Judge Sets Execution Date for Killer Who Asked to Die : Courts: David Edwin Mason has abandoned his legal appeals. Barring an unforeseen change of heart, he will be put to death Aug. 24.

A multiple murderer who took the rare step of abandoning his legal appeals and declaring himself ready to die will be executed at San Quentin on Aug. 24, a Superior Court judge decided Monday.

Barring an unforeseen change of heart, David Edwin Mason, 36, will become only the second person put to death in California since executions resumed in 1992 after a 25-year hiatus.

Michael Brady, Mason’s attorney, said his client is prepared to “pay the ultimate price” for strangling five people.

“He is tired of manipulating the system,” Brady said. In a reference to the terrible abuse Mason suffered as a child, Brady added: “I only wish there were three chairs in the gas chamber so his parents could join him.”

Under a state law passed after the execution of Robert Alton Harris on April 21, 1992, Mason and the other 365 inmates on Death Row may choose to die by lethal injection instead of cyanide gas, the method traditionally used in California.

Brady said he has recommended lethal injection because “it seems more humane,” but Mason has not made his choice.

An Oakland drifter, Mason went on a killing spree in 1980, strangling four elderly residents of his former neighborhood with a silk stocking or telephone cord. While awaiting trial, he strangled a fellow inmate he suspected of being a snitch.

Appeals of his death sentence bounced from court to court for 10 years. Recently, however, Mason said feelings of remorse and a desire to teach a lesson to a wayward brother prompted him to quit fighting.

This month, a judge ruled that Mason was mentally competent to abandon his appeals, despite a psychiatrist’s testimony that the violent treatment Mason had received as a child had traumatized him for life.

Chained at the waist, wrists and ankles, Mason appeared pale but showed little emotion during the hearing Monday before Alameda Superior Court Judge Jacqueline Taber. His wife of nine years, Charlene, wept and later said she had tried to persuade Mason to revive his bid to stay alive.

“I’ve told him I want to spend the rest of my life with him but . . . his mind is made up,” said Charlene Mason, who described her husband as “a man of his word” who has a great sense of humor. “I love him, so it’s hard.”

A relative of Mason’s first victim said the setting of an execution date brought her one step closer to “the end of a very painful, 13-year-old story.”

“My children have grown up without their grandmother, and I’m getting old without my mother,” said Dolly Lundberg, whose mother, Joan Pickard, befriended Mason and was strangled by him. “You’d have to walk in my shoes to know what it’s like.”

Outside the Oakland courthouse, 30 opponents of capital punishment held a protest, waving signs reading “Don’t Kill for Me.” The demonstrators said they had written to Mason, asking him to resume his fight to stay alive. Brady said his client receives about 50 letters a day.

Deputy Atty. Gen. Catherine Rivlin said Mason is the first condemned killer in modern California history to voluntarily waive his right to legal appeals.