http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/02/20/MNGV3HBONP1.DTL
Terri Lynn Winchell left home on the last night of her life in January 1981 to help a boy she knew hated her.
That's just the way she was, friends and family said. Good-hearted. A devout believer in turning the other cheek, in giving people a second chance.
But this was a chance she should not have given.
By the end of the evening, the 17-year-old church choir singer and high school beauty lay raped, hammered and stabbed to death, her corpse sprawled between two rows of grapevines.
She had no inkling of it, but she had been caught in the middle of a love triangle gone hideously bad. Her boyfriend, unbeknownst to her, had been involved in a gay relationship with another man -- whose jealousy drove him to recruit a street thug who would take Winchell out of the picture
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According to court testimony, Morales began plotting ways to kill Winchell, practicing how to strangle someone by wrapping a belt around a female roommate's neck and cranking it tight. Once he had the technique down, he waited for the call to action. It came on a Thursday, Jan. 8, 1981.
Ortega, pretending to want to ease tensions with Winchell, called her house around 5:30 p.m. as she was heading out the door to buy food for her mother, who was ill. He told her he wanted her help buying a gift at a local shopping center. Eager to mend fences, Winchell agreed to go, relatives testified.
Ortega picked her up around 6 p.m. In the back seat was Morales, with a claw hammer, a belt and a 7-inch kitchen knife hidden and ready. He was already stoned and agitated from guzzling cheap Thunderbird wine and smoking a PCP-laced cigarette.
As night fell and the Central Valley tule fog formed, Ortega drove his car out of Lodi along lonely Peltier Road. According to court records, they were a few miles out of town when Morales suddenly cinched his belt around Winchell's neck and began strangling her. She fought back fiercely. The belt broke, so he pulled out the hammer and began bashing her head.
"She screamed for Ortega to help and attempted to fight off the attack, ripping her own hair out of her scalp in the struggle," according to a state attorney general's account. Ortega ignored her pleas and as Morales told him to keep driving he smashed her 23 times in the head, crushing the base of her neck and bloodying her arms and hands as she tried to ward off the blows.
By the time Ortega pulled over at the corner of Bender and Peltier roads, 7 miles outside Lodi, Winchell was unconscious and slumped against the passenger door. According to investigators, Morales hopped out of the car, and saying it was a shame to waste "a good piece of ass," he told Ortega to leave the two of them, drive away and come back in 15 minutes.
Morales dragged the still-unconscious Winchell face-down across the road into a vineyard. There, in the chilly darkness, he stripped her of everything but her sweater and bra, which he pulled up to her neck. Then he flipped her onto her back and raped her in the dirt.
Just before he headed back to the road, he plunged his knife four times into her chest to make sure she was dead.
God Forbid he suffer from a lethal injection