Waldon Sentenced to Die for S.D. Murders, Rapes

Insulted by a defense strategy they found too bizarre to believe, a San Diego County jury Thursday sentenced Billy Ray Waldon to die in the gas chamber for murdering three people during a brutal two-week rampage of robbery and rape in December, 1985.

After deliberating just two hours and 27 minutes, the jurors returned the death penalty for each of the murders of Dawn Ellerman, 42, of Del Mar; her 13-year-old daughter, Erin, and Charles G. Wells, 59, of University Heights.

Waldon, 39, showed no emotion as the verdict was read. The former Navy deep-sea diver, who has said he is the innocent target of an FBI conspiracy, told Superior Court Judge David M. Gill that he will seek a new trial. During the appeal process, he said, he wishes to continue representing himself without the aid of a lawyer, as he did during the nearly six-month trial.

The verdict brought an end to one of the oddest San Diego County trials in recent memory. Because Waldon was both the defendant and the defender, he questioned witnesses himself, often referring to himself in the third person.

More than once, that made for dramatic testimony, as witnesses responded to Waldon’s questions by identifying him as the man they’d seen committing a crime. Toward the end of the trial, Waldon took the stand in his own defense and fielded questions from himself.

On Thursday, the families of the murder victims and other survivors of Waldon’s crimes gathered in the courtroom’s front row and wept as the verdicts were read.

“He’s just caused so much pain,” said one woman who testified during the trial that Waldon had raped her at gunpoint in 1985. “Six years later, it’s finally over. I just want that part of my life that Billy Ray Waldon was involved in gone. I don’t know if it will ever really be gone. But at least this part of it is final.”

Jurors who spent nearly half of 1991 considering Waldon’s fate said the rape victim’s testimony was among the most compelling evidence they considered before they convicted Waldon last month of the three murders and 21 other crimes, including the rape.

Juror Julie Seymour, a 25-year-old Social Security claims representative from Chula Vista, said Waldon’s sexually explicit cross-examination of the woman was difficult to watch.

“At that point, even though we weren’t supposed to make up our minds as to whether he was guilty or not, you could tell by looking at her face that she knew he was,” Seymour said, adding that, because Waldon represented himself, “you got to know him a lot more than, say, you really want to.”

Later, when Waldon claimed he was the victim of an elaborate FBI conspiracy that framed him for the crimes, Seymour said, “I was almost offended that he thought we would believe all that.”

Throughout the trial, Deputy Dist. Atty. Mike Carpenter had given the jury a detailed chronology of the robberies, rapes and killings that Waldon was accused of committing in 1985 and 1986. One prosecution witness told of finding items stolen from many of the victims in Waldon’s car. Other witnesses identified Waldon as their attacker.

Waldon built his defense around his contention that, because of his affiliations with American Indian organizations, the FBI made him the focus of a counterintelligence operation, or COINTELPRO.

Waldon, who often delayed the trial with lengthy asides about the plight of the American Indian, said he preferred to be called by the Cherokee Indian name of Nvwtohiyada Idehesdi Sequoyah. He described himself as peaceful and said he was a member of the World Humanitarian Church.

Juror Diane (Deedee) Cooper, a 37-year-old secretary from South Bay, said Waldon’s own arguments convinced her, however, that he was not what he said he was.

“I think he’s intelligent. A humanitarian, he’s not,” she said as she and other jurors gathered in the hallway to let off steam after the verdict. Another thing Waldon wasn’t, she said, was truthful.

“He invented a lot,” Cooper said, calling the central character in Waldon’s conspiracy plot, a federal agent he called Mark Williams, a “fabrication. He didn’t exist.”

“It would have been more credible to say he was picked up by a UFO,” said Mapuana (Marlene) Abel, a 35-year-old telephone service representative from Santee.

The bizarre nature of Waldon’s story was part of the reason jurors were able to convict Waldon last month after less than eight hours of deliberation, they said.

Jimmie Murray, 42, a Point Loma technical writer, recalled that the jury began its discussions with a quick, half-hour meeting on a Friday afternoon in November. A quick poll revealed immediately that every juror had his mind pretty much made up: Waldon was guilty.

“What a relief!” Murray said, remembering how glad he was to finally know he was not alone in his certainty about Waldon’s guilt. “I got my first couple of good nights’ sleep that weekend because I knew there was no one on the jury who was convinced he was innocent.”

But, as sure as the jurors were of their decision, they said they often felt unsettled at the end of the day. Without wanting to, they took Waldon home with them, where he found his way into their dreams and turned them into nightmares.

Murray dreamed he heard a noise in his back yard at night. When he went to investigate, he found Waldon, dressed in the suit he wore in court. Murray said the lingering impression he had of Waldon was not of a deranged person, as some have suggested, but of a man without compassion.

“I don’t think he’s crazy. I think he’s the emotional equivalent of a stick figure. He’s not complete. He’s absolutely self-absorbed,” Murray said. He called the death sentence “a moral decision.”

Abel said her husband awoke one night to find her screaming at Waldon that she believed he was guilty.

“My husband told me I was screaming, ‘I’ve decided. I can’t take it back!’ ” she said. The rape victim’s testimony also entered her dreams, she said, especially one emotional exchange when the woman told Waldon that being questioned by him was like being raped a second time.

“We all began having nightmares as a result of that. You go to sleep and you hear this little voice saying, ‘Mr. Waldon, you’ve succeeded in raping me twice,’ ” Abel said. “And he never, ever showed any remorse. Ever.”

Seymour said the jurors felt frustrated by the defendant, not by the criminal justice system. Waldon’s rambling, unfocused and often argumentative self-defense created tension, she said, between him and the jury.

“As he got farther in the trial, he began to accuse more and more people of things,” she said. “He was trying to place the blame on more and more people, and that even included us. The system did as best it could.”

Murray agreed: “With the length of the trial, and all his stalls, what he actually generated was an us-verses-him mentality. We all kind of felt like we were on a mission after a while. It was up to us. We were the conscience of the community.”

Abel said sense of mission pervaded the deliberations Thursday, which began with three people undecided and nine voting for death.

“Someone said, ‘You can’t challenge the law of the land and expect that you can escape. You do something wrong, you have to pay for it,’ ” she recalled. “He’s a very angry man, but if he’s angry, he brought it on himself. We’re not killing him.”