"We do not have the likes of the Hollywood elite asking to spare his life."
Perhaps he didn't kill enough people.
The ugly saga starts in 1974. Allen owned a security company. According to court documents, he enlisted the help of his son Roger and two employees to rob Fran's Market, a store east of Fresno owned by the Schletewitz family, whom Allen had known for years.
Roger Allen invited the Schletewitz son, Bryon, to a party. While Bryon was swimming, someone took his keys. The Allen gang then robbed the store. Later, Roger's 17-year-old girlfriend, Mary Sue Kitts, confessed to Bryon that she helped cash money orders stolen from the market. Bryon confronted Roger Allen, and also confirmed that Kitts had told him what happened.
Clarence Ray Allen then ordered that Kitts be murdered. Between threatening phone calls from Allen, an accomplice strangled the poor girl. When Bryon learned Kitts was missing, he went to authorities.
After a 1977 trial, a jury convicted Clarence Ray Allen of burglary, conspiracy and first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life without parole.
In Folsom State Prison, Allen cooked up a scheme to kill the witnesses who testified against him so that he could appeal his conviction, and then be freed because any witnesses were dead -- or scared into silence. After Allen's buddy, Billy Ray Hamilton, was paroled, Allen's other son supplied Hamilton with guns and ammo.
Accompanied by a girlfriend, Hamilton visited Fran's Market, brandished a sawed-off shotgun and led Bryon and other employees into the stockroom as he searched for a safe. As the Fresno Bee reported, Hamilton shot Bryon to death. He killed Douglas White, 18. Then he shot a crying Josephine Rocha, 17, through the heart, lung and stomach.
"When you hear the details, it's hard," Teresa Daniele, Rocha's big sister, told me over the phone. Some 25 years later, "it's still very raw."
Hamilton also shot a 17-year-old clerk, who was left for dead but miraculously survived, and a neighbor who heard the shotgun blasts and went to investigate. Hamilton shot the neighbor, who then shot Hamilton.
Days later, a wounded Hamilton was arrested while robbing a liquor store. Police found a list of names and information on eight people who had testified against Allen, including Bryon Schletewitz and his father, Ray Schletewitz.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/11/20/EDG46FQCEN1.DTL