Caro Expected to Be Ventura County’s 12th on Death Row

Convicted child-killer Socorro Caro is expected to become the 12th person from Ventura County awaiting execution in California. Here is a look at the others and their crimes:

* Justin Merriman was convicted in March for the 1992 rape and murder of Santa Monica College student Katrina Montgomery.

* Kenneth McKinzie was convicted in 1999 for strangling 73-year-old Ruth Avril during a botched robbery at her Oxnard apartment building Dec. 21, 1995.

* Spencer Rawlin Brasure was convicted in August 1998 for torturing a Redondo Beach man on Sept. 7, 1996, by tying him to a makeshift electric chair. Brasure later burned Anthony Guest, 26, alive and left his body in a park near Gorman.

* Michael Raymond Johnson was convicted in 1997 of fatally shooting Ventura County Sheriff’s Deputy Peter Aguirre on July 17, 1996. The deputy was responding to a domestic disturbance call at the Meiners Oaks home of Johnson’s estranged wife when Johnson shot him. Prosecutors portrayed Johnson as cold-blooded, but the defense argued he was mentally ill. His appeal has been sent directly to the state Supreme Court on allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.

* Mark Scott Thornton became California’s youngest death row inmate at age 20 when he was sentenced to death in May 1995. Thornton abducted and fatally shot Westlake nurse Kellie O’Sullivan during a carjacking on Sept. 14, 1993. O’Sullivan was on the way to pick up her son from school when Thornton confronted her outside a pet store. He forced her to drive with him to an isolated area in the Santa Monica Mountains, where he shot her and stole her vehicle.

* Christopher Sattiewhite was convicted in 1994 for the kidnapping and murder of Genoveva Gonzales, an Oxnard mother of four whose body was found in a drainage ditch Jan. 26, 1992. After Gonzales was raped by a second man, Frederick L. Jackson, Sattiewhite shot her three times in the head. Jackson also was convicted of murder; he was sentenced to life in prison.

* Gregory Scott Smith pleaded guilty in April 1992 to the kidnapping and murder of 8-year-old Northridge boy Paul Bailly. At Smith’s penalty trial, defense attorneys argued that the Canoga Park day-care aide had the mind of a child and should not be executed. Prosecutors described Smith as a vindictive predator who took sexual pleasure in killing the boy and setting his body on fire.

* Larry David Davis was sentenced to death in 1990 for the rape and murder of 20-year-old beauty queen Dawn Holman. Davis kidnapped her from outside an Oxnard grocery store Aug. 28, 1988. It was later determined that Holman tried to escape by jumping from a moving car and running onto the San Buenaventura Golf Course, where Davis caught her. She was found strangled.

* Tracy Cain was sentenced in 1988 for fatally bludgeoning his neighbors, William and Modena Galloway. Cain ran out of money while having a cocaine party and broke into their Oxnard home, where William Galloway, 63, was known to keep large sums of cash. Cain beat the couple to death with a rocking chair and took their money.

* Curtis Fauber was sentenced to death in 1988 for killing businessman Tom Urell, 52, who had been selling drugs to Fauber and a friend, Brian Buckley. The pair broke into Urell’s Oxnard Shores home, found him asleep and tied him up. Using an ax he found in the house, Fauber fatally hit Urell in the head. Buckley pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

* Alejandro Gilbert Ruiz was convicted in 1980 for murdering his third wife, Tanya Staats, and later killing his fifth wife, Pauline Wachs, and her teenage son. Staats disappeared in 1974. Ruiz told police that his wife had left him. Three years later, Wachs and her son were found buried in a shallow grave in the backyard of their Piru home. They had been shot in the head. Ruiz was convicted of first-degree murder in their deaths. He was convicted of second-degree murder for killing Staats, but her body was never found.