2 killers on Death Row found dead in cells
Authorities said Monday they are investigating the deaths of two inmates awaiting execution at San Quentin Prison.
Prison staff found one inmate, 54-year-old Andrew Urdiales, unresponsive during a security check on Friday at 11:15 p.m., according to a prison statement. Urdiales was pronounced dead at 12:01 a.m. Saturday.
At 10:15 p.m. Sunday, prison staff found a second condemned inmate, Virendra Govin, 51, unresponsive in his cell, the statement said. Officials said Govin received CPR, but he was pronounced dead at 10:30 p.m.
Both men were in cells by themselves and were on Death Row for multiple murders. Their deaths are being investigated as suicides.
Urdiales was convicted of killing eight women between 1986 and 1995, San Quentin officials said in the statement.
He was a U.S. Marine in the late 1980s and early ’90s when he terrorized Southern California and killed five of his victims during a seven-year murderous rampage.
On Jan. 18, 1986, Robbin Brandley, 23, volunteered as an usher at a piano concert at Saddleback College in Orange County. Afterwards, Urdiales overtook her in the parking lot and stabbed Brandley 41 times with a hunting knife.
Over the next several years, he would drive his victims to isolated places and sexually assault them before killing them, Howard Gundy, Los Angeles’ senior deputy district attorney later said.
Urdiales shot Julie McGhee, 29, in the head on July 17, 1988, and shot Maryann Wells, 31, to death on Sept. 25, 1988 in a deserted industrial park.
Less than a year later, on April 16, 1989, Urdiales shot Tammie Erwin, 20, three times in a remote area of Palm Springs.
He then moved to Illinois, according to newspaper accounts, but returned briefly to Palm Springs in 1995 when, on March 11 that year, he stabbed Denise Maney, 32, to death in the desert.
Back in Illinois, Urdiales killed three women in 1996 and tried to hide the bodies in lakes: Cassie Corum, 21, Lori Uylaki, 25, and Lynn Huber, 22.
Ballistics tests linked Urdiales to the three Illinois murders. He was arrested in 1997 and sentenced to death in 2004. His sentence was commuted to life in prison in 2011 when Illinois outlawed capital punishment. Meanwhile, according to newspaper accounts at the time, Southern California police scoured their many unsolved murders and planned to question Urdiales about 17 murders of prostitutes, transients and hitchhikers from the 1980s.
Ultimately, the former Marine confessed to killing eight women.
He would be extradicted to California, Gundy said in 2009, because “members of the community want to see him stand trial for crimes he committed here.”
Urdiales was sentenced to death this month in Los Angeles and has been on Death Row since Oct. 12, prison authorities said.
Govin, the second deceased inmate, was sentenced to death in 2004 for the murders of four family members in Los Angeles two years earlier: Gita Kumar, 42; her son Plara Kumar, 18; her daughter, Tulsi Kumar; and her mother-in-law, Sitaben Patel, 63.
Govin, his brother Pravin Govin, and another man then burned down the family’s home, San Quentin officials said. Pravin Govin was also sentenced to death.
California has 740 people on Death Row.
Since 1978, when capital punishment was reinstated in the state, California has executed 13 Death Row inmates.
Another 117 died while awaiting execution, including 25 who committed suicide, prison officials said.
They said 79 Death Row inmates died of natural causes, and 11 died of other causes — including murder, most recently last month, officials said.
Two causes of death — Govin’s and Urdiales’ — are pending.
Chronicle Librarian Bill Van Niekerkan contributed to this report.