Facts of the Crime:
Bunyard's wife of three years, Elaine, a nurse's aide in Manteca, was a few days shy of delivering their baby girl in 1979. In anticipation of a stay in the maternity ward, she had packed a bag and kept it by the front door. But Jerry Bunyard wasn't as excited. The good-looking, well-spoken carpenter had been carrying on with a Tracy woman and thought his wife would "take him for everything he had" if he divorced her, a witness said. Enter Earlin Popham, a biker-type boyhood friend who had been helping the Bunyards build a home in Patterson.
On November 1, 1979, when Elaine Bunyard was alone in the kitchen, Popham broke an iron skillet on her skull. He then shot her in the head with a shotgun and tried to make the crime look like both a robbery and a suicide. Popham later testified that his buddy had promised him $1,000 to kill Elaine Bunyard. Popham received a sentence of 25 years to life in exchange for his testimony against Bunyard. California law requires special circumstances for a death sentence. They include multiple murder and murder for hire. Murder-for-hire prosecution parameters still were evolving, so Stockton prosecutors chose to go after Bunyard for multiple murder. A 1970 law -- which resulted from the prosecution of a Stockton man who had killed his ex-wife's fetus -- makes no differentiation between children who are born and those who aren't. Jacobsen doesn't recall any significance attached to the Bunyard trial as a test case for the fetal murder law. He does recall that prosecutors played up evidence that Elaine Bunyard struggled mightily against her attacker, as if "fighting to stay alive for her unborn child."
Bunyard was sentenced to death on February 2, 1981.
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