Judge Signs Death Warrant for Escapee Who Killed 4

Six years after Kevin Cooper was convicted of stabbing and hacking to death three members of a Chino Hills family and their 11-year-old neighbor, a San Diego County Superior Court judge Monday signed Cooper’s death warrant.

Judge Jesus Rodriguez ordered Cooper to be put to death Oct. 25, despite protests from one of Cooper’s attorneys, David Negus, who said that, because upcoming appeals will probably delay the execution, the signing of the warrant had “no practical effect except to terrorize” Cooper.

Rodriguez responded, “I think everybody here is sorry that Mr. Cooper is inconvenienced. However, the four bodies in a cemetery in San Bernardino County were inconvenienced also.”

A few hours later, Cooper’s lawyers began what they predict will be a five-year appeals process, filing a motion with the state Supreme Court to vacate the execution date until Cooper’s case can be considered by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Deputy Atty. Gen. Frederick R. Millar Jr., who is supervising Cooper’s case, said that, although he cannot estimate how long Cooper’s appeals will take, he does expect a delay.

“This is an initial execution date. He is starting the process that (Robert Alton) Harris has been in for a period of many years. This is the first step in the process,” Millar said, referring to the convicted San Diego murderer whose execution was blocked last year. Harris would have been the first person executed in California in 23 years.

Cooper, 33, was tried in San Diego because of extensive pretrial publicity in San Bernardino County. He has been on death row in California State Prison at San Quentin since 1985, when a jury sentenced him to die for what became known as the Chino Hills Massacre.

This May, the California Supreme Court upheld Cooper’s death sentence, rejecting his bid for a new trial.

The murders took place in June 1983, two days after Cooper escaped from the California Institution for Men at Chino. Wanted by authorities in Pennsylvania for escaping a mental institution, rape, kidnapping and robbery, he had mistakenly been placed in the prison’s minimum-security wing after a burglary conviction in Los Angeles.

On June 5, 1983, the lifeless bodies of Doug and Peg Ryan, both 41; their daughter, Jessica, 10, and Christopher Hughes, 11, were discovered in the Ryans’ Chino Hills home. The victims were hacked and stabbed with a hatchet, knife and ice pick, and authorities counted 140 wounds.

The Ryans’ son, Joshua, then 8, survived a slashed throat and blows to the head. He has since been adopted by his maternal grandmother.

Cooper fled to Mexico and signed on as a deckhand on a 32-foot sailboat. He was captured aboard the boat July 30, 1983, in an island bay 20 miles south of Santa Barbara.

Throughout his trial, Cooper insisted he was innocent of the crimes. His court-appointed lawyer argued that law enforcement officials had botched the investigation of the murders. He also focused on conflicting testimony from the sole surviving son, who at one point told an investigator that three white men, or three Latinos, committed the slayings. Cooper is black.

The prosecution’s case consisted entirely of circumstantial evidence. Investigators found prison tobacco and footprints at the scene that matched the prison-issued tennis shoes that Cooper was wearing when he escaped.

Prosecutors took jurors to the scene of the grisly slayings and told them not to be fooled by “lies” Cooper told when he testified on his own behalf. They also contrasted graphic photographs of the victims’ bodies with large pictures of the family alive and laughing together.

Almost 800 pieces of evidence and 141 witnesses were introduced by both sides during the trial, which so inflamed spectators that the judge had to admonish the jury to disregard “Die Cooper!” and “Kevin Cooper must be hanged” graffiti outside the courtroom.

At one point, Cooper’s adoptive mother, Esther Cooper, begged the jury to spare her son’s life, reducing Cooper and two female jurors to tears.

After the sentencing, Superior Court Judge Richard C. Garner, who presided over Cooper’s trial, called the murders “cool and calculated.” He said, “I can understand rage and hostility, but there was nothing to explain those attacks in the middle of the night.”