San Quentin. Photo by Zboralski (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Richard Eugene Stitely, 71, was found unresponsive in his single cell Wednesday night and was pronounced dead a short time later, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
“There were no signs of trauma,” according to a statement from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. “His cause of death and COVID-19 status will be determined by the Marin County coroner.”
Stitely has been on death row since 1992, when he was sentenced in Los Angeles County to death.
He was convicted of first-degree murder for strangling 47-year-old Carol Unger. Jurors found true the special-circumstance allegation of murder during the commission of unlawful sodomy.
Stitely was also found guilty of forcible rape involving a June 1989 attack on a 16-year-old girl who was 5 1/2 months pregnant.
Unger was last seen alive while leaving the White Oak Bar in Reseda with Stitely about midnight on Jan. 19, 1990, authorities said. She was found dead the next day in a parking lot of a North Hollywood industrial complex, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Stitely had offered the woman a ride home after she asked a bartender to call a taxi for her, according to a 2005 ruling from the California Supreme Court that upheld his death sentence.
Unger’s body was discovered naked from the waist down the next day lying partially underneath the corner of a parked van in an alley, according to the California Supreme Court’s ruling.
“Carol died after a violent struggle with defendant, a virtual stranger. The condition and position of her body bore the classic signs of murder in the course of a forcible sexual assault,” then-Associate Justice Marvin R. Baxter wrote on behalf of the panel, with the other six justices concurring in the March 2005 ruling.
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