Convicted killer who twice avoided execution dies in California prison

A man who was twice sentenced to execution and twice avoided that fate died in a prison hospital over the weekend.

Darryl T. Kemp, 88, died of natural causes Saturday at the California Medical Facility in Solano County, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Kemp was one of more than 600 inmates in the California penal system who was sentenced to death but was instead made to wait out their natural life after the state put a permanent freeze on prison executions.

Kemp, originally from Los Angeles, was convicted of first-degree murder in 2009, found responsible for the 1978 rape and killing of 40-year-old Armida Wiltsey at a reservoir in Contra Costa County.

For Kemp, it was the second time he’d been convicted of rape and murder and then sentenced to death.

In 1960, he was found guilty of killing and raping Los Angeles nurse Marjorie Hipperson. He was sentenced to death following that trial, and waited execution for the next decade.

But in 1972, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was unconstitutional and his sentence was then modified to life with the possibility of parole.

In July, 1978, he was released on parole after serving his full sentence “as defined by the law.”

Weeks later, at Lafayette Reservoir, he would go on murder Wiltsey, who died by either strangulation or suffocation. A little more than two years after that, he fulfilled the terms of his parole and walked free.

He was connected to the Wiltsey’s long-unsolved killing decades later through DNA technology.

During his 2009 trial, in an attempt to avoid the death penalty, Kemp’s defense attorneys argued that he suffered from mental illness that compelled him to rape, and that the killings were the accidental result of sexual assaults in which he restricted his victim’s airflow, according to reporting from the East Bay Times.

The gambit did not pay off and, despite his advanced age, a jury recommended he be executed—a sentence that twice was never fulfilled.

There are currently 611 remaining inmates on death row in California. For more information about the state’s capital punishment, click here.