San Diego County Killer of 3 Gets Death Sentence

Insulted by a defense strategy that they found too bizarre to believe, a San Diego County jury on 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 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, who said during the trial that he prefers to be called by the Cherokee Indian name Nvwtohiyada Idehesdi Sequoyah, 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 trials in recent memory in San Diego County. Because Waldon was 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 had seen committing a crime. At one point, toward the end of the trial, Waldon took the stand in his own defense and fielded his own questions.

On Thursday, the families of Waldon’s victims and survivors of his 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 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’ll ever really be gone. But at least this part of it is final.”

The jurors, who spent nearly half of 1991 considering Waldon’s fate, said the rape victim’stestimony 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.

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 asserted that he was the victim of an elaborate FBI conspiracy, Seymour said, “I was almost offended that he thought we would believe all that.”

Jimmie Murray, 42, a Point Loma technical writer, said he found Waldon so menacing that he had nightmares about him.

“What he actually generated was an us-versus-him mentality,” Murray said. “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.”