The State - News from Dec. 4, 1986

A witness who did not testify at Booker T. Hillery’s first trial 24 years ago said he heard Hillery admit a killing believed to have been that of a Hanford girl. Lowell Reightley told a Monterey County Superior Court jury that he was a Kings County sheriff’s deputy when Hillery was arrested in March, 1962, on a charge of stabbing Marlene Miller, 15, in the throat with her own scissors. Reightley said while checking the cells during a thunderstorm one night, he told the prisoners: “God must be angry because someone has killed one of his children.” The former deputy said at that point Hillery, who was hunched in a corner of his cell, said: “I didn’t mean to kill that girl. I didn’t mean to.” Hillery, a black man, was convicted of murdering Marlene and has been in custody ever since. However, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the conviction last January on grounds that blacks were systematically excluded from the grand jury that indicted him.