Death row inmate dies of complications from cancer

NOVATO, Calif. (AP) - A Kern County man who has spent more than 17 years on death row for killing his girlfriend and her 14-year-old son died Wednesday of complications from cancer, prison officials said.

Hells Angel motorcyclist Robert Garceau was convicted for the 1984 stabbing deaths of girlfriend Maureen Bautista and her son, Telesforo Bautista, both of North Hollywood.

According to trial testimony, Garceau buried the bodies in cement in the backyard of a fellow drug dealer's house in San Luis Obispo County and claimed that his drug-dealing friends, not him, killed the two. He killed them in Bakersfield, according to records.

Garceau was subsequently sent to death row at San Quentin State Prison outside San Francisco in 1987. He was also serving a sentence of 33-years-to-life for the killing of a fellow drug dealer.

It all began in Sept. 1984 when Maureen Bautista threatened to inform the police of her boyfriend's methamphetamine laboratory in Shandon, California. Fearing that his narcotics operation would be discovered, Garceau stabbed Bautista to death. He also murdered her 14-year-old son, Telesforo, because he witnessed his mothers death.

Six months later, the bodies were found stuffed in a bedroom dresser that had been buried under concrete in the backyard of Greg Rambo, one of Garceau's drug-dealing partners.

By that time, Rambo had also been slain.

In 1985, a jury in Monterey County convicted Garceau of killing Rambo and he was given a sentence of 33-years-to-life for that homicide. Then a separate jury was convened in Bakersfield during that same year in the slaying of the Bautistas, the crime for which Garceau received the death sentence.

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Maureen Bautista and her 14-year-old son Telesforo were stabbed to death in September 1984. Six months later, Susan Rambo—the widow of a drug dealer who had been recently murdered himself—led police to the corpses which were buried in her backyard.

Garceau was convicted of murdering Greg Rambo, who had allegedly helped him bury the Bautistas, and sentenced to 33 years to life imprisonment. Prosecutors then introduced evidence of the Rambo murder at Garceau’s trial for the Bautista murders.

They also presented testimony from Susan Rambo—under grant of immunity—that she helped dig the hole in her backyard, where a dresser containing the Bautistas’ bodies was buried. Several other prosecution witnesses were implicated in covering up the Bautista murders or the Rambo murder, or in the drug business.

Garceau, a Hells Angel biker, was sentenced to death for the 1984 murders of his girlfriend, Maureen Bautista, and her 14-year-old son, Telesforo, in Bakersfield. The California Supreme Court in 1994 upheld the convictions, even though it ruled that the trial judge had erred in allowing testimony that Garceau was a drug dealer who had murdered before.

Three years ago, the 9th Circuit in a split vote threw out the conviction, saying that the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 -- which requires federal courts to uphold convictions if the state court reasonably applied existing law -- did not apply to Garceau because he had requested a stay of execution and appointment of counsel before the act was signed. The ruling not only overturned the California Supreme Court, but also U.S. District Judge Oliver Wanger in Sacramento, who had upheld the conviction.

The 9th Circuit denied rehearing en banc in 2002.

This is why the Death sentence is not a deterrent. too many of them are never carried out.

Criminal , murderers who receive the death sentence should get an automatic appeal,within 6 months. That appeal held in another jurisdiction preferably where they know little about the crime committed. Upon a conviction in that appeal they should die within 7 days.

This is probably how Scott Peterson will die. If he'd never murdered Lacy, he'd probably have a larger chance of being killed in an auto accident some time in the next 30 years than he has of being executed now. The one good thing about a California death sentence is that it more effectively keeps a murderer in prison for the rest of his natural life than any "life without parole" sentence can.

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