(Image source from: USA Today)
Two high-profile murderers sentenced to death row for their crimes in Southern California were found dead in suspected suicides in their cells, officials said Monday.
One of them, the 54-year-old Andrew Urdiales, was a former Marine who killed five women in Southern California. He was found dead, precisely weeks after he was sentenced to death for the slayings of five women.
During a security check in the adjustment center on Friday at 11:15 p.m., jailers found him unresponsive. Urdiales was given CPR (Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation), but he was declared dead at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday, said officials with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
He was sentenced October 5 and had been on California's death row since October 12. His reason of death is pending the results of an autopsy; however, his death is being investigated as a suicide. He was single-celled.
Urdiales, a former United States Marine was discharged from the military in 1991. Speaking in the court, Urdiales said he respects the jury's decision and probably would have done the same thing.
"I understand how they voted," he said. "If I were a juror on my case I would probably have done the same thing. There's no hard feelings."
He went on to speak to victims' families.
"I'm a little shaken actually, a little nervous," Urdiales said as he offered "sincere apologies" to jurors, prosecutors, the judge, victims' families and his own family for having to hear the "gory" details of his crimes.
Urdiales killed five women in Riverside, San Diego, and Orange counties amid 1986 and 1995, but it was an Illinois triple-murder lawsuit that brought him to the notice of investigators looking into the Southern California killings.
The California serial killings stated with an attack on a 23-year-old Saddleback College student, according to investigators. The dead body of Robbin Brandley was found in a school parking area, stabbed 41 times. She had been on the job earlier that night as an usher at a campus event.
Over that last three decades, her father's memories of the day Brandley left for college and never came abode have mixed with letdown and ire. Her mother died in 2011.
The case went cold for years, during which the bodies of several women with ties to prostitution were found in distant and secret parts of Riverside and San Diego counties. A break came in 1996 when Chicago police investigating the deaths of three women in Illinois learned that a man subsequently identified as Urdiales had been pulled over with a pistol in his car in Indiana.
That revolver was matched to bullets found in the bodies of the three victims in Illinois.
Urdiales told Chicago detectives that they also might want to ask him about people in California, Orange County prosecutors said in opening statements at his trial.
He later spoke with Orange County investigators, and he was arrested in 1997 on intuition of killing an Orange County woman when he was a Marine at Camp Pendleton. He killed the four other women, in Riverside and San Diego counties, when he was stationed at Twenty-Nine Palms.
The second convict, Virendra Govin, 51, was found unresponsive in his cell on Sunday at 10:15 p.m.
Govin was sentenced to death by a Los Angeles County jury on December 21, 2004, for the first-degree slayings of 18-year-old Plara Kumar, 42-year-old Gita Kumar, 63-year-old Sitaben Patel, and 16-year-old Tulsi Kumar.
Govin, his male sibling Pravin Govin, and Carlos Amador, then set the Kumars' home on fire. Govin was received onto California's death row on January 5, 2005. His brother Pravin has been on death row since September 19, 2005.
The reason of death for both of them are pending results of a postmortem.
Their deaths are likewise being probed as self-annihilation.
There is no sign that Govin's and Urdiales' deaths are related.
-Sowmya sangam
