Second Trial Brings Same Sentence: Death : Defendant in Impalement Murder Tells Court He Is Not ‘Coldblooded, Inhumane Monster’

John Galen Davenport, denying that he is “the coldblooded, inhumane monster some people believe me to be,” on Monday was sentenced to death for the second time in the death of a Tustin woman found impaled on a wooden stake.

Davenport is the last of four defendants retried in Orange County after the state Supreme Court under then-Presiding Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird reversed their death sentences. All four men now have been returned to Death Row at San Quentin.

On March 27, 1980, Gayle Ann Lingle, 30, was stabbed repeatedly and impaled on a stake while she was still alive. Her nude body was found in a vacant field in Irvine.

“I cannot imagine a more horrible way for a person to die,” Superior Court Judge Everett W. Dickey said in sentencing Davenport.

Jail Attacks Claimed

The sentence came on Davenport’s 34th birthday. His girlfriend, Judy Dunn, said that in one way it was the present he wanted most.

“He’s anxious to get back to San Quentin and out of the Orange County Jail,” she said.

Because of incidents involving deputies and other inmates, Davenport was housed in disciplinary isolation for most of the four years of his return stay in Orange County Jail. Davenport, however, claims that he has been the victim of unprovoked attacks by jail deputies on numerous occasions.

Davenport’s complaints about the jail were incorporated in a three-page statement to the court which his attorney, Gary M. Pohlson, read for him Monday. He also complained about prosecutors calling him unremorseful.

“Why would I feel remorse; I did not kill her,” Davenport stated. He added: “I don’t remember seeing tears in the eyes of the investigators when they told me about her death.”

At the time of Lingle’s death, Davenport, of Tustin, had been on parole just a few months after serving nearly five years in prison for the 1974 stabbing of another young Tustin woman, Susan Tewes, in a robbery.

He was seen leaving with Lingle from the Sit n Bull bar in Tustin on the night she was killed. The most damning evidence against him came from his own beloved Honda 350. Davenport, known to his friends as Honda Dave, had different-style English tires on the front and back, and both--almost atop each other--made clear tread marks in the sand near the victim’s body. Even a defect in one of the tires was reproduced in the sand tracks.

“I cannot explain all of the evidence there is against me,” Davenport stated Monday.

He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1981. The use of the stake was a critical issue. Jurors found that its use amounted to torture, which allowed prosecutors to seek capital punishment.

In 1985, the Bird court upheld both Davenport’s murder conviction and the torture allegation. But the court reversed the death sentence, citing numerous errors by the judge and prosecutor in statements to the jury. That meant a new penalty trial, where jurors would decide only whether to return Davenport to Death Row or impose a lesser penalty of life without parole.

Numerous members of Davenport’s family traveled from Utah to testify for him at his new penalty trial. But the only person present in the Santa Ana courtroom Monday was Dunn, who has been Davenport’s girlfriend since before the Lingle killing.

“I haven’t changed my mind; John didn’t do it,” she said firmly last week.

Davenport does admit the 1974 attack on Tewes. But in his statement Monday, he tried to explain his behavior. “I was 19, scared to death, and loaded on drugs at the time.”

Davenport concluded his statement by saying, “I am tired of all this, but I will not give up the fight. . . .”

Davenport’s attorney said later that the circumstances of the case were such that he had no doubt that the judge would impose the death sentence. Judges may set aside a jury’s death verdict, but no judge in Orange County has done so under California’s 12-year-old death law.

‘An Appropriate Sentence’

“We did all we could do,” Pohlson said.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Jeoffrey L. Robinson said, “It was an appropriate sentence, when you look at what Davenport has done.”

The other death sentences reversed by the state Supreme Court were those of Rodney Alcala, Marcelino Ramos and Theodore Frank. The Bird court reduced two others to life in prison, without permitting prosecutors new trials.

“We were fighting a philosophical bent from the Bird court in all these cases,” said Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. James G. Enright. But he added that the new death sentences in all four of the new trials show that “our juries and judges had been right the first time around.”

Enright said he is certain that Davenport and the other three will die in the gas chamber at San Quentin. But he predicted that Davenport’s execution wouldn’t happen in the 1990s unless the Legislature streamlines the appellate process.

“We’re probably looking at five years just to get the case decided by the state Supreme Court,” Enright said. “After that, there’s the long federal court appeals process.”

Davenport attorney Richard L. Schwartzberg said the length of the appellate process is Davenport’s only real hope of escaping execution.

“It could be that the system is going to be so overloaded with these kinds of cases that (the state) will just call everything off,” he said. “You can only hope that if and when that day comes, your client is still around.”