Replies

As execution draws near, families grieve for 3 killed at store in 1980

- Stacy Finz, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, January 13, 2006

It was 1980, and Bryon Schletewitz was planning to take over his family's general store in Fresno so his parents could retire. Josephine Rocha was looking forward to being a high school senior and had taken a part-time job at the market to pay for her new car. Douglas White worked at the shop while going to college and hoped to start a real estate business with his mother someday.

But on a warm evening that year, the three were shot to death as part of a revenge plot cooked up in a Folsom Prison cafeteria. The scheme's architect, Clarence Ray Allen, is scheduled to be executed Tuesday morning for the murders.

For the victims' families, Allen's punishment will be an epilogue to a terrible event whose effects linger to this day.

Some plan to watch as Allen is given a lethal injection in San Quentin State Prison's death chamber.

"It will close a chapter for me," said Schletewitz's sister, Patricia Pendergrass, who is the last surviving member of her family. "But the pain will never go away. It's lasted for 25 years."

Others say there wouldn't be much point in watching Allen die.

"I'd rather spend the time with my family, remembering my sister," said Robert Rocha, Josephine Rocha's younger brother.

"Let's face it -- he'll be put to sleep," Rocha said of Allen. "He's not going to feel one ounce of the pain we've endured since that day."
Sept. 5, 1980, started out ordinary enough. Bryon Schletewitz persuaded his dad, Raymond, to go home early and let him close up Fran's Market, an old-fashioned country store on the east edge of Fresno.

Schletewitz, 27, loved working in his family's shop, which carried fine meat cuts for the weekend ranchers down from the city, an assortment of Mexican specialty items for local farmworkers, animal feed, clothing and sundry items.

"That store sparkled," Pendergrass said. "My mother made sure of that."

Pendergrass and Schletewitz grew up in the market, which their father had named after their mother, Frances. Schletewitz worked there while attending Clovis High School, where he played trumpet in the band and made friends easily.

After graduating, Schletewitz enrolled at a local junior college, where he considered becoming a paramedic. But in the end, he decided that working at the market was what he loved best.

"He was a people person," Pendergrass said. "He had this joyful spirit that was catchy. He loved joking and laughing with the customers, and they in return liked and looked for him."

Raymond Schletewitz agreed to leave closing up to his son that evening, a decision he would regret for the rest of his life.

Bryon Schletewitz joshed with his three employees as they swept up. He had three engagements that night and was probably wondering how he was going to make it to all of them, his sister said. He'd begun dating a pretty brunette. It wasn't serious, but Pendergrass said her brother had made a promise to marry when he was 27 -- just like their father did.
Josephine Rocha hadn't been employed at the store for long. But working at Fran's Market seemed like it was becoming a tradition in the 17-year-old's family. Her older sister Teresa had worked there while she attended high school, and she helped Rocha get a job.

Their Portuguese parents raised all seven of their children with a strong work ethic, Robert Rocha said. Josephine, whom the family called "Phina," was earning money to pay off her car and for auto insurance. Rocha said he remembered her washing that blue Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme while listening to music by the Cars.

Of all the kids in the family, she was Daddy's little girl, he said.

The father's name was Joseph, and "when she was born fourth of all girls, my dad began to worry that he would never have a namesake," Robert Rocha said. "So they named my sister Josephine."

She was the only member of the family to have blond hair and blue eyes. "My mother thought God sent her an angel," he said.

By 17, Josephine Rocha had already won awards for her artwork. When she wasn't drawing, she was working in the garden with her father. Her family is sure that, had she lived, she would have become either an artist or a horticulturist. Robert Rocha said she loved children and caring for people and might have chosen a profession in teaching or medicine.
Before leaving for work at Fran's, 18-year-old Douglas White insisted that his mother see a doctor about her injured foot. She had been putting it off, so he got on the phone and made the appointment himself. As he walked out the door, he teased his mom, a real estate agent, that maybe he should show houses to her clients that day.

White was a 6-foot-6 teenager with the manners of a prince. The Schletewitzes noticed right off how polite he was with the store customers.

"It was 'yes ma'am' and 'no sir,' " Pendergrass remembered. His mother, Nadine, used to call him her "big, gentle teddy bear."

At Clovis High School, he sang with the choir and helped the director plan activities.

"Douglas was a very caring young man," his mother wrote in a 1997 court declaration. "Many other families considered him a virtual member of their families. As a personal favor to his choir director's family, he drove to Madera to do their yard work."

After high school, White attended Reedley Community College. He wanted to study law and architecture and join his mother in her real estate business.
While Schletewitz, Rocha and White began their routine of closing up the market for the night, Clarence Ray Allen, then 50, waited in his Folsom Prison cell to see if his plan of vengeance had been carried out.

He didn't know Rocha or White, but he wanted Bryon Schletewitz, Raymond Schletewitz and six others dead for testifying against him during his 1977 trial for the murder of Mary Sue Kitts, his son's 17-year-old girlfriend, authorities said.

Allen believed Kitts had gone to the Schletewitzes three years earlier and told them that he and a group of accomplices were responsible for a burglary at Fran's Market that year. Allen owned a security outfit, but he also plotted robberies and couldn't abide "rats," prosecutors said.

He ordered a hit on Kitts. The teen was strangled and thrown into the Friant-Kern Canal. Her body was never found.

Allen, who was sentenced to life in prison, planned to eliminate the prosecution witnesses so they wouldn't be around for his appeal. He contracted with inmate Billy Ray Hamilton, who worked with him in the prison's cafeteria and was soon to be paroled, to kill the eight people on his list.

So that September night, Hamilton and his girlfriend, Connie Barbo, lingered in Fran's Market until they were the last customers. Joe Rios, a teenager also working at the store that day, became suspicious of the two as he cleaned up the aisles. But it was too late.

Hamilton pulled out a sawed-off shotgun, and Barbo drew a .32-caliber revolver. They herded all the employees toward the stockroom and ordered them to lie on the floor.

Schletewitz volunteered to give the couple all the money they wanted, according to court records. He then led Hamilton into the stockroom. Once inside, Hamilton pointed the shotgun at Schletewitz's forehead and shot him from less than a foot away.

Hamilton came out of the room and turned to White, the records say. "OK, big boy, where's the safe?" Hamilton demanded. White responded, "Honest, there's no safe." Hamilton shot him in the neck and chest at point-blank range, according to court documents.

Rocha began crying. Hamilton shot her two or three times from about five feet away. The shots pierced her heart, lung and stomach.

Rios had managed to escape to the bathroom. Hamilton pushed his way in, stood three feet away and fired, according to the documents. Rios raised his arm just in time, and the shot entered his elbow, saving his life.

Jack Abbott, who lived next to the market, grabbed his gun and came outside when he heard the shots. He and Hamilton exchanged fire, and Hamilton fled after being shot in the foot. Police arrived and found Barbo hiding in the market.

Hamilton was arrested a week later after trying to rob a Modesto liquor store and now is on Death Row with Allen. A hit list containing names and addresses of the eight trial witnesses was found on him when he was arrested. It's what linked him to Allen, who has always denied ordering the killings.
Robert Rocha and his sister Teresa were at home watching television when a brief story about the robbery flashed on the news. They heard there had been a lone survivor and prayed that it was Josephine. Teresa Rocha and her mother raced to every hospital in the area.

Nadine White got the news during a phone call. At about the same time, her son George drove by the store and saw the commotion. He came home screaming that something horrible had happened.

"We went to Fran's Market," Nadine White wrote in 1977. "At first, we were led to believe that Douglas had survived. However, that hope was destroyed when Ray Schletewitz himself told us that Douglas was inside the store with his dead son, Bryon."

Pendergrass said her parents never opened the store after that day.

Rocha's father told his family that he wished he could have taken the bullets for his daughter.

White had to close her real estate business because she couldn't function after her son's death.

She wrote, "Douglas' death destroyed our world."

E-mail Stacy Finz at sfinz@sfchronicle.com.