Richard Arlin Walker
Special to ICT
A Monache/Cherokee man will remain in prison for a 1978 murder he says he didn’t commit after a Fresno County, California, Superior Court judge denied his petition to have his conviction overturned.
A member of Douglas R. Stankewitz’s legal team wrote that efforts to free the 66-year-old man will continue.
“The petition denial is another injustice against our client. The legal team will continue to fight for our client’s freedom,” attorney Alexandra Cock wrote to ICT of the judge’s Dec. 24 decision.
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Other members of Stankewitz’s legal team – Curtis Briggs, Peter Jones and J. Tony Serra – were unavailable for comment. A copy of the judge’s ruling was not available; Fresno County courts were closed Christmas Eve through the end of the week. A court database only logged that the petition was denied.
Stankewitz’s legal odyssey began 46 years ago when the Big Sandy Rancheria man was convicted of the shooting death of Theresa Graybeal, 21, whom he and three friends carjacked in a Kmart parking lot in Modesto, 90 miles east of San Francisco.
He was sentenced to die at San Quentin Prison but his conviction was overturned four years later because of doubts he had been competent to assist in his own defense. He was found guilty at retrial in 1983 and again sentenced to death.
The case seemed to unravel from there.
Stankewitz’s retrial attorney acknowledged in 1989 in two sworn statements that he failed to introduce psychiatric and psychological evaluations that might have spared Stankewitz the death penalty. In 1993, co-defendant Billy Brown recanted his testimony that he saw Stankewitz shoot Graybeal in the head after the group dropped her off in a vacant lot in Fresno. In 2000, co-defendant Marlin Lewis told a regional director of the American Indian Movement that he, not Stankewitz, fired the gun.
Brown, Lewis and Stankewitz had gotten out of the car with Graybeal when they dropped her off. Co-defendants Christina Menchaca and Teena Topping had remained in the car and told investigators they heard a shot but didn’t see who fired the gun, according to court records. Brown received immunity in exchange for his testimony against Stankewitz. The others were convicted of lesser charges.
In 2012, based partly on the retrial attorney’s sworn statements, Stankewitz’s death sentence was reversed and in 2019 he was sentenced to life without parole. A California appellate court ruled in 2022 that Stankewitz had been entitled to an evidentiary hearing before he was resentenced.
The hearing took place in January 2024 in Fresno County Superior Court Judge Arlan Harrell’s courtroom, with additional written arguments filed over the next three months.
Continuing to fight the charges
The team introduced evidence and expert testimony that the handgun investigators reported finding in Graybeal’s car was not the murder weapon; that Stankewitz was too tall to have been the shooter, based on the angle and trajectory of the gunshot wound; that there were no fingerprints on the gun and no gunshot residue on Stankewitz’s hands at the time of arrest; and that evidence had been mishandled.
Stankewitz’s legal team asked the court to order a new trial or dismiss the case with prejudice. Harrell denied the request.
James Ardaiz, now 76 and a retired prosecutor and judge, said the investigation and prosecution were above board. He took umbrage at the defense’s allegation that evidence was planted.
“I get very upset about this, because I knew all of these officers,” Ardaiz said. “They’re very fine men. They have absolute integrity. And that wouldn’t have happened, and it didn’t happen, and that’s what the record shows.”
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The gun introduced as the murder weapon — a .25-caliber Titan semi-automatic pistol — has a murky chain of custody.
The gun first turned up in police records in Sacramento —169 miles northwest of Fresno — where someone had found it in a park and turned in to police there on July 25, 1973. A Sacramento police officer inscribed that date and his badge number on the weapon’s holster in keeping with evidence-handling practice at the time. There’s a second inscription, made by Fresno County Sheriff’s investigator Thomas D. Lean III on Feb. 10, 1978, the day after Graybeal’s body was found. ICT left a message at a number registered to a Thomas D. Lean III in the Fresno-area community of Clovis.
Sacramento police have no record that the gun was reclaimed by its owner and the question remains: How did a gun go from Sacramento police custody in 1973 to Stankewitz’s hands in 1978? His lawyers say it didn’t. They say the gun was a “throw-away” — California state law allows abandoned firearms to be released for use by law enforcement — and Stankewitz’s lawyers allege the gun was planted.
Furthermore, while an investigator reported finding a .25-caliber shell casing near Graybeal’s body, no slug or bullet was found and no scientific analysis was done to determine what caliber of bullet killed her.
In 2019, Roger Clark, a certified police procedures consultant and retired Los Angeles County sheriff’s detective, determined the trajectory of the bullet indicated Stankewitz, at 6-foot-1 the tallest of the co-defendants, was too tall to have fired the shot that killed Graybeal, who was 5-foot-3.
“I continue to believe that the trajectory of the fatal shot demonstrates that the victim, Ms. Graybeal, was not shot by Mr. Stankewitz but instead by a shorter person,” Clark wrote in his analysis. The other defendants were 5-foot-6, 5-foot-3, and 5-foot-1, according to court documents.
Time is working against Stankewitz. Brown signed a sworn statement recanting his damning testimony, saying it had been coerced — he was a minor at the time of Graybeal’s murder and was questioned at length without a parent or lawyer present, a practice no longer allowed. Lewis reportedly confided his guilt to an American Indian Movement official helping him fill out tribal enrollment papers. But Lewis died in 2000 and Brown died in 2006.
Topping died in 2015 or 2016, according to Cock. Menchaca’s whereabouts are unknown.
“When you introduce statements like, ‘So-and-so said at one point out of court … ,’ that’s a hearsay statement,” Ardaiz said. “You have to show a foundation of facts in order to get that in [as evidence]. And if you can’t meet that foundation, it doesn’t come in. It’s like saying, and the easiest example would be something like, ‘Well, Joe told me that he lied at the trial.’ Where’s Joe? Well, Joe’s dead. You have no evidence, there’s no foundation [of facts] to show.”
Life in a new prison
Stankewitz walked into San Quentin Prison as a 20-year-old man in October 1978 and for the next 46 years lived in the prison’s Death Row — the longest Death Row tenure in California history. He told of his daily routine in an earlier interview with ICT: wash up, clean his cell, pray and meditate, listen to his radio, exercise, type a letter, and work on his case. He left his cell a couple of times a week to shower, go into the yard for a few hours or participate in worship services. He attended the annual powwow hosted on the prison grounds.
Stankewitz was transferred in May 2024 to the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo after the state closed San Quentin’s Death Row block for repurposing. He’s now four years from age 70, paunchy, with teeth that give him trouble and a variety of ailments common to the incarcerated. Cock said a long-awaited set of lower dentures are finally being made for him, and he eats with other inmates rather than alone in a cell.
The population of California Men’s Colony was 3,254 on Jan. 31, 2023, with a capacity of 3,816. Inmates can work in textiles, making gloves, jackets and T-shirts; in the laundry, shoe factory or printing plant: or in equipment and building maintenance. Inmates can learn trades, such as auto mechanics, computers and electronics, masonry, small engine repair, and welding. Inmates can also take classes to earn a GED or college degree, serve as a prison firefighter or on a community service crew, and learn anger management and alternatives to violence.
It’s not known if Stankewitz is eligible to participate in these programs.
Stankewitz told ICT in an earlier interview that law enforcement was biased against him because of his family’s background. His mother was an alcoholic and abusive and his father and siblings spent time in prison.
“I was the target because I’m Indian and because of my family and my family name,” he said in an earlier interview. “My family was known for violence, was known for trouble, was known to start trouble and to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. But police knew I didn’t do it. They just wanted any Stankewitz.”
Ardaiz, who had prosecuted other Stankewitz family members by 1978 when Douglas Stankewitz was arrested for Graybeal’s murder, told ICT on Dec. 26: “You’re entitled to evaluate the merits of his conviction, but I would tell you right now, that at the time that all of this occurred, there was no question that he was an incredibly violent person, as were his brothers. This is a very violent family for whatever reason. Violence was their recourse.”
Few would deny Stankewitz’s childhood was horrific.
His family seemed to unravel after the death of his maternal grandfather, a well-known culture bearer whose 1964 death was covered in three columns on page 2 of The Fresno Bee newspaper. Stankewitz was 6 at the time. Later that year, Child Protective Services removed Stankewitz from his home after his mother beat him. He was later sent to Napa State Hospital for evaluation because of behavioral problems.
Napa State was not a place where a child found compassion and love; others treated there at the time included adult suspects deemed to be incompetent to stand trial, offenders with mental health disorders, and offenders found not guilty by reason of insanity.
When most children his age were attending kindergarten or first grade, Stankewitz had a court record.
“It’s not uncommon for Indigenous juveniles to be referred into some form of system rather than deferred out like Caucasian youth,” said inmate rights attorney Gabriel Galanda, a citizen of the Round Valley Indian Tribes who now lives in Seattle. “That’s their entry into the prison pipeline.”
According to evaluation reports, the 6-year-old Stankewitz was heavily medicated and sometimes restrained in his hospital bed at Napa State. He said he was sexually abused by staff.
“From an early life developmental standpoint, [Stankewitz] has suffered from early childhood losses, prolonged separation from parents, poor institutional surrogate care,” one evaluation states. “This has resulted in poor social adjustment as manifested by frequent runaways, behavior problems, scholastic under-achievement and finally culminating in antisocial behavior which has occurred both in and out of institutional placements.”
Stankewitz alternated between foster homes and juvenile hall during his childhood and early teens, and his behavior was characterized as “unpredictable” and “out of control.” He ran away from home. He stole.
At one point, while living with a foster family, Stankewitz showed promise of turning around. He earned B grades in U.S. government and algebra and, according to a report in his file, understood that “his impulsive behavior often results in problems for him.”
But he relapsed. He sniffed glue and paint and used drugs and alcohol. He committed two assaults, one while in juvenile hall. At age 15, he was the driver of a car fleeing the scene of an alleged assault and robbery. A passenger in the car was killed in a shootout between Stankewitz’s brother and a pursuing police officer. Four years later, Stankewitz was arrested, tried and convicted of murdering Graybeal.
In interviews with ICT, Stankewitz didn’t deny his past behavior. But he insisted he didn’t kill Graybeal.
“I want to give them proof I didn’t do that,” he said of Graybeal’s family in a Feb. 25, 2022, story. “If I could talk to [Graybeal’s family] today, I would tell them I feel bad that they lost their daughter, their wife, whoever she was to them. She was only 22 years old. That was a devastating loss to everybody.”
He added, “I hold her in my prayers every morning, her and her family. I wish it hadn’t happened, but I didn’t do it.”
Graybeal’s husband, David, who later remarried and started a family after several years of struggling to cope with his wife’s death, told ICT in the same story that Stankewitz should spend the rest of his life in prison.
“It doesn’t matter who pulled the trigger,” he told ICT. “They were all guilty of kidnapping and murdering Theresa. She was a beautiful young woman who had her whole life ahead of her. They didn’t need to kill her.”
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