Parole Is Denied for 2 Murderers : Punishment: Both men, whose Orange County crimes occurred in December, 1973, are serving life sentences.

Two of Orange County’s more heinous killers were denied parole Thursday despite pleas from both men that they are rehabilitated enough to safely return to society.

For John Benjamin Tidwell, 41, who shotgunned an elderly couple to death in Ohio before executing an Orange County teen-ager, it was the third rejection by the state Board of Prison Terms.

For Robert Michael Sesma, 38, who killed two men in Orange County by beating one with the butt of a gun and shooting the other as he begged for his life, it was the eighth denial.

Tidwell, from Ohio, was barred from again seeking parole for three years. Sesma, a drug syndicate enforcer originally from Mew Mexico, was ordered to wait another two years.

Although their murders in Orange County occurred only a day apart in December, 1973, the cases were not related. The two defendants were coincidentally scheduled to appear Thursday in separate hearings at the California Men’s Colony East outside San Luis Obispo, where both men are serving life sentences.

Deputy Dist. Atty. W.J. Moseley III represented Orange County at the hearings and argued vehemently against the inmates’ release.

“I don’t believe that society should ever suffer their release,” Moseley said in a hearing as he waved autopsy photographs of Sesma’s two victims, whose bodies were found months after the crime in a shallow grave.

The inmates attempted to distance themselves from their past crimes and emphasize what they called their exemplary performance within the California Department of Corrections.

Both Tidwell and Sesma are considered model inmates by prison officials, having been disciplined only once apiece for infractions committed during their incarceration. Sesma has been imprisoned since 1975. Tidwell has been in the California prison since 1979.

“Let’s leave my past behind me and let me see the future,” Tidwell said in his plea before board commissioners Rudolph Castro, Fernando Vazquez and Albert Leddy. “I am here to tell you face-to-face that I will be lawful.”

The inmates, wearing prison-issue denim shirts and jeans, sat at a table across from the commissioners in a second-floor meeting room of the medium-security prison. Both were represented by state-appointed attorneys in proceedings that each lasted more than an hour.

The board commissioners said they were troubled by Tidwell’s refusal to accept guilt for the Dec. 13, 1973, robbery and murder of Harold Reinhart, 18, of Midway City. Tidwell also steadfastly denied killing an elderly couple during an Ohio burglary earlier the same year. He was convicted in the crime and will begin serving a life sentence in Ohio if he is released from California.

Under rigorous, sometimes sarcastic questioning from Castro, Tidwell claimed that all the numerous witnesses who testified against him in both cases had lied to set him up.

“I don’t believe your story,” Castro said flatly at one point. “If we’re to believe your story, all of these people are lying. If they are to be believed, you have been lying from day one.”

Tidwell acknowledged only that he “was in an antisocial state of mind” during 1973 and that he committed minor assaults and associated with criminals.

“In 1973, I went crazy,” Tidwell said. “Then in 1974, I returned to normal.”

According to psychiatric reports, Tidwell has shown steady progress, has learned a trade as a gemologist and is working in the prison as a classification clerk.

Moseley argued that Tidwell, a diagnosed sociopath, is doing well only because he is in prison. “He has a dormant antisocial personality,” Moseley said. “It is controlled in a prison setting.”

Tidwell told the panel that, if paroled, he hopes to rejoin his parents, now living in Florida, and earn a living in the jewelry business.

With Sesma, panel commissioners rejected his parole in part because they were still troubled by what they called the “especially heinous and cruel” nature of his role in the Dec. 12, 1973, murders of Vaudra Dewey Nunley, 28, and Rue Eugene Steele, 29. The men, reputed drug dealers, were killed as Sesma and an accomplice carried out a drug lord’s order.

While in prison, Sesma has earned an associate of arts degree, obtained a state welder’s license and, like Tidwell, studied gemology. He now works as a prison carpenter.

Since his last parole hearing in 1988, Sesma has followed the board’s recommendation to seek more counseling for what they termed “a passive-aggressive personality disorder.”

Now, Sesma said, he is ready for freedom and wants to live either with his parents in Albuquerque, N.M., or with a cousin in Garden Grove.

Sesma said his criminal problems resulted from a single period of turmoil in his life.

“I was just a little wild at the time,” he said. “I always got into the wrong things, like dealing drugs. I thought I was superior and could get away with it.”