Double murderer on Death Row dies
James Odle, sentenced to death for murdering a Pinole woman and a police officer who was trying to arrest him in 1980, has died in a hospital, state prison officials said. He was 71.
Odle of San Pablo was convicted of stabbing 19yearold Rena Aguilar at her home on April 30, 1980, and shooting Officer Floyd “Bernie” Swartz four days later as police closed in on him. Odle was trying to stop Aguilar from contacting police after her roommate, Odle’s former girlfriend, had told her he had stolen a van.
Swartz was the father of Amber Swartz-Garcia, born four months after his death. She disappeared from the front yard of her Pinole home in June 1988, two weeks after the state Supreme Court upheld Odle’s death sentence.
She has never been found. But in 2009, Pinole police and the FBI said Curtis Anderson, convicted of kidnapping and murdering another 7yearold girl, had confessed to killing Amber before he died in prison in 2007.
In 2013, however, police said they were reopening the case at the request of Amber’s mother, Kim Swartz, and others who signed a petition disputing Anderson’s confession. No further evidence has been reported.
Odle’s case was never fully resolved either. In 2001, a federal appeals court ruled that a Contra Costa County judge should have held a hearing on Odle’s mental competency before his trial in 1983.
The Ninth U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Odle had been badly injured in a 1973 car crash and had a large section of his temporal lobe removed. Afterward, relatives said, he talked like a child and had trouble controlling his impulses. He was committed to a
mental hospital three times in the next seven years and later attempted suicide twice while in jail or prison.
Although psychiatrists at Odle’s 1983 trial diagnosed brain damage marked by seizure disorders, he behaved calmly at the trial, and neither his attorney nor the trial judge questioned his competence. The 2001 ruling was followed by many years of litigation on whether a competency hearing could be held and what it could establish, and the issues were still pending in Superior Court at the time of Odle’s death.
The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said Odle died of natural causes in a hospital Friday, leaving 709 inmates on the state’s Death Row. California has not executed a prisoner since 2006, when federal judges said the state’s flawed procedures, equipment and training created an undue prospect of a prolonged and painful execution. Gov. Gavin Newsom has declared a moratorium on executions while he is in office.
Officials say 113 condemned prisoners have died of natural causes or drug overdoses and 29 have committed suicide. The state executed 13 inmates from 1992 to 2006.