July 7, 2008
Court denies Salcido death penalty appeal
Ramon Salcido, the mass murderer who slit the throats of his own children and left a trail of blood across Sonoma Valley in 1989, was denied a death penalty appeal by the California Supreme Court on June 30. Salcido has been on death row at San Quentin since December 1990, and had appealed his sentence on several grounds, including the allegations that he was illegally extradited from Mexico and that he was high on cocaine and alcohol and suffering a psychotic break during the time of the killings.
Salcido went on a murderous rampage April 18, 1989, after allegedly learning he was not the biological father of one of his wife's four children. He murdered his wife, Angela Richards Salcido, 24, at their Boyes Hot Springs home after taking his three daughters, aged 4, 3, and 22 months, driving to the dump transfer station on Stage Gulch Road, slitting their throats and tossing them into a ditch. The 3-year-old, Carmina, miraculously survived. Salcido also killed his mother-in-law Marian Richards, two sisters-in-law whom he also raped, and Tracy Toovey, an assistant winemaker at Grand Cru Winery in Glen Ellen where the killer worked as a fork-lift operator. There he also shot and wounded Kenneth Butti, his supervisor at Grand Cru…
LINK - SonomaNews.com
