Allaway says he is sane and has asked that the court move him to a half-way house or to a less restrictive hospital setting. “If you want to be a human being, in all sense of the human being--laughter, love, sadness, sorrow, the whole bit--you cannot be in here,” Allaway said.

Now 47, he was interviewed the other day at Atascadero State Hospital, a 1,000-bed, high-security facility 20 miles north of San Luis Obispo.

“I have these feelings,” he said. “I’ve regained them, and I’m fighting to get into a better place, a better setting for myself.”

Allaway, who spent a month in a Michigan mental hospital in 1971, said he went crazy at Fullerton because co-workers in the campus media center taunted him about pornographic movies that, they joked, might have been made there. The movies, they kidded Allaway, might even have starred his attractive, 22-year-old wife.

In addition, Allaway, once a Baptist Sunday school teacher, was deeply offended by the obscene graffiti and homosexual activity he found in a men’s restroom, he said.

“I would walk in to clean, and the men would say, ‘Let’s make it a threesome’ or something, and I would say, ‘Gosh no, I’m trying to make a buck, leave me alone,’ ” he recalled.

In October, 1985, Allaway took his first step toward release from Atascadero by filing documents in Orange County Superior Court asking that he be moved to Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino.

The Orange County district attorney’s office vehemently opposed his request, saying the “return of Mr. Allaway to a facility near Orange County would only serve to inflame local passions and inflict more suffering on the relatives and survivors of Mr. Allaway’s murderous rampage.”

After a Dec. 13, 1985, court hearing, Allaway’s Orange County public defender persuaded him to withdraw his request--a move Allaway now says he regrets.

Under California law, Allaway is entitled to a sanity hearing every year. If his psychiatrists say he is sane, he can present his case to a jury. If the jury believes him and decides in his favor, he can, deputy public defender James Schumacher said, be released without restrictions.

Not surprisingly, Allaway’s bid for freedom has infuriated and shaken the victims’ relatives, including Patricia Almazan, whose father, graphics artist Frank Teplansky, was shot several times by Allaway.

She says the insanity plea was a ruse.

“There is a fine line between anger and insanity, and the fine line wasn’t crossed,” insists Almazan, an Upland free-lance writer.

Through years of piecing together shreds of information and innuendo, Almazan is convinced that in 1976 Allaway was about to “blow the whistle” on the “decadent behavior” of his co-workers and the people around him.

According to trial testimony, media center employees were showing commercially produced pornographic films. After the murders, campus police seized about 20 such films. Some people close to the case, including Almazan, believe that pornographic films might even have been made at the university, although no evidence of that ever has been presented.

Allaway said his co-workers repeatedly told him that his wife, Bonnie, was appearing in the films, but he never saw any films to prove it.

Bonnie Allaway, then a banquet waitress at the Hilton Inn in Anaheim, was a pretty, vivacious, strawberry blonde. She had moved out of their apartment about two months before the killings, before divorcing him. Bonnie Allaway has since changed her name and moved out of the area.

Michael Riley, a media center photographer, denies that any pornographic movies were made on campus. He said the staff produced one 16-millimeter film about counseling techniques for a high school, but that was all. “We had a basic camera and a few lights,” said Riley in a recent interview. “We were in the infancy of our television studio.”

Riley, who was not at work on the day of the murders, said no one in the media center wants to see Allaway released. “They want to see him buttoned up,” he said. “He is not forgotten here.”

Almazan, whose blue eyes filled with tears as she discussed the case, said that even after 10 years, she must pursue the truth about what caused what she calls the “July 12 massacre.” “If all that hadn’t been going on,” she said, discussing the pornographic movies, “those people would be alive today.”

Allaway said he doesn’t remember killing anyone.

“I don’t remember firing the weapon. I don’t remember the recall, the noise, the kick of the rifle, the rejection of the shell. I have no knowledge of this. It did happen, but not in my mind,” he said during the 2 1/2-hour interview in the visitors’ room at Atascadero.

“I didn’t go there to shoot anybody--to hurt anybody. I went there because I was so frightened. I understand it’s stupid thinking. It’s dumb.”

At the time of the killings, Allaway wanted out. Co-workers testified during his trial that Allaway had filed a grievance and was due to meet that Monday morning with Bruce Jacobson, an equipment technician who was a representative of the California State Employees Assn.

Allaway denies filing a grievance, and no grievance was ever found. But he acknowledged in the interview that he had talked to Maynard Hoffman, his supervisor, about transferring to another building. Nothing came of it.

Wearing a snap-front khaki uniform, white running shoes and a black plastic watch, Allaway spoke in measured tones about his bid for release, his troubled marriage and the day that shattered his life and the lives of nine families. Several times, tears welled up in his eyes and his hands shook.

Allaway said he was “a lousy janitor” at Cal State Fullerton. But, he said, he loved working in the library, where he could read books during his breaks.

He slowly described the day of the killings.

“I went to work. I was so afraid, so scared. I can remember the morning. My thought was to quit the job, don’t go to work, go on a vacation, go to work. I couldn’t make a decision. I had a rifle. I said nobody would hurt me. Nobody’s going to mess with me, so I could work all day long. When I make this statement, it tells you just how illogical I was--just how sick I had become.”

It was not the first time Allaway had exhibited psychotic behavior. His first wife, Carol, testified that she convinced him to admit himself to Oakwood Hospital, a mental facility in Dearborn, Mich., after he accused her of having affairs with other men in their bed while he slept.

She said Allaway put a bolt lock on their bedroom door and stashed two loaded guns underneath their bed. She also testified that one time Allaway seemed surprised to see her because he was convinced she had been kidnaped, drugged and molested by a group of men.

At Fullerton, Allaway recalled, the talk of sex movies and the reality of homosexual activity in the men’s room were too much to take.

“After a while it became an open joke, and after a while I lost the humor,” he said, his pale blue eyes unblinking. “I wasn’t able to express what was really going on, and I became very frightened. The more frightened I became, the smaller I made my world.”

(Not everything has changed at Cal State Fullerton. In May, 1986, campus officials closed a men’s restroom in the Performing Arts Building after the student newspaper published articles about alleged homosexual activity there.)

On the Friday before the killings, Allaway said he went out to shop for groceries. Before returning home, he bought a semiautomatic rifle and shells at a store in Buena Park. Court records showed that Allaway failed to disclose on the gun registration form that he had been a mental patient and that he had been dishonorably discharged from the Marine Corps in 1958. He said he was discharged for having venereal disease three times.

Allaway told a court-appointed psychiatrist that he spent a restless weekend, not eating or sleeping very well.

On Monday, he drove to the university, arriving about 8:30 a.m. Judy Mandel, the university public relations director, recalls that it was a warm, hazy morning. Students were arriving for summer school classes. The Los Angeles Rams were running plays on a nearby football field.

Mandel, who was walking her sons to a sports camp, said she remembers thinking it was odd to see a car parked on the walkway on the western side of the library. It was Allaway’s.

Toting his rifle, Allaway entered the library and opened a side door marked with the Instructional Media Center logo. He walked down two flights of stairs to the basement. The media center’s long beige hallways are lined with small, windowless offices. It is a dark and subdued place.

Once inside, witnesses said, Allaway moved quickly from office to office, shooting some people, sparing others.

His bullets struck most of his victims in the upper body or head. He chased two fellow janitors, Debbie Paulsen and Donald Karges, down the hall before shooting them, according to witnesses at his trial.

Jacobson, the equipment technician with whom Allaway was scheduled to meet, hit Allaway on the head with a metal statue before Allaway shot him at point-blank range. Allaway said he remembers thinking that he had been shot because his head hurt. Before taking a service elevator to the first floor, he also shot professor emeritus Seth Fessenden and photographer Paul F. Herzberg.

Inside the library, Allaway confronted Stephen Becker, a library assistant and son of Ernest A. Becker, one of the university’s founders. Becker tried to stop Allaway, but his heroism ended when he died on the sidewalk a few yards outside the library.

Before fleeing, Allaway also shot Donald W. Keran, an associate librarian, and Maynard Hoffman, supervisor of the morning shift custodians. Hoffman and Keran survived their wounds. Keran died last December after heart surgery, according to university officials. Hoffman is retired and believed to be living somewhere in Orange County.

Emergency workers came upon a scene of unspeakable horror.

“They (the victims) were just dropped in their tracks with Pepsi cans and papers in their hands,” Carmon Johnson, a paramedic, told reporters. “I looked down a long hallway and saw bullet shells and bodies from hell to breakfast.

“It looked like Vietnam.”

His clothes covered with blood, Allaway drove himself to the Hilton to tell Bonnie that he had done “something terrible.” According to the police report, he borrowed a dime from her to call the Fullerton police. He handed her six $20 bills before police surrounded him--guns drawn--to arrest him.

Today, Allaway insists that there was no common thread between his victims.

“I don’t think you could make a list and find those people in the library at any given time. It’s like an open supermarket with people coming or going.”

He said some of those he killed were “real good friends.” During the trial, testimony revealed that Allaway had dated one victim, Debbie Paulsen, and had asked her to move in with him.

Five days a week, Allaway spends his time cleaning hospital floors with a $20,000 machine he calls his “Porsche.” He lives in a dormitory with eight other patients and serves as ward librarian. He attends some group therapy sessions but no longer meets regularly with a psychiatrist.

Ronald Y. Butler, Allaway’s defense lawyer and now Orange County’s chief public defender, said the case remains his most celebrated.

“It is probably far and above the worst tragedy that ever occurred in Orange County in connection with a homicide,” said Butler, whose office walls are decorated with three artist’s sketches of the trial.

“He was probably the best client I’ve ever had,” Butler said. “You talked to him, and you couldn’t believe this individual could ever be violent.”

Butler said Allaway has always been a “model prisoner.”

“As we look back, society has been protected. They can keep him for the rest of his life.”

Chief Orange County Deputy Dist. Atty. James Enright, who prosecuted Allaway, refused to discuss the case.

“I’d be crazier than him to (discuss it),” he said. “This guy hasn’t done anything to get his sanity restored.”

Atascadero officials agree.

A May 14 letter to the court said:

“The Interdisciplinary Team treating this patient has no evidence his sanity has been restored at this time. Mr. Allaway requires continued treatment at Atascadero State Hospital.”