Town note
The town began as an Army Air Corps rest camp called Site Six during the Second World War, on the shore of Lake Havasu.
about 0:09:44The story
His mother drank heavily throughout the pregnancy and never saw a doctor, and his father beat her while she was carrying him. What followed was a childhood of continuous abuse. His father burned him with cigarettes when he was a baby, his mother sexually molested him, and when she tired of him she gave him and his sister to her parents, where his grandfather tied him to a chair as punishment and abused his sister. After his grandmother died the children went back to their mother and a new stepfather who beat all of them, and the sexual abuse continued. His mother, who had several mental disorders, once asked him to sit beside her while she took an overdose, and the stepfather then beat him for making her want to die. A friend he met in the fourth grade stayed in touch through all of it and later said that even as children they could tell Dan was neglected.
Just before his fifteenth birthday his mother handed him over to the state of California. In 1979, aged seventeen, he left school and moved to Arizona. He joined the army reserves, was posted to Fort McClellan in Alabama, attempted suicide in 1980 and was honourably discharged.
He drifted to Idaho to live with a woman he called his foster mother, Barbara Williamson, then back to Wyoming, where he drove a truck until he was fired for drinking in November 1980. In December 1981 he checked himself into the Idaho State Hospital after trying to kill himself with a shotgun. While there he married Laura, a member of staff, left against advice to do it, and was readmitted a week later after another attempt. On March 22, 1982 he jumped the reception desk and ran out; Laura withdrew four or five thousand dollars, bought Greyhound tickets and the two of them moved to Kingman, Arizona. They later separated.
By 1983 he was being diagnosed with schizophrenia and alcohol abuse. In 1986, in Kingman, he met a woman named Barbara, who had two children, Becky and Sean, and he became obsessed with her. She ended the relationship in March 1987. He worked at Bob's Big Boy, wrote her letters about how well he was doing, and counted the days since she left on a calendar. On July 17, 1987 his boss told him to leave his problems at home and he quit.
A third man, Carlos Cruz Ramos, a Nicaraguan who was in the country illegally, slept on the floor of the apartment and worked at the same restaurant. He had about ninety dollars.
When Ramos came back down he found his money pouch gone. They punched him, beat him with a metal pipe and a stick, burned his chest, stomach and genitals with cigarettes and demanded to know who his CIA contact was, accusing him of being a Nicaraguan spy and referring to Oliver North and the Iran-Contra affair.
At around two-thirty or three in the morning a sixteen-year-old co-worker, Kevin Sweeney, knocked at the door looking for somewhere to drink. Sweeney's body went into the closet beside Ramos.
At about 10.30pm they came back to the complex, sat by the pool with a friend, Byron Watkins, and others, and then invited them up to the apartment.
He admitted choking Sweeney with his hands and then said he did not want to talk any more.
He filed for federal habeas relief in 1997 with 21 claims, went on a hunger strike in June 2000 and had his case rejected by the Ninth Circuit in March 2011.
He asked for eggplant lasagna, garlic cheese mashed potatoes, roasted Brussels sprouts, broiled asparagus, ice cream and root beer. His last words were an apology to the victims' families, a thank you to his lawyers and the phrase "Red Robin, yum, I'm done, I love you." Members of Kevin Sweeney's family watched. One brother said he felt sorry for the scared man on the gurney; his sister said only: "Why, Kevin, did that?"