The Bay Area News Group interviewed several families whose relatives were killed by condemned men convicted in Santa Clara County who in the next few weeks are scheduled to be resentenced from death row to lifetime prison terms, as part of an initiative by the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office. Here are more of their stories, and reactions, to the resentencing petitions announced earlier this year.
Libby Williams Allen’s late husband, Wayne “Buddy” Williams Jr., was 23 when he was among seven people shot and killed by Richard Wade Farley at the Sunnyvale headquarters of tech firm ESL Inc. in 1988. The mass shooting became an emblem for workplace violence and spurred anti-stalking legislation because Farley was fired after stalking a co-worker who rejected his advances, leading him to show up to the company draped with guns and ammunition.
Allen, who worked with her husband at the company and was just a hair away from being in Farley’s warpath, said “his crime is exactly the kind of crime the death penalty is meant for,” and that having to revisit the tragedy through the resentencing petition has “fully retraumatized me. I feel it’s right back in my face again.”
“He did not afford for my 23-year-old husband to live out his life, or the six other people who died,” Allen said. “If you’re all just waiting for him to die naturally, you’ve completely negated the importance of this shooting at all.”
Rodrigo Paniagua is the most recent person condemned in Santa Clara County, receiving his sentence in December 2010 for the 2005 murders of his pregnant girlfriend Leticia Chavez and their two young daughters. Chavez’s cousin, Lisa Gutierrez, said her family has also felt retraumatized by the resentencing petitions.
“It’s not fair to any family who has had to sit through a trial just to re-live those memories all over again. Especially where it comes to children,” she said. “There was an unborn baby and two innocent kids who couldn’t defend themselves. It’s been devastating to us since the news broke.”
Mark Christopher Crew, who had newly married Nancy Jo Andrade, was convicted of murder in Andrade’s 1982 disappearance, on the strength of testimony from witnesses and co-conspirators who said Crew shot Andrade and dismembered and disposed her body in a cement-filled barrel as part of a larger plot to steal her money.
It was also a landmark case in California because prosecutors were able to secure a death sentence for Crew despite Andrade’s body never being recovered, with a number of possible locations surfacing over the years. Stacey Andrade King and and her brother Thomas Andrade, who were both young children when their mother disappeared, have held out hope that at some point Crew would be compelled to disclose where their mother’s remains are. That hope was dashed Friday after a judge approved a recall of Crew’s death sentence, and its conversion to a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Nancy’s younger sister, Sandy Wilhelmi George, said that the resentencing took away what was likely her family’s last bargaining chip to compel Crew — who still maintains he was wrongfully convicted — to disclose where Nancy’s body is, among the various rumored sites that span from the waters below the Dumbarton Bridge to remote areas in Utah.
“Never finding her body has added a new level of cruelty,” George said. “Where is she? He knows.”
Thomas Andrade said: “It’s mind-boggling to think this is a consequence of the law. It’s probably an unintended consequence.”