Prisons Chief Assails SSA for Bonin Payments

The state’s top prison official criticized the Social Security Administration on Tuesday for a snafu that funneled more than $50,000 in benefits to a Southern California bank account for executed serial killer William G. Bonin during his 14 years on death row.

James Gomez, California Department of Corrections director, said he was “appalled” by the mistake that allowed Bonin to continue to collect Social Security payments, which are by federal law prohibited for any convict serving longer than a year behind bars.

“The Social Security Administration should have stopped Bonin’s checks long ago,” Gomez said, adding that “I sincerely hope that the federal government intends to prosecute whoever was helping a man who killed 14 children cash these checks.”

Social Security officials said Tuesday that they had launched an investigation of the Bonin case and are trying to determine whether other prison inmates also are illegally collecting benefits nationwide.

Bonin, the so-called “Freeway Killer” who was executed Feb. 23, apparently did not tap into the bank account set up for him, according to corrections officials, who said he died with just $3 in his account at San Quentin Prison.

Social Security officials refused to name the person who co-signed Bonin’s account, citing privacy laws.

But the Oroville Mercury-Register quoted Bonin’s mother as saying she had used her son’s Social Security money to make about $75,000 in payments on the family house in Downey.

“He loved me very much,” Alice Benton told the Mercury-Register. “He didn’t know it was wrong. He wouldn’t have done anything to hurt me.”

Attempts to reach Benton were unsuccessful. Bonin’s brother would not confirm the newspaper’s reports and refused to put Benton on the phone, saying that his mother was too distraught to talk with a reporter.

“She’s a nervous wreck,” Robert Bonin said Tuesday.

Bonin, the first California inmate ever executed by lethal injection, received monthly disability checks ranging from $300 when he was jailed in 1982 to $589 last month. Bonin had been receiving Social Security checks since he was found to have a mental illness in 1972, according to Leslie

Walker, a Social Security spokeswoman.

Under federal law, Bonin’s payments should have been discontinued when he entered prison. Social Security numbers of new inmates in the state prison system are provided to the federal agency’s headquarters in Baltimore on a quarterly basis. In 1990, the California Department of Corrections provided a computer tape containing the Social Security numbers of the more than 83,000 inmates then in state prison, including Bonin.

“He somehow slipped through the cracks and we continued to pay him the whole time,” Walker said.

Walker said the Bonin case has prompted the federal agency to request new and complete lists of prisoners currently housed in all 50 states. Officials plan to do a complete check to ensure there are no other oversights.

Walker said it remains unclear whether it was a computer glitch or human error that was responsible for the improper payments.

Bonin confessed to 21 murders but was convicted of killing 14 young men and boys, then dumping their nude bodies along Southern California highways in 1979 and 1980.

Walker said that agency is attempting to get the money back, but could not provide details on how that could be accomplished.

Benton told the Northern California newspaper she was visited by Social Security investigators, but told them she doesn’t have the money to return.

“They said all I had to do was give the money back,” Benton was quoted as saying. “I want to give the money back. But I don’t have it. I don’t know what to do.”

The Social Security Administration discovered the unauthorized payments after a funeral director sent required paperwork notifying them of Bonin’s death and listing his Social Security number. The paperwork is designed to prevent benefits from being improperly paid to people who have died.

Relatives of some of Bonin’s victims reacted angrily to news that the serial killer received public benefits for 14 years, as they waited for his execution.

“The convicts and the murderers are getting better treatment than the people who pay the bills,” said Elza Rodgers, the 76-year-old grandfather of victim Glen Norman Barker, 14, of Huntington Beach.

“It’s like a snake with several heads. You chop one head off and it keeps going.”

Rodgers said he and his wife, Betty, draw a combined payment of $560 a month in Social Security benefits--about $30 a month less than Bonin was paid before he was executed.

Jessica Vialpando, whose brother, Charles Miranda, was murdered by Bonin in 1980, said the money should be recovered and paid to families of the victims.

“He took my brother’s life. He was only 15 years old. My father didn’t receive any Social Security. My family didn’t receive anything,” said Vialpando, who lives in Covina. “He didn’t deserve anything.”