Living on Appeal : 8 Years After His Conviction, a Former Piru Man Sees Another Execution Date Pass

After 8 years on San Quentin’s Death Row, Alejandro Gilbert Ruiz was to be led to the prison’s steel-walled gas chamber Friday, be strapped chest and limbs to a metal armchair and collapse in a white cloud of cyanide.

Predictably, he won’t.

Like the other 248 convicted murderers with whom he shares Death Row, Ruiz has had the benefit of a lengthy appellate process, one that has kept him and all his cellmates alive despite the reinstatement of capital punishment by the state Legislature 11 years ago.

For now, the 51-year-old former Piru ranch hand, found guilty in 1980 of murdering his third wife, his fifth wife and her teen-age son, has had his Dec. 16 execution stayed by the California Supreme Court while he undergoes psychological testing for another appeal.

What makes the case noteworthy--apart from the grisly nature of the shootings, the sadly ironic lives of his victims and e vidence that Ruiz might have been guided by a twisted belief in voodoo--is its symbolic role in the push by California voters to one day use the gas chamber again.

Ruiz, the first killer from Ventura County to be convicted since the death penalty was reinstated, has had the distinction of appealing twice to the state Supreme Court, both before and after the bitter 1986 campaign to oust Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird.

First, Ruiz’ appeal was heard by the Bird court, which had become notorious for finding errors in such cases and had reversed all but four of the 68 sentences it had been asked to review. But before an opinion was issued, Bird and two other justices were voted off the court in a wave of pro-death-penalty sentiment.

After three conservative judges were named in their place, the Supreme Court heard the Ruiz case again. Despite ruling that some evidence had been improperly admitted in the original trial, the court earlier this year affirmed the sentence, making Ruiz’ death judgment among the first of the 45 it has so far upheld.

“This case, in a sense, marks the reinstatement of the death penalty as a matter of reality,” said Richard E. Holmes, the Ventura County senior deputy district attorney who won the conviction against Ruiz 8 years ago. “It sends a message that the death penalty is real, not simply a lawyerly or an academic exercise.”

But Ruiz’ court-appointed attorney, James Larson, said the case is far from closed. In documents filed with the state Supreme Court, Larson has requested a new trial on the grounds that Ruiz, who has never admitted to committing the crimes, has been diagnosed as schizophrenic.

If, in fact, he did kill his two wives--one of whom was mildly retarded from a childhood accident, the other a Holocaust refugeer--Ruiz was mentally incompetent at the time and was unable to adequately assist in his defense, Larson said.

“The trend seems to be to limit or do away with constitutional protections in order to get some people executed,” said Larson, a San Francisco attorney. “But we need to be very careful in making these kind of difficult judgments.”

Meanwhile, Ruiz, who did not respond to requests for an interview, has become one of the few Death Row inmates entrusted to leave his cell and perform daily tasks, such as making coffee, doing custodial work and cutting hair.

“I didn’t do it,” Ruiz told police in a taped interview on Jan. 3, 1979, the day he was arrested. “I don’t have nothin’ to hide . . . I can’t add any more to that, ‘cause I’m the one who is going to sleep with a conscience. Nobody else has to.”

Tanya Staats, born in Portland, Ore., on Jan. 21, 1951, was a year old when a car accident ripped a gaping hole in the side of her head.

The hole, which became a soft spot on her skull that never completely healed, left her epileptic and mildly retarded. Her right side was spastic, her leg and hand slightly malformed. Doctors said she would probably not live to be 15.

But Tanya, a blonde, blue-eyed child of British and Norwegian stock, forged through the special education classes to which her mother sent her. She took Dilantin four times a day to control the seizures. She wore a brace on the leg. And, through a combination of practice and good cheer, she learned to hide her disabilities well enough to avoid the taunts of cruel schoolmates.

By the time she was a teen-ager, Tanya had grown into an attractive young woman, shy but affectionate, dependent but devoted--perhaps to a fault.

“Once attached, she stayed attached and she showed her loyalty to you without question,” her physician of 8 years, Russell Shields, later testified in court. “She had an absolute carte blanche feeling that you were never going to do anything wrong to her.”

Tanya was 21 when she met Gil Ruiz. Gil, 35, polite and well-groomed, was the only child of Alex and Susie Ruiz, farm workers who spent most of their lives on the fertile citrus ranches of eastern Ventura County.

Tanya was living in Castaic, where her mother ran the Ranch House Cafe, a bar and restaurant. Gil, whose previous two marriages had ended in divorce, was something of a jack-of-all-trades. He had worked as a barber and had a cosmetologist’s license, he had been a chef, he could drive a truck, he had operated heavy machinery, herded cattle and picked oranges and avocados. This time, he was looking for work as a bartender.

“He was squeaky clean,” recalled Tanya’s mother, Alyce (Rustie) Ferreira, in a recent interview. “Very well-dressed. Very nice. Very quiet. I was really sold on him.”

She gave him a job, and soon let him manage the place. A few months later, Tanya and Gil were married by Tanya’s uncle, a minister in Oregon City, Ore., on Christmas Eve, 1972.

At first, Tanya’s family thought that Gil was about the best thing that ever happened to her. Once such a bashful child, she would now leave the house on her own to buy groceries. She learned to cook Gil’s favorite Mexican dishes and took pride in her housekeeping abilities. “He really brought her out,” her mother said.

But Gil soon began to show a frightening side. He moved Tanya from town to town throughout the state so frequently that her mother did not see her for nearly 2 years. He refused to allow a telephone in the house. Once, he dropped Tanya off at a store to buy cigarettes and drove away, not returning for several weeks. Police were called to break up their fights.

One day, in August, 1975, after settling at the Edwards Ranch near Piru, Tanya, then 24, did not show up for one of her regular visits with her grandmother to a nearby Mormon church. When her grandmother, Marie Petersen, asked Gil where Tanya was, Gil said he didn’t know, that she had simply left.

“I said, ‘Well, if she’s gone, let’s go and report it to the police,’ ” Petersen later testified in court. “And he said, ‘No,’ he didn’t want to start any trouble.”

Knowing that Tanya could not survive without her medication, her grandmother filed a missing-persons report with the police. But investigators, although suspicious that Gil seemed aloof about the disappearance, turned up no clues and dropped the case.

Shortly thereafter, Gil remarried his second wife and opened a beauty parlor with her in Oxnard.

“I was still in love with him,” said the woman, Ruth Ann Gacey, in a recent interview. “He was a very attentive person. Quite a family man. He was never mean or anything.”

But after 3 months together, Gil left Ruth Ann, who didn’t see him again until he was sitting in Ventura Superior Court 3 years later charged with murder.

Pauline Wachs was a young child living in Paris when the Nazi soldiers came looking for Jews.

Her father, a French Foreign Legionnaire, had been killed in the war. Her mother, unsure of how to protect the child, placed her with Catholic nuns in the French countryside. There she was raised while Nazi tanks roamed the capital, finally emigrating to the United States while a teen-ager.

“Nobody knew she was Jewish,” said her aunt, Louise Holzman, of Hollywood. “She got saved that way.”

As if to compensate for the turmoil of her childhood, Pauline grew to be a fun-loving, vivacious woman, always the life of any party. Petite yet bosomy at 4 feet, 10 inches, 100 pounds, she wore short skirts, spoke thickly accented English and earned good tips at the taverns where she was a waitress. She was a good provider for her three children, who say they were constantly indulged.

But there were problems to test her joie de vivre. She married three times and divorced three times. She was often in for surgery. A car accident on the Hollywood Freeway had gashed her forehead. And then, when she was in her late 30s and working at a tool-and-die shop, her left hand got caught in a machine, severing the tendons and leaving her fingers useless.

“She never wanted anyone to know she was in pain or hurting,” said her oldest daughter, Nina Judkins, now 30. “She’d conquer everything. No matter what got in her way, she’d walk right over it and keep going.”

Then she met Gil. He was strong and fit, with a pencil-thin mustache, droopy face, steely eyes and a cross tattooed on his upper right arm. As a child, his parents had made him do all the cooking and housework. Now, at 40, quiet and well-mannered, he seemed to offer a reasonable degree of security and companionship.

They were married in Reno on Sept. 19, 1977, and moved with Pauline’s 13-year-old son, Tony Mitchell, to Rancho Camulos, the sprawling citrus farm outside of Piru where Gil’s parents had lived and worked for more than four decades.

Camulos had been famous near the turn of the century as the “Home of Ramona.” A historical marker still reminds visitors that it served as the fictional setting for the popular love story of Ramona and Alessandro, a heavily romanticized tale that used to lure trainloads of tourists to the ranch.

But between Gil and Pauline, the ranch sparked little romance. Pauline confided to friends that Gil beat her. Tony, a lanky kid who loved motorcycles, complained that Gil hated him. Several times Gil and Pauline split up. Once, after a big fight, Pauline warned a friend, “If either Tony or myself or both of us turn up missing, raise hell with the police because we will be dead.”

In October, 1978, just a year after she married Gil, Pauline, then 43, did in fact disappear. Tony did not show up for school at Fillmore High. Friends called the police, who found Gil unconcerned about the disappearances.

“I feel bad about it, sure,” he later told police in a taped interview. “I feel sorry. But, uh, my goodness, you know, I can’t let my emotions run away with me.”

Jose Pulido, a senior investigator for the Ventura County district attorney’s office, didn’t think Pauline and Tony would just pick up and leave without telling friends or family. He also didn’t think it was mere coincidence that another wife of Gil’s had disappeared a few years earlier under similar circumstances.

Poking around outside the house with an old TV antenna that was lying on the ground, Pulido hit a soft spot of dirt. Eighteen inches below the surface, he found two decomposing bodies. Pauline and Tony still were clad in their nightclothes, with rifle shots through the backs of their heads.

In the shallow grave, investigators also discovered a small figurine, which they described as a voodoo doll, with a pin stuck through it.

Except for the interview he gave police at the time of his arrest, Alejandro Gilbert Ruiz never spoke about the allegations, never took the witness stand and never explained what a small doll normally associated with Haitian rituals was doing in the grave.

In the preliminary hearing, some friends of Pauline testified that they thought Ruiz was practicing voodoo. Another friend said that Ruiz was into “psychic stuff” and had told Pauline that his parents had a spell on him.

A cousin said he believed Ruiz’ mother, who has refused comment, was a witch. “Not someone practicing witchcraft, but an authentic witch,” he testified.

One detective for the district attorney’s office said in a memo that his investigation found that Ruiz had told his wife that his mother was psychically capable of knowing where he was at all times.

“He indicated that was one of the reasons he moved around so much and would leave at various times unexpectedly, because mentally he would receive vibrations from his mother to return to his home,” the memo said.

But Superior Court Judge Steven J. Stone agreed with Ruiz’ public defender, Louis S. Haffner, that any references to witchcraft would be so prejudicial as to deny him a fair trial and ruled to exclude such testimony.

It is only now, as Ruiz prepares an appeal based on psychiatric grounds, that the details of his religious or mystical beliefs may come to light, said Larson, who has been his attorney since Ruiz began appealing his conviction in mid-1980.

“I’m pursuing it,” Larson said. “I can’t really figure out what it all means. But if it does have significance it will probably bear on his psychiatric disability.”

Although Haffner did not pursue a psychiatric defense in the original trial, Larson said that staff doctors at San Quentin shortly thereafter diagnosed Ruiz as schizophrenic, an opinion that has also been upheld by another psychiatrist.

In his trial, there were enough fingers pointing to Ruiz for an eight-woman, four-man jury to convict him of the first-degree murders of Pauline and Tony. Although Tanya’s body was never found, the jury found enough similarities in her disappearance to convict Ruiz of second-degree murder in her death. Two days later, on Jan. 25, 1980, the same jury sentenced him to death.

In Ruiz’ appeal to the California Supreme Court, his attorney argued that the two cases should not have been tried together because the relatively weak evidence about Tanya was unfairly enhanced by the “spillover” from the slayings of Pauline and Tony.

In addition, he contended that hearsay from friends, who testified that both Tanya and Pauline said they had been scared of Ruiz, should never have been admitted as evidence.

Prosecutors and defense attorneys familiar with the case say that the court under Bird, who often held such practices to be in error, would probably have accepted those arguments and overturned the death sentence.

But the new conservative court, which has been more willing to view such errors as “harmless,” readily upheld the conviction. In a 6-1 decision, the justices agreed that evidence of Tanya’s murder was relatively weak and that some hearsay statements were wrongly admitted but said that such matters did not affect the jury’s ultimate decision.

“I think they have simply gone back to what the law was before the Bird Court perverted it,” said Kern County Dist. Atty. Ed R. Jagels, one of the leaders of the drive to oust Bird. “They have acknowledged that harmless error is just that--harmless.”

But other legal experts, who have criticized the new court for being too hasty to uphold death judgments, said that more care needs to be taken in assuring that no innocent person is ever convicted.

“Whole areas of jurisprudence are being subjected to a very cavalier treatment now,” said Ephraim Margolin, a San Francisco attorney who is president of the National Assn. of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “We are paying an enormous price for the desire to have as many convictions as possible confirmed.”

After the court affirmed the death sentence last Feb. 29, Ruiz’ execution was set for June 24. That date was stayed so that Ruiz could appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court on the grounds that federal legal issues applied to the case. But the high court refused to hear his appeal, and the Dec. 16 date was set.

Many steps in the appellate process still lay before Ruiz, enough so that even if his psychiatric defense were rejected by the state Supreme Court, he could still try U.S. District Court, the 9th Circuit Court and the U.S. Supreme Court again.

Of course, one of those courts could accept his plea of insanity and order a new trial, which would start the whole process over again. And even the most ardent prosecutors, well aware that no one has been executed in California for 21 years, aren’t making any predictions about when the gas chamber will next be used.

For Larson, those delays are an inherent part of the judicial system, a necessary evil to protect the rights of all defendants. “Taking a person’s life is a very serious undertaking,” he said. “People don’t realize how long it takes to make sure the judgment is something we can rely upon.”

For Holmes, the senior deputy district attorney, those delays create a burden that no one should have to bear. “A decision’s been made. It should be over,” he said. “On a personal level, I can understand why he keeps appealing. But as a societal matter, there has to be a finality to things.”

Finality is what Rustie Ferreira wants for her daughter, Tanya, whose remains never have been found.

“This is just a nasty, bad thing,” Ferreira said. “It’s damn near driven me crazy. If I could just know what he did with her, at least I could bury her and put this out of my head.”

And finality is what Nina Judkins wants too, as a way of putting to rest the nightmares that torment her. Sometimes, she said, she dreams of her mother, Pauline, as having no face or of blood squirting from the walls.

“He’s really put us through a lot of torture,” Judkins said. “Just seeing him die would be my satisfaction, knowing he’s out of my life and my mother’s life too.”

But for now, Ruiz ages quietly in San Quentin, with years left before execution.

“I’m not that old,” he wrote to Pauline’s other daughter, Dee Dee, shortly before his arrest. “I’m just beginning to live.”