Prisoner Confesses to 1965 Killing

Orange police say they have solved a 38-year-old murder case that has frustrated them for years.

Confronted by detectives in Texas, where he has been incarcerated for a decade, William Self, 64, recently confessed to beating an elderly woman over the head with the lid of a pressure cooker on May 6,1965.

“This was important, because you could call her a faceless victim,” Sgt. Dave Hill, a spokesman for the department, said Tuesday regarding the killing of Floy “Faye” Redmon, 75, at her home in the 600 block of East Walnut Avenue. Because she was a widow with no known relatives, Hill said, her death went largely unnoticed outside the Police Department. “We don’t want to forget the victims of crimes,” Hill said. “We try to solve every crime that we can.”

The break in this one, he said, came last year when forensic investigators followed their annual habit of entering fingerprints found on a coffee cup and saucer in Redmon’s kitchen into a national FBI databank. For years, he said, the results had come back negative. Now, suddenly, there was a hit.

“We had access to that database before,” Hill explained, “but those particular prints were not accessible. The various databases were still in the process of connecting with each other effectively.”

After determining that the fingerprints belonged to an inmate at Huntsville State Prison in Texas, Hill said, Det. Steve Booze, the department’s chief robbery and homicide investigator, took a trip there to meet him.

“I think [Self] was shocked, to say the least,” Booze said Tuesday. “At first, he was very reserved -- kind of seeing what we had before he would talk to us. In the end, he said he was relieved, that he had lived with this for a long time and was glad that he finally got a chance to talk about it.”

The story Self told was consistent with the evidence still stored in the department’s property room. In 1965, the inmate told Booze, he had gone AWOL from the Marine Corps while stationed at what was then the Santa Ana -- later the Tustin -- air base. Living as a transient, Self said, he met Redmon in her frontyard. She offered him something to eat and drink and, once inside, he beat her to death with the pressure cooker lid and ransacked her house for money.

In subsequent years, Self said, he lived the life of a vagabond, traveling widely throughout the western states and as far east as Florida, surviving mostly on odd jobs.

He was arrested in 1994 and convicted of killing his mother, with whom he had been living.

Self is serving a 50-year sentence for the killing. “If he gets out in Texas, he’ll be 102 years old,” said Booze, who was in high school when Redmon was killed.

Hill said the case has been turned over the Orange County district attorney’s office, which will decide whether charges should be filed.