Death Verdict Repeated for Tustin Killer : Original Sentence Overturned by High Court Under Bird

John Galen Davenport, the last of four Orange County men to be retried after death penalty reversals by the state Supreme Court under former Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird, received a new death verdict from a jury today.

Davenport, 34, of Tustin had been convicted eight years ago in the March 27, 1980, stabbing death of 30-year-old Gayle Ann Lingle in a vacant Fullerton field. She had been stabbed more than a dozen times and was found impaled on a four-foot wooden stake.

The Bird court upheld Davenport’s conviction but ordered a new death penalty trial, ruling that errors had been made by both the trial judge and the prosecutor.

Davenport had previously served a four-year prison sentence, from 1975 to 1979, for the stabbing of a young Tustin woman, Suzanne Tewes. He had been out of prison less than eight months when Lingle was killed. Tewes was the key witness against him in the penalty phase at his first trial in 1981 and again at his new trial.

Davenport admitted stabbing Tewes but denied killing Lingle. He testified at length at his first trial. At the new trial, his lawyers put him on the witness stand only for the limited purpose of getting his prison artwork into evidence.

Davenport was known as “Honda Dave” to his friends and, during his first trial, his bright red-and-white Honda 350 motorcycle sat in front of the judge’s bench every day.

It was the key evidence against him, because Davenport had put two kinds of tires on the bike, each with a unique tread. Both treads, almost on top of each other, were cleanly reproduced in plaster casts by crime lab specialists from prints found at the scene where Lingle’s body was discovered in a vacant field at Myford Road and Michelle Drive in Fullerton.

Lingle had last been seen leaving the Sit ‘n Bull bar in Tustin with Davenport at about 1 a.m. on the morning she was killed.

Superior Court Judge Everett W. Dickey set formal sentencing for June 23.

The three other men who won new death penalty trials in Orange County--Marcelino Ramos, Rodney Alcala, and Theodore Frank--all received new death sentences.