Death row inmate hoping California Supreme Court sides with him

SAN QUENTIN — John C. Abel is the first to admit he’s led a crook’s life.

He robbed banks and convenience stores, grocery marts and check-cashing joints. He terrified people with Uzi-style Mac 11s and .22-caliber handguns, Browning pistols and Dirty Harry-style Magnums. His stickup jag dated to the 1960s and sliced through the country from Massachusetts to California.

“Even a couple islands up there by Seattle,” he adds, in the genial voice of an old ballplayer reminiscing about a far-traveling career.

Fifteen years ago, a jury concluded he deserved to die for killing a man outside a Tustin bank. Now 68, gray-bearded and diabetic, he waits in his cell on San Quentin’s death row and insists he doesn’t belong there.

“I’m the furthest thing from John Q. Citizen, but it bothers me to be called a killer,” says Abel, chewing a Hershey bar in one of the visiting room’s mesh cages.

He is accustomed to lockup — he has spent most of his life in cells — but describes death row as a particularly lonely place of loathsome company: mass murderers, child-killers, serial rapists.

“The psychos and the weirdos,” he calls them. “I don’t talk to none of them creeps.”

Abel’s lawyers, who say his notorious reputation made him a convenient fall guy for the Tustin killing, are asking the California Supreme Court for a new trial.

At the heart of their case is something few condemned men possess: a signed confession by another man admitting to the murder.

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On an overcast morning in January 1991, 26-year-old Armando Miller left the Sunwest Bank in Tustin with a bag containing $20,000 in cash. He’d just withdrawn the money for his family’s nearby check-cashing business and was walking to his van.

A robber pumped a .22-caliber slug into his forehead and disappeared with the cash. A witness described the shooter as a sharp-featured, middle-aged man with a mustache and wearing a cuffed watchman’s cap.

Abel, who roughly fit the description and sometimes wore a similar cap during holdups, had been paroled the year before on bank robbery charges and was drifting around Southern California.

He gambled heavily at blackjack and poker tables. He chased a cocaine and heroin habit. By his own admission, he was a man desperate for money.

Abel said he had been part of a planned armed robbery of some Colombian drug dealers in Northern California in early ‘91, a potential “humdinger” of a score that fell apart when an accomplice — who plotted the job — died of a heart attack.

“That’s when I more or less went south,” he said. “I ran out of money. In come the weapons, in come the robberies. It wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t the plan of a mastermind or none of that.”

He robbed banks in Hacienda Heights and Rowland Heights, a pizzeria in Lakewood, a pharmacy in San Pedro, a flower shop in Harbor City. He planned the jobs hastily, he said, giving himself an hour or so to stake out the target.

“I just go by feeling,” he said. “Pretty much played it by ear. I guess I wasn’t that good at it.”

In October 1991, Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies tracked Abel to a Simi Valley parking lot. He was walking to his Toyota Tercel, where a loaded .22 waited under the seat. “If I had made it to the car, there would have been a shootout,” Det. Steve Rubino recalled Abel telling him.

The string of robberies sent him to Folsom State Prison for a 44-year term.

Meanwhile, the Miller slaying moldered unsolved until 1995, when a tip led Tustin Det. Tom Tarpley to Lorraine Ripple, Abel’s former crime partner, in state prison, where she was serving a 45-year robbery sentence.

Ripple told the detective Abel had confessed to the bank slaying, calling it an “easy score.”

At trial two years later, prosecutors produced two witnesses who said they had seen the shooter briefly. One, a bank teller, expressed certainty that Abel was the culprit. The second, who worked near the bank, couldn’t identify him in court, saying, “Too much time has gone by.”

Prosecutor Lew Rosenblum described the robbery as “an inside job,” telling jurors that Abel had been tipped to the score by a mortgage lender who knew the Miller family and their habit of withdrawing large sums of cash. The prosecutor showed a photo of Abel in a cap similar to the one seen on the shooter.

When Ripple took the stand, saying that Abel had confessed to her, the defense tried to portray her as a mentally unstable woman who was angry that Abel had spurned her romantic advances.

After his conviction, Abel’s attorneys tried to spare him the death penalty but could offer jurors little that he’d ever contributed to the world. His record was ghastly: more than two dozen robbery convictions in Los Angeles and Orange counties since the 1960s.

The prosecutor, however, could draw from a deep pool of Abel’s robbery victims who testified to their terror. One said she wet her pants when he put a gun to her head.

Jurors took about four hours to decide Abel should be put to death.

“This guy is just pure evil,” Tarpley would say later. “There are no redeeming features.”

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Robert Chase was a lifetime crook himself, a bank robber, safecracker and drug addict, his liver ravaged by longtime heroin use.

He had known Abel for years. They had run high-stakes gambling tables at Lompoc federal prison in the 1970s.

Abel’s appeals team said their investigation led them to Chase, who was serving time in state prison in San Luis Obispo for an unrelated murder in Lynwood.

Defense investigator Emma Smith visited him several times in 2008. She said he seemed guarded and reluctant to talk at first but eventually admitted to the fatal bank job in Tustin.

“He just told me repeatedly, ‘I’m getting older, and I need to get this out,’ ” Smith said.

She persuaded Chase to sign a typed confession.

“In January of 1991 I shot and killed a man coming out of a bank,” it said. He waited for the victim, who was Latino, to emerge from the bank with a bundle of cash, he said, and shot him with a .22-caliber handgun when the man tossed the money in the air.

“I am getting older and I am seeing now how wrong it is for John to be sitting in prison for something he did not do.” The statement was dated December 2008.

Seven months after signing it, Chase was dead of liver disease. He was 76.

Authorities say Chase’s statement lacked important information — such as what he did with the gun and cash — and that details he included could have been gleaned from the public record.

Tarpley, now a lieutenant at the Tustin Police Department, said Chase knew he wouldn’t be cross-examined. “Any time you see a dying inmate that makes a confession, it has to be viewed with suspicion.”

He said Abel was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, the fearsome prison gang. Chase was a gang associate.

“These are not strangers,” Tarpley said. “It’s a recurring theme with these white supremacist groups. One guy will get convicted and another comes forward to say, ‘I’m the real killer.’ ”

Abel’s lawyer, Mike Lasher, said his client was ousted from the Aryan Brotherhood in the 1980s for refusing to carry out an assassination ordered by the gang.

Complicating the case further: Last year, Ripple — Abel’s former robbery partner and a key prosecution witness — recanted her testimony when she was interviewed by the defense team. She said it was Chase, not Abel, who had confessed to the slaying.

“I can honestly say that John never told me that he shot anybody,” she said in a March 2011 statement made available by Abel’s team. “I said all of these things because I was angry at John and because Tarpley was putting all kinds of pressure on me.”

Tarpley said Ripple, who remains in state prison, was never threatened or promised special favors in exchange for her testimony.

Tarpley said he had never been able to rule out Chase as the getaway driver in the Tustin shooting.

“I know there’s more than Abel involved,” he said.

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Abel wakes at 4:30 every morning in his death row cell and pricks his finger to test his blood sugar. He expects that diabetes will kill him long before the state gets around to it.

“You might even say to some extent I would welcome” death, he says. “I guess I don’t have much to look forward to anyway. I’m surrounded by people who don’t even know how sick they are.”

He taps his head. He means people who killed for pleasure, or hurt children. He recently learned that a man living a few cells away had mutilated a baby girl.

“I got so upset because I said hello to him once or twice. I let the whole tier know about this stinking.... They got these guys spread out. Weird, crazy... killers all over this place.”

Abel says he always knew that Chase killed Armando Miller, but never said a word. “You don’t squeal on people, period,” he says.

He plays pinochle for stamps, and watches sports on TV. He hasn’t used heroin for years, he says, because the stuff on death row is “garbage,” though powdered speed is available. “A few times a year I’ll decide to get a little spin on the speed.”

His face lights up when he mentions that he does have one friend, a strangler.

Abel’s lawyers say he has served his time for the robberies and will go free if the conviction is overturned. If that happens, Abel says, he’s too old for any more trouble.

“I can barely get around. I’m gonna take a wheelchair and roll it into a bank?”

christopher.goffard@latimes.com