Judge rejects DA petition, preserves death sentence for 1980s Sunnyvale workplace shooter

SAN JOSE — One by one, they relived the pain they experienced in 1988 upon learning that their loved one, their college roommate or their dear friend was dead at the hands of an enraged and heavily armed Richard Wade Farley as he carried out a massacre that would inspire the entire construct of workplace violence.

Former employees of ESL Inc. in Sunnyvale spoke or gave statements Friday recounting how they watched their colleagues get fatally shot or how they dragged a wounded person to safety only to see them shot again. Others recalled how they prayed that Farley wouldn’t find them as they hid for hours from his shotgun-wielding wrath. Retired police officers described having to survey the trail of bodies left in the wake of Farley’s rampage.

The emotional and gripping hearing in Judge Benjamin Williams’ courtroom concluded the implementation of a major initiative announced last year by Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen, which petitioned to move men condemned for some of the South Bay’s most notorious killings off death row and into lifetime imprisonment.

But after 11 instances in which condemned men were resentenced, the final case brought before the court saw a starkly different outcome.

Williams, citing an absence of remorse and rehabilitation by Farley — who is 76 and in the advanced stages of cancer — and calling the mass shooting “the most horrific crime committed in this county, probably ever,” pivoted from his previous rulings.

“Mr. Farley is fundamentally different than many of the individuals that have come before this court,” the judge said.

“There is no reason to believe that Mr. Farley is any less dangerous today,” Williams added, before stating, “this court declines the invitation of the district attorney’s office” to resentence Farley.

The decision was met with elation from Libby Williams Allen, whose husband, Wayne “Buddy” Williams Jr., was killed by Farley and who helped rally three dozen people to give victim-impact statements to the judge on Friday. She was aided by South Bay attorney James McManis, Dolores Carr, Rosen’s predecessor as district attorney who advocated for the victim families, and retired Sunnyvale police Detective Chris Dow, who investigated the nearly 40-year-old shooting.

“It’s so important to me that we had this fight,” Williams Allen said outside the Hall of Justice in San Jose. “The real thing you need to know, Santa Clara County, is that I had to fight against your district attorney to win what we already had. We already had justice.”

Rosen’s office declined to comment on Williams’ ruling Friday. In announcing his office’s petition effort last year, Rosen characterized his policy decision as a pragmatic and measured tack in light of California’s moratorium on the death penalty, as well as the political and institutional forces that have made capital punishment unlikely to be carried out in the state.

The move is a continuation of a trajectory Rosen set in 2020 when he announced that his office would no longer pursue the death penalty, citing in part the error rate of capital prosecutions and his own change of heart on the issue. He also asserted that the resentencings posed no public danger because the petitions sought life-without-parole sentences and no possibility of release from prison.

Even so, the resentencings were met with strong disdain from families of the victims and their supporters. The large turnout in Williams’ courtroom Friday occurred after McManis secured a continuance in December, arguing that a majority of victims of the ESL Inc. shooting had not been contacted and did not have a chance to address the court under Marsy’s Law, a victims’ rights law passed by voters in 2008.

“I personally believe the reason we won this case today was because of all these good folks that came down and either addressed the court or asked me to read their statements,” McManis said. “I think this was so horrendous … and as I pointed out, where’s the justice in commuting this guy?”

The ESL shooting became an emblem for workplace violence and spurred anti-stalking legislation because Farley was fired after stalking a co-worker who rejected his advances, leading him to show up to the company draped with guns and ammunition. It’s one example of how Rosen and his office faced powerful optics in pursuing the resentencings: The condemned men offered relief form a who’s-who of infamous killers in South Bay history.

James Francis O’Malley, who was convicted of the murder-for-hire killing of Sharley Ann German in 1986, for the separate murder of Richard Oliver Parr while trying to steal his motorcycle, and for the murder of Michael Robertson — after suspecting Robertson might tell authorities about Parr’s killing — was the first to be resentenced in August.

Mark Christopher Crew was convicted of murder in the 1982 disappearance of his new wife, Nancy Jo Andrade, whose body was never found.

Also resentenced was David Allen Raley, who in 1985 was a security guard for the Carolands mansion near Hillsborough when he kidnapped then-17-year-old Laurie McKenna and 16-year-old Jeanine Grinsell after offering them a tour of the mansion. Over the next half a day, Raley beat and stabbed the two girls dozens of times before dumping them down a steep ravine off Silver Creek Road in San Jose. McKenna, now Laurie VanLandingham, survived, but Grinsell died.

Erik Sanford Chatman was resentenced for his killing of 18-year-old Rosellina LoBue in 1987, when he stabbed her to death at the San Jose photo developing shop where she worked, with Chatman’s 2½-year-old son in tow. The most recent man condemned in Santa Clara County, Rodrigo Paniagua in 2010, was resentenced for his murder conviction in the 2005 murders of his pregnant girlfriend Leticia Chavez and their two young daughters.

Before Friday, the resentencing hearings have been criticized by victims’ families as feeling largely preordained. Friday’s ruling suggests otherwise, but Williams Allen paid tribute to the families and survivors who did not get to experience her resolution.

“It broke my heart to watch all these people come to court and suffer and bleed out emotionally in court and lose,” she said. “They all lost justice that was rightfully theirs. So today was so important.”