Social Security Criticized for Paying Bonin

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 Bonin during his 14 years on death row.

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

“The Social Security Administration should have stopped Bonin’s checks long ago,” Gomez said. “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 they have launched an investigation of the Bonin case and are trying to determine whether other prison inmates nationwide also are illegally collecting benefits.

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 upset to talk with a reporter.

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

Bonin, the first California inmate executed by lethal injection, received monthly disability checks ranging from $300 when he was jailed in 1982 to $589 last month, officials said. Bonin had been receiving Social Security checks since he was given a diagnosis of 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 state 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.

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

Walker said it remains unclear whether a computer glitch or human error caused the oversight.

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

Walker said the Social Security Administration 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 does not have the money to return. “I want to give the money back,” Benton was quoted as saying. “But I don’t have it. I don’t know what to do.”

The agency 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 of Huntington Beach. 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. [My brother] 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.”