Women Serial Killers of the 20th Century (24 page)

Dorinda gave the police a full description of the woman, and they made a composite sketch. The following day the story, sketch
, and description were in the local newspaper.

Geri
Armbrust, the following morning as she drank her coffee and read the newspaper, nearly choked. The description she was reading, and the composite sketch of a woman who was suspected of a brutal assault and attempted murder, was of her step-daughter Dana. She phoned Detective Greco and told him of her suspicion. Dana, she told the detective, had recently dyed her hair red and had a boyfriend with a boy named Jason. She was well-known to Norma Davies and June Roberts.

Composite sketch

Detective Greco applied for a search warrant for Dana's home. He received it late on the morning of March 16
th
, 1994.

Elsewhere on the morning of March 16
th
, Julia Whitcombe was worrying that her 87-year-old mother, Dora Beebe, was not answering her phone. It was the fifteenth anniversary of the death of Ernest Beebe, Julia’s father, from cancer; a day Dora always felt depressed. Julia’s mother lived in Sun City on her own in a condominium. Worried, Julia decided to drive round to see her with a friend, Louis Dormand. When they arrived later in the afternoon, they were disturbed to find Dora’s door unlocked. They eventually found Dora’s battered body lying in the fetal position on the floor of the bathroom. There was blood everywhere. She had been bludgeoned to death with a heavy iron and strangled. Her credit card was missing.

Crime scene Dora’s bathroom

Detective Greco, with search warrant in hand, went to the house Dana shared with her boyfriend in Wildomar. In her house, they found a wallet containing $2,000 stashed in the washing machine, along with jewelry, brand new clothing with the labels still on, June Roberts' bank book, credit cards, and keys to her home. They also found keys to the antiques shop where Dorinda was attacked, and Dora Beebe’s credit card was found in Dana’s lingerie drawer: a woman whose murder the detective had only learned about thirty minutes before entering Dana’s house.

Detective Greco arrested Dana for forgery and possession of stolen property
, cautioned her about her rights, and then took her in for questioning.

The questioning lasted for several hours. During it, Dana admitted to the use of June Roberts’s credit cards, thereby implicating herself in the February 28th murder. Dana then said she had found the bankbook and credit cards belonging to Dora Beebe. She even admitted to having been in Beebe's house and seeing her body. Dana, however, denied having anything to do with her murder.

When asked why she hadn’t handed the credit cards and bank books she apparently found over to the police, she replied, “I got desperate to buy things. Shopping puts me at rest. I'm lost without it”.

Detective Greco then charged Dana with the murders of June Roberts and Dora Beebe and the attempted murder of Dorinda Hawkins. Dana was detained without bail in the Riverside County Jail. The following day
, the police held a press conference announcing her arrest.

Riverside County Jail.

Friends and acquaintances of Dana’s were stunned and shocked; they could not believe Dana as the kind of person who had allegedly assaulted one woman and killed three others. “She was,” they said, “an extremely nice girl”. Others said that Dana had been a good, friendly neighbor while others said that when her life had started to fall apart, she’d become strange and withdrawn.

Dana was not charged with Norma Davis’s death as the police had as yet no direct evidence connecting her
to the crime. The newspapers speculated as to whether the DA would seek the death penalty.

On April 8, 1994, Dana pled, through her public defender lawyer, Stuart Sachs, innocent to the charges. On June 23rd, Richard Bentley,
the Deputy DA, announced he would be seeking the death penalty due to the brutality of the murders.

Dana’s mug shot

On the lead up to the trial, Dana’s defense lawyer Stuart Sachs employed several psychiatrists. Stuart Sachs believed that Dana, due to the circumstances of her life in 1994, had been acting in a position of decreasing mental function. He wanted to prove to the court that Dana, who had been a respected registered nurse and married to a man with whom she loved, had in a short period of time in 1993 undergone severe stress. Dana had lost her job; her marriage had broken down, she had entered into bankruptcy, she had lost her Canyon Lake house, and she had suffered a miscarriage. A doctor from whom she had sought help, as she had felt suicidal, had prescribed her anti-depressants.

On March 10 1995, as Dana's trial was about to start in the Superior Court of Riverside, Stuart Sachs entered an insanity plea on Dana’s behalf. He told the court the psychological problems Dana had suffered from during the period of time the murders took place were now no longer an issue but at the time, they had caused her behavior.

After Dana changed her plea to evaluate her claim, two psychiatrists were appointed. The defense psychiatrist found her insane and felt that the events that happened prior to the killing spree t
o be the catalysts for her insanity. Before the killing binge, the defense claimed, she had been abusing alcohol and had given up taking her anti-depressants. During examination by the psychiatrists, Dana admitted that when she had murdered June Roberts, she had left five-year-old Jason in her Cadillac while she went into June’s house. Following the murder, she took Jason out for lunch and on a shopping trip.

The prosecution’s psychiatrist, Dr. Martha Rogers
, claimed that Dana was well aware of her actions at the time of the murders. She said that despite being stressed, Dana had planned and prepared for the murders fully aware they were wrong.

While these evaluations were going on, Detective Greco was still looking for evidence linking Dana with Norma Davies’s murder. A gardener in a house across the road from Norma’s condominium had seen Dana wandering around Norma Davis's condo on the day of her murder.
However, Detective Greco did not think this statement on its own was sufficient evidence for charging her with murdering Norma.  Nevertheless, he was determined he would find the evidence.

Three and a half years later, Dana’s trial had still not begun and then just before the police charged her with Norma Davies’s murder, Dana changed her plea. She had accepted a prosecution plea agreement On Sept. 8, 1998. Dana, now at the age of forty, pleaded guilty to robbery and the murder of two women and attempted murder of another. In this way, Dana avoided any possibility of the death penalty and the charge of murdering Norma Davies.

Over four years after Dana’s killing spree, on October 16th, 1998, Dana was sentenced. She elected this opportunity to make a statement to the court. The local newspaper reported her as saying, “My life and my career have been focused on healing. It has strayed so far from that purpose; it was so out of character. I'm sorry, and I know that these words will never be enough. I will live with this the rest of my life”. Dana continued by expressing her remorse to Judge Magers saying that she accepted responsibility but thought her judgment at the time of the offenses had been somewhat cloudy.

Judge Magers
, on delivering her sentence, said, “It's hard to find words to describe the atrocity in this case. The crimes were horrendous, callous, and despicable”.

He sentenced Dana to life in prison without parole.

Dana lives incarcerated in Chowchilla, in the California Women's Prison, where she will stay until she dies.

California Women's Prison, Chowchilla

The local newspaper,
The Press Enterprise
, covered the case in detail. One story wrote about Dana’s movements after killing June Roberts. While she was killing June, she had left Jason in the car, telling him that she wouldn’t be long. When she returned to the car, she first took Jason to lunch and then she’d had her hair done. Both her hair and lunch were paid for with June’s credit card. Following this, she bought $695 of clothes and jewelry. People who had encountered her that day described her as happy and cheerful. At the end of the day, she had spent $1,700 on June’s card.