Richard Arlin Walker
Special to Indian Country Today
It was about 5:30 p.m. on Feb. 8, 1978, when 21-year-old Theresa Graybeal was carjacked in a Kmart parking lot in Modesto, California. The suspects: four young Native youths from Fresno — Billy Brown, Marlin Lewis, Douglas Stankewitz and Teena Topping.
It wasn’t Graybeal’s first brush with violence. Her brother, Bryan, had been shot and killed at a friend’s house only seven months earlier, when an argument between the friend’s parents escalated and a handgun was fired.
And Graybeal had apparently experienced a robbery or theft only a few days before being pushed inside her car and kidnapped.
“This is crazy. This is the second time in one week this has happened to me,” she said, according to one of the suspects.
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Still, she maintained her composure as Topping drove Graybeal’s 1971 Mercury Cougar to Fresno, 95 miles south, to pick up a friend so they could make a drug buy. She seemed relieved to hear Stankewitz’s promises that she wouldn’t be harmed, that they just needed to get to Fresno.
But that’s not how it ended.
Now Graybeal’s murder is getting renewed attention as lawyers representing Stankewitz, the convicted gunman, is challenging once again the sentencing that left him with life behind bars in California’s San Quentin Prison.
Stankewitz, a Monache from Big Sandy Rancheria, was convicted of the killing and initially sentenced to die in the gas chamber at San Quentin. Lewis and Topping pleaded guilty to lesser charges and received 12 years each in prison. Christina Menchaca, the firned who was picked up in Fresno, was sentenced to five years in prison. Brown, who was a minor at the time, was granted immunity in exchange for testifying against the others.
Stankewitz’s sentence was later reduced to life without the possibility of parole, but he has chosen to remain on Death Row, which he says is safer than the general prison population. In a series of phone calls with Indian Country Today, he still maintains he is not the one who shot the young woman in the head before jumping back into the car.
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His legal team has requested a new hearing so they can present evidence they believe will ultimately make Stankewitz eligible for parole.
As Stankewitz and his legal team wait for a hearing, Theresa Graybeal’s widower, David Graybeal, hopes people “don’t lose track of the victim” – the woman he had dated for three years, the woman whose death traumatized him for 10 years, the woman he said never got to be a mother and didn’t get to grow old.
David Graybeal, who later remarried and became a father, spoke briefly to Indian Country Today on Feb. 25 to share some information about his late wife. He has rarely spoken about the murder in the past 40 years, and asked that he not be contacted again.
With information from him, the case file, online databases and news stories, however, Indian Country Today offers a glimpse into the hardworking young woman Theresa Graybeal was. If alive today, she would turn 66 on April 20.
Helping others
She was born Theresa Kay Pawlowski — nicknamed “Sissy” — on April 20, 1956, in Stanislaus County, California, to a family that reflected the American story: her Polish, Irish and German forebears had settled in the Midwest, served their adopted country in the military in war time, and relocated to this Northern California county rich in fruit and nut orchards and vegetable farms. Theresa would ultimately join Cannery Workers Union 748 and work at Tri-Valley Growers Cannery.
Stanislaus County was, by most appearances, a pretty cool place to grow up. Drive a little more than an hour north and you’re in Sacramento; the same distance east, in Yosemite National Park; an hour and a half west, in San Francisco. The San Joaquin River, which starts in the Sierra Nevada, flows through Stanislaus County, nourishing farms and livestock. An archway over the city’s entrance reads, ”Water Weather Contentment Health.”
When Theresa was in high school, Modesto was the setting for the coming-of-age film, “American Graffiti.”
According to an Oct. 1, 1978, article in The Fresno Bee, Theresa and David lived together as husband and wife but had not yet married — their wedding was planned for April the year she died — and they had settled into a three-bedroom, one-bath house on Las Vegas Street in Modesto. The couple’s parents, grandparents and other relatives lived nearby.
David said Theresa led a productive life. She worked at the cannery and at JC Penney department store, volunteered at a local veterinary clinic and loved animals.
She was buying dog food for her Irish setters when she was abducted.
‘I don’t want to get shot’
Theresa was understandably shaken as the carjacking took place, but she maintained her composure as Topping drove Graybeal’s 1971 Mercury Cougar to Fresno, 95 miles south, to pick up Menchaca and make a score.
Graybeal noticed one of the abductors had a holstered gun.
“I hope there’s no shooting going down, because I don’t want to get shot,” she said, according to Brown’s statement to investigators.
Graybeal came to believe that at some point the group would let her go. She was cooperative, Topping and Lewis told investigators. When asked by her abductors if she had any money, Graybeal gave them the money she had — $31 — and her watch.
“She said we kind of scared her, but that’s it, you know, we talked most of the way,” Topping told investigators. Lewis told investigators that after Graybeal felt confident she wouldn’t be harmed, “She was friendly and talking. She was cooperating in every way,” he said, adding, “She was a nice girl.”
It was dark and raining when Topping pulled the car over at the corner of 10th and Vine in the Calwa area on the outskirts of Fresno. Graybeal got out of the car with Stankewitz, Lewis and Brown. “At least you could have dropped me off where there was a restroom,” Graybeal said, according to a co-defendant’s statement to investigators.
Suddenly, a handgun was fired. Graybeal fell to the ground with a bullet wound to the head. Topping and Christina Menchaca, whom the group picked up earlier in Fresno, were in the car when the young woman was shot.
“I didn’t know they were going to shoot her,” Topping told investigators. “I thought we were just going to drop her off.”
Law enforcement officers found her body shortly after 1 a.m. Feb. 10; she had been dead for about five hours, according to her death certificate. The funeral took place four days later, on Valentine’s Day.
Theresa was interred near her brother in the cemetery in Ceres, the Modesto suburb where they had attended school. A bird, a dog and a butterfly are carved into her headstone, which features the words, “In God’s Hands.”
‘They didn’t need to kill her’
Theresa’s father, Gerald Pawlowski, told The Fresno Bee in 1978 that his daughter would have given her abductors a ride to Fresno if they had asked her to.
“She would do anything for anybody,” he said. “She was always going places to help people, taking her mother or her grandmother somewhere. She came here to help me out the day she was kidnapped.”
David Graybeal told Indian Country Today that Stankewitz deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison.
“It doesn’t matter who pulled the trigger. They were all guilty of kidnapping and murdering Theresa,” he said. “She was a beautiful young woman who had her whole life ahead of her. They didn’t need to kill her.”
Graybeal said he’s never supported the death penalty, but believes life in prison without parole is a just punishment. His father, Wayne Graybeal, took a tougher stance in a Sept. 1, 2012 article in the San Francisco Chronicle.
“He was a bad guy and I don’t know why he’s alive,” the elder Graybeal said of Stankewitz. The Chronicle noted that Wayne Graybeal, who would die from cancer five years later, still carried a news clipping about his daughter-in-law in his wallet.
Wayne Graybeal told the Chronicle: “That’s a long time living in a cage like that for that guy, but my daughter-in-law didn’t deserve what happened to her. She was a nice girl.”
He added, “That man needs to die.”
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