"Victims Who Had a Current or Former Intimate Relationship with Their Killer Were More Likely to Receive Wounds to the Face"

"Here, there was considerable evidence of bruises and lacerations preceding Kniffin's death, including evidence that he had been struck by a gun barrel. This evidence is more consistent with a brutal attack than a calculated killing." (People v. Thomas, p. 34)

I'd like to pick up a loose thread I left dangling at the end of the last post.  This thread is the  quote from Justice Mosk's dissenting opinion.  It seems to me that, in reading the dissenting opinions given by Justice Mosk in People v. Thomas (1992) and Justice Kennard in In RE: Ralph International Thomas (2006), one finds not only sharp criticisms of the reasoning behind the majority's opinion, but also clear demonstrations of the weaknesses in the prosecution's case against Thomas (Mosk) or the deficiencies in his defense (Kennard). In this post I'll focus on how Justice Mosk's demonstrates the weaknesses of the prosecution's case against Thomas.

To begin, I need to be clear about Mosk's position.  He concurred with the majority's opinion that Thomas committed the murders, and that it was just for him to be convicted of second degree murder in the killing of Mary Gioia.  But he argued that Thomas's conviction for the first degree murder of Greg Kniffin should have been reversed, since there was no strong evidence of premeditation "nor evidence of motive along with evidence of planning or manner."  In his opinion, the evidence only supported a conviction for the second degree murder of Greg Kniffin.  So let's move on to some of the details of Mosk's dissent.

We know from People v. Thomas Inspector Dan Wolke told Thomas that "the police could not figure out the motive for the murders." (People v. Thomas, p. 6)  We know from this same document that, at sentencing, "the trial court declared the murders to have been committed 'without apparent motive, nor any rhyme or reason.'" (Ibid. p. 11)  Justice Mosk emphasizes this point in his dissent.  He challenges the theory that there was a sexual motive behind Mary's murder.  He also challenges the theory that Greg witnessed Mary's murder and he had to be eliminated; that the motive behind Greg's murder was "witness elimination." I'll try to present the reasoning to support these two challenges individually.

Sexual Motive

Like Mary's mother, Justice Mosk understands Dr. Iocco's testimony regarding the state of Mary's denim shorts after her body's recovery in a way that differs from the majority's understanding.  Here's the majority's understanding:

"The upper snap of the shorts was undone and the zipper was substantially [my emphasis] down." (Ibid. p. 2)

Now here's Mary's mother's report on Iocco's testimony during the preliminary hearing:

"Although the upper snap of the denim shorts was undone and the zipper was partially [my emphasis] down, he didn't find any trauma to her private parts." (Berkeley Marina Murders, p. 110)

And now here's Justice Mosk's understanding of the testimony:

"The only evidence that might suggest a sexual motive, however, was that the zipper of the outer of two pairs of pants Gioia wore was partway [my emphasis] down when her body was recovered. But this evidence is consistent with the pathologist's testimony that Gioia's body was dragged over rough ground. Without more, the zipper evidence is insufficient to support the conclusion that Gioia was killed for a sexual reason." (People v. Thomas, p. 32)

In summation, the undone snap and the partially unzipped zipper don't support the prosecution's hypothesis.

Witness Elimination Motive

Justice Mosk's argument is pretty simple.  The evidence doesn't indicate who was killed first, Mary or Greg.  "The theory that defendant killed Kniffin to eliminate him as a witness to the prior, apparently unmotivated, murder of Gioia founders on the absence of any evidence that Gioia was killed before Kniffin." (Ibid. p. 32)  So there's no evidence that Greg witnessed Mary's murder, and Greg could not have witnessed Mary's murder if he was murdered first?  On some predatory level, I guess, it'd make sense for their killer to strike at the stronger of the two first and kill him.  Thus there may be reason to believe that Greg was killed first.  And, yes, that's speculation, but so's the claim that Mary was murdered first.   In my opinion, Mosk's opinion shows that the prosecution made weak arguments with regard to the motive behind the murders, and, what's more, the majority accepts them as plausible in People v. Thomas.

"Savagely Beaten Before They Were Murdered"

Some reporting on the murders in the days following described them as "execution style".  For example, a headline from the Sunday, August 18 San Francisco Examiner reads "Execution killings in Berkeley."  Or, take as another example the opening sentence to an article in the August 19 Santa Cruz Sentinel that reads, "Police are investigating the execution-style murders of two devout followers of the rock group Grateful Dead whose bodies were found this weekend floating in San Francisco Bay near the Berkley Marina." As Justice Mosk points out in his dissenting opinion, these were not execution-style murders:

"Had the attack on Kniffin consisted of a single shot and nothing more, the case might perhaps be different. Such a situation would arguably suggest a so-called 'execution-style' killing—which is 'particular and exacting' practically by definition.  The actual attack, however, was not of this sort: Kniffin was savagely beaten over virtually his whole body before he was shot. The situation that the facts unambiguously disclose points toward a killing done spontaneously and impulsively in unchecked and undiscriminating fury—a method that is neither 'particular' nor 'exacting.'” (Ibid. p. 29) 

I think that his description is particularly insightful because it touches on  what Salfati and Canter would call a "behavioral theme" of the murders.  In their Differentiating Stranger Murders:  Profiling Characteristics from Behavioral Styles (1999) C. Gabrielle Salfati and David Canter distinguished three behavioral themes or styles in their analysis of data related to 82 cases of "stranger homicide".  These three themes are Instrumental (Opportunistic), Instrumental (Cognitive) and Expressive (Impulsive).  As Justice Mosk's description suggests, the murders of Mary and Greg show a predominantly Expressive (Impulsive) theme.  Here's how Salfati and Canter characterize this theme:

"As can be seen from Figure 1 [below], there is a collection of frenzied and eclectic impulsive behaviors in the Impulsive theme, incorporating variables such as multiple wounds distributed across the victim's body, many different types of wounds such as slash/cut wounds and stab wounds, bringing a weapon to the scene and using a weapon from the scene. Many of the victims in these cases also have injuries to the face which may indicate a very emotional attack where the offender is attacking the core of the representation of that person. [my emphasis]" (p. 401)

And they also have this to say:

"Here the offender strikes out at the victim's face because, as is reflected in much of the clinical work in this area, the victim had a certain emotional meaning to the offender. In this case, the victim's face represented the victim and was thus targeted. [my emphasis]" (Ibid.)

The murderer shot Mary and Greg in the head.  The forensic evidence tells us that the murderer shot Mary in the face.  I'm not going to repeat the entire description of the damage to Mary's face here, but I am going to point out that much of this damage was inflicted in and around her mouth.  "There was also extensive fracturing to the jaw and teeth." (People v. Thomas, p. 2) Five teeth were found at the crime scene.  

The location of the entry wound may be telling.  In an abstract to a journal article entitled Variations In Wounding by Relationship Intimacy in Homicide Cases (Trojan and Krull, 2012) I found this claim:  "The findings [of the current study] demonstrated that victims who had a current or former intimate relationship with their offender were more likely to receive wounds to the face and be injured by a weapon from the scene..." (abstract found at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2249122)