25 Years Later, Will the Cries of Victims’ Families Be Ignored?

When I asked Judy Scholtz to remember what she could about her father, it was difficult for her. Details of his murder kept intruding on images of his true nature.

I had to lead her gently past that day 25 years ago when he and eight others were gunned down in a basement at Cal State Fullerton. Images of him filtered back slowly through the enormity of the event.

The person she eventually drew from her memory was a slim, soft-spoken man with thick, white, wavy hair. He loved children and family vacations and sharing freely with others the knowledge he had acquired teaching and researching. He gave without asking, Scholtz says. His joy was boundless.

At the time of his murder, Seth Fessenden was a speech professor emeritus at Cal State Fullerton and had been the university’s first faculty chairman.

His specialty was listening. Not just listening, but hearing--perceiving the undertones of speech, detecting the nuances, sensing the unspoken messages.

On the morning of July 12, 1976, he was sitting in the media center of the Cal State library doing research to prepare for a class he would be teaching.

That was when Edward Allaway walked in.

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Allaway was a janitor at the college. For reasons never really made clear, he walked down the stairs to the library that sunny morning in July and opened fire with a .22-caliber semiautomatic rifle. When it was over, nine people lay in pools of their own blood. Seven would die.

Fessenden, relaxing in a chair, talking to a friend, was one of them. Judy heard about it from her sister, Janet, who lived near the college. There is no good way to bear bad news. Simplicity is best. “Dad’s been murdered,” Janet said.

A silence followed.

Murdered?

This man who had always been there for her? Who had never raised his voice in anger? This gentle, kind, loving man?

Murdered?

Scholtz looked at me one day recently as she must have looked at her sister on the morning she got the news. Disbelief and confusion continue to cloud the memory. Murder is a crime that never seems real and never goes away.

The killing of seven people was the worst act of violence ever committed in Orange County, and it continues to resonate through the lives of those involved.

Allaway, then 37, was declared innocent by reason of insanity and has been locked up in mental institutions ever since. But, recently, doctors at Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino County declared that he was cured and no longer a threat to the community. They recommended that he be released.

The medical director at Patton is fighting the recommendation, as is a growing army of relatives and civic leaders who believe that Allaway should never be freed.

If he does get out, says one of them, he will enter a world he has not been a part of for 25 years. “If stress drove him to kill 25 years ago,” Pat Almazan asks, “what will it do to him today?”

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She’s the daughter of Frank Teplansky, a graphic artist who was another of Allaway’s victims. He was talking to Fessenden, an old friend, on the morning they were shot. Fessenden died instantly. Teplansky clung to life.

“When I saw him at the hospital, it was surreal,” Almazan said the other day in her Upland home. “There were no tubes in him and no blood. He looked as though he might wake up any minute. I leaned over him and said, ‘Fight.’ He squeezed my hand.” She paused. “And then he died with my hand in his.”

This is Allaway’s fourth bid for freedom, but the first time that doctors have declared him healed. Almazan has been at each of the hearings, fighting his release, and is one of the prime organizers of that army of opposition.

She has never been convinced that the man who killed her father was insane at the time of the shootings. At his trial, Allaway said he “went crazy” after he was taunted by his co-workers. A judge believed him. Almazan does not.

It is troubling to realize that a man who has killed seven people stands a good chance of walking the streets again. Twenty-five years aren’t enough to atone for the lives he has taken and the lives he has affected. One senses terrible gaps in the existence of those left to struggle with images both hard to remember and impossible to forget. Grief, deep and abiding, keeps their lives disconnected.

By a judge’s declaration, Allaway escaped a death sentence or even life in prison without parole. By the declaration of doctors, he could walk free without further legal shackles. Now it’s up to a judge again to determine if he will.

One can only hope that this time a new judge will look past the determination of psychiatrists and listen to the screams of the victims who lay dying in a library basement, and the soft crying of those who still struggle with the terrible memory.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. He is at al.martinez@latimes.com.