En Route to See Bonin Die, Victim Dreams of Fresh Start

Laughing and joking, downing ice-cold beers, the six passengers in a lumbering motor home are headed north for a “vacation” in the Valley of the Shadow of Death--San Quentin Prison.

The leader of the group is 35-year-old David McVicker, a blue-eyed, open-faced man who holds a place in the annals of American crime: He is a surviving victim of serial killer William G. Bonin, whose execution he plans to witness at 12:01 a.m. Friday.

When he was 14 years old, hitchhiking in Garden Grove, McVicker fell into the clutches of Bonin, the so-called Freeway Killer, who kidnapped and raped him at gunpoint. Though he eventually killed at least 14 of his young male victims, Bonin drove McVicker home after the assault and set him free.

“We’ll meet again,” Bonin told the boy.

Twenty-one years later, it seems Bonin was right.

“I’m looking more forward to this than anything in my life,” McVicker says, passing out beers to his friends as the Winnebago heads out of Orange County, where McVicker lives and works as a deejay at a Santa Ana nightclub.

“I have to see it,” McVicker says of the execution. “It will change the mental videotape in my head. I can see him dead. I can see his body carried out. He can’t rape me anymore. He’s dead.”

Bonin was convicted in 1982 of molesting and murdering 14 young males and dumping their bodies along roadways in Los Angeles and Orange counties in 1979 and 1980. He was sentenced to death twice.

Along for the strange road trip with McVicker are a few boyhood friends, an old girlfriend, and McVicker’s sister, Doreen Bartholomew, who risked this excursion although her doctor warned her that any stress could prove fatal. She suffered a stroke two years ago and underwent heart surgery four years ago.

In quiet moments, she says, you can hear the artificial heart valve making a loud clicking noise inside her chest.

McVicker tells everyone to be very quiet so they can hear his sister’s heart.

The sound of her own heart often keeps Bartholomew awake at night. But everyone has their demons, and Bartholomew’s heart sounds are no match for the nightmares that play in an endless loop in her brother’s head:

Bonin pointing a gun at his neck.

Bonin telling him to undress.

Bonin hitting him when he refuses.

At the moment Bonin succumbs to a lethal injection, McVicker said, he will uncork a magnum of champagne and share it with the families of other victims on hand.