Killer of 7 Takes Step to Freedom : Courts: Perpetrator of county’s worst mass slaying moves to lower-security facility for the insane. Victims’ families feel victimized once again.

When the man who killed seven people in a shooting spree at Cal State Fullerton in 1976 was committed to a hospital for the criminally insane, the victims’ families told themselves he would be locked up forever.

But they have been reminded that nothing is forever. Tuesday afternoon, Edward Charles Allaway was transferred from Atascadero State Hospital to a lower-security facility in Napa, a move legal and psychiatric experts say is a step toward his eventual release.

“That the man who butchered seven people could ever be free is just unthinkable, and this is the first step,” Ernest Becker, father of one of the victims, said after learning of the transfer. “I’m going to do everything I possibly can to stop him from taking that next step.”

Found not guilty by reason of insanity, Allaway has spent most of the past 16 years at Atascadero, the maximum-security facility that is home to the most dangerous of California’s criminally insane.

In June, Atascadero doctors recommended that Allaway be placed in an outpatient program that typically leads to unsupervised release after five years. Superior Court Judge Donald A. McCartin, who presided over the annual hearing to determine whether Allaway is still insane, ruled that Allaway is too dangerous for the outpatient program but approved his transfer to Napa.

“It’s kind of an intermediate step,” said Dr. Gordon Gritter, medical director of Atascadero, adding that, in his opinion, Allaway no longer needs to be hospitalized.

“Under the law, I don’t think the state can prove he should be in the hospital,” said Allaway’s attorney, Orange County Public Defender John Bovee. “He’s suitable for release. He will get there someday.”

Relatives of Allaway’s victims were devastated when they learned of McCartin’s decision, which revived the original trauma of their loss and heightened their anger at the judicial system that absolved him of criminal guilt 16 years ago.

“It really is pure torment to think the person who killed your father is going to be set free,” said Patricia Almazan of Upland, daughter of Frank Teplansky, a graphic artist who was killed in the shooting. “They say time heals. It’s healing him, but it doesn’t heal the victims. Every time he’s up for his freedom, I think, I’m not going to get any freedom,” said Almazan, who uses vacation days each year to attend Allaway’s hearings. “It’s like an open wound that never heals; they just put a Band-Aid on from year to year.”

This year, though, has been the worst, as relatives of the victims face the reality that Allaway may someday be set free.

“We’re going to have to do everything we can to thwart his next hearing,” said a determined Becker, 77, whose son, Stephen, a library assistant, tried to stop Allaway by hitting him over the head with a plate. “I believe a person forfeits his right to life when he knowingly, brutally, viciously takes the life of other people.”

Just before 9 a.m. July 12, 1976, Allaway, a janitor at Cal State Fullerton, entered the school’s library and shot nine co-workers at close range with a .22-caliber rifle.

Left dead in Orange County’s worst mass slaying were Becker; Teplansky; Seth Fessenden, 72, a retired professor of speech who lived in Fullerton; Paul Herzberg, 41, a photographer from Pomona; Bruce Jacobson, 32, an audio technician from Pomona; fellow custodians Donald Karges, 41, of Santa Fe Springs, and Debbie Paulsen, 26, of Anaheim. Associate librarian Donald Keran and custodial supervisor Maynard Hoffman were wounded in the melee. Keran died several years ago and Hoffman now lives in a convalescent home.

Allaway, who spent a month in a Michigan mental hospital in 1971, said he went crazy at Fullerton because some employees had teased him about pornographic movies allegedly made in the library’s media center and because he had to confront graffiti and homosexual activity in a men’s restroom he was charged with cleaning.

Both Almazan and Becker have diligently followed the case and attend Allaway’s hearings. Each has spent hundreds of hours writing to lawyers and legislators, collecting newspaper clippings and court documents. Becker, a retired professor and Congregational clergyman, testified against the insanity defense in the state Legislature in 1980; Almazan wrote a 100-page manuscript about the ordeal.

But others, anxious to ease the pain, have distanced themselves from the ongoing legal battle, and were shocked when McCartin approved Allaway’s transfer to Napa.

Helen Paulsen, interviewed earlier this month, said her husband was shaking as he brought in the paper carrying news of McCartin’s decision. “It just starts it all over again,” said the 71-year-old Anaheim woman, unable to keep from crying. “It brings it all back in a flash. You just relive the whole thing.”

After the murders, the Paulsens moved out of the home where Debbie Paulsen had grown up to escape their grief. They have put away most photographs of her, keeping only a few baby pictures and her high school graduation portrait.

In a hallway hangs a photograph of Debbie looking down from the garden patio of a restaurant where the family spent the Mother’s Day before her death. On a table in the living room, a greeting card sits in a little glass frame:

“I wish for you lots of times. I want to see you and talk to you, and you’re not there. I wonder what you might be doing and if everything is OK,” the card says. “When I start feeling sad because I miss you, I remind myself how lucky I am to have you to miss, to have been with you through so many close and happy days.”

Helen Paulsen shrugged when asked whether the card was for any specific occasion. “It just sounded like I was saying it to her,” she said through tears.

Death of a loved one is always painful, but that Allaway was hospitalized rather than sentenced to death or life in prison for his crimes makes the experience all the more wrenching, relatives said.

“People get killed on the freeway--that’s hard,” said Janet Harley of Ontario, daughter of Seth Fessenden. “But to have someone intentionally take someone’s life and then be suddenly cured and set free--that would be an injustice.”

Almazan’s brother, Gerry Teplansky, works as an investigator for an Orange County law enforcement agency and says he still can’t accept that his father’s killer could be set free.

“It’s amazing that we can’t even call this man a criminal,” said Teplansky, shaking his head. “By calling him a patient, we’re absolving him of his sins.

“It doesn’t matter to me if he’s sane or insane,” said Teplansky, 38, of Ontario. “All that matters to me is that he’s punished for his actions and that he remain in custody.”

But “punishment” is out of the question, legal experts say. Not guilty by reason of insanity means just that, and states can only confine such people as long as they remain insane.

“It’s an acquittal,” said UCLA law professor Peter Arenella of the insanity defense. “It’s a special type of an acquittal, but it’s an acquittal.”

Keeping Allaway in the hospital now is “an injustice to him, an injustice to society,” according to Atascadero’s Dr. Gritter.

“We really shouldn’t use our hospitals for indefinite detention of people who don’t need to be in hospitals,” Gritter said. “It’s not appropriate for the hospital to be a prison.”

“This was a heinous crime, there’s no debating that, but people do change,” said Dr. Paul Blair, a psychiatrist who testified in favor of Allaway’s transfer at the June hearing. “The treatment should change too.”