The Vampire Van on Interstate 5

FEBRUARY 9, 1978

This is not a pretty story. It is written with the bitter ink of fury, indignation and impatience.

Fury against those human renegades who would maim and kill their fellow men. Indignation with a presumably civilized society become so indolent it will no longer protect itself against insanity. Impatience with those slothful public officers — be they judges, juries or jailors who will not drive the assassins from the market place, and who, for some uncomprehensible reason, shower mercy, riot justice, upon the predatory outlaws of mankind.

This is a cry of outrage against those feeble commissioners and parole officers who assume the mantle of messiah and then rush to open the prison doors so that Cain may walk free upon the city streets to slay, and slay and slay again.

And so, as these wonderful chatty people out there in Television Land say so well, from here on discretionary reading is recommended, and parental guidance may be advisable.

The hero of this evil tale is one Ronald Doyle Wilburn of Santa Barbara, age 37. The sanguinary narrative begins 24 years ago in Pittsburg, California, on the San Joaquin delta. But first, it is better that we pause long enough to review the events that unfolded early on that Saturday morning a week ago.

During the “murky hot night a California Highway Patrol cruiser stopped a van out on Interstate Freeway 5 near Castaic for a routine inspection. One of the rear view mirrors was missing. The driver, Rodney Wilburn, seemed agitated as they proceeded with their search. Inside Wilburn’s van the officers discovered the beaten, pulpy body of a young woman.

The corpse had been horribly mutilated. Both thumbs had been cut off, the pads were sliced from her fingers. Both breasts had been amputated.

In custody, Wilburn began to sing a gruesome song. He had picked up, he said, a young creature who was hitch-hiking. After the customary freeway courtship, Wilburn stated, his newly-found companion agreed to assuage his lust for a consideration of $20. And then, as almost every tale of passion goes, everything went black, or red, or magenta or whatever turbulent psychic shade is in vogue at the moment.

Later, while the deputies were attempting to reconstruct the bloody ride, Sheriff’s deputies asked their prisoner what he had done with his companion’s butchered extremities. He answered that he thought he had eaten her breasts and gulped a few swallows of blood.

Subsequently Wilburn obtained the services of a public defender, and this cautious lady suggested that her client keep his recollections to himself.

This adventure with human gore, is a ghastly business in itself. In some less squeamish world young Wilburn would have been dragged to the executioner and his body tossed into a ditch in a potter’s field. But in our intricate and compassionate 20th century American society, Wilburn has now become that privileged and extraordinary fellow, a prisoner before the bar, whose God-given immutable human rights must be protected at all costs. We must become the unwilling sickened spectators as this wretched man turns and twists in, the coils of justice. His brigade of attorneys will indubitably sob with sympathy and try to convince the world that Wilburn’s God-given thirst for butchery must be blamed on an errant society. He will cry out for rehabilitation instead of the hangman’s noose.

This is a crazy business. But before we play with the problems of guilt or innocence, let us turn back through those sickly 24 years to Pittsburg, California, and decide whether or not there is good and sufficient reason that Ronald Doyle Wilburn should have been living in liberty and pursuing his happiness a fortnight ago in Santa Barbara. And for the next 14 years

Wilburn slogged through the sewers of high crime. He was constantly in the hands of police as an auto thief, armed robber, attacker, rapist, escape artist, and mental delinquent, and, finally, paroled continuously under absurd circumstances. Those gentle readers who wish to follow Wilburn’s ragged trail step by step may turn to Page 1 of this newspaper for his record.

Oh yes, while Ronald Wilburn was enjoying the hospitality of our federal penitentiaries, his confessors and psychiatrists diagnosed him as a schizophrenic with sexual problems. And while he languished in his cell, it is recorded that he would inflict wounds on himself and drink his own blood.

So this is our suspect, a maniac in the best Edwardian sense of the word, whose bloody footprints have been tromping across California for 14 terrible years. And only some allseeing God really knows how many recorded, unsolved crimes he has committed against his fellow man.

The moral to this sickening tale is the fact that there are hundreds, or more likely thousands or tens of thousands of Ronald Doyle Wilburns running loose amongst us at this precise moment.

Our all-American justice has become so slack as to be considered a ghastly and incredibly expensive joke. Consider Wilburn himself. Verily, here is a. self-proclaimed cannibal, a known maniac, who is set loose time after time, to trudge along his violent path amidst an unsuspecting public. By what conceivable right do our prison wardens and parole officers allow malefactors like this to roam the countryside? How can these arrogant and reckless arbiters of clemency set such a human vampire free when they have been warned he is a menace to the world?

What man or woman among us has the God-given right to declare this tormented soul restored and fit for a free society? What man or woman has the power or judgment to deliver into the familiar world a gourmand who laps at his own gore and who lunches on female breasts and refreshes himself by quaffing blood?

In Rome or ancient Egypt or Marco Polo’s Cathay such a villain would have faced the gallows or a headsman, not a parole board. But here in our all-American Utopia the headsman’s axe and the silken strangling cord have been put away, and in their place we have the services of the sons and daughters of Sigmund Freud, who would make a Nobel laureate out of every cutthroat, and merchant prince of every thief. Today the great and gaudy American criminals are no longer subject to any real threat of serious punishment or penal custody. Our killers and rapists are no longer sent to prisons or old-fashioned jails. They are remanded to correctional institutions and honor farms, not to be disciplined but to be rehabilitated.

Rehabilitated — rubbish. Our worst felons are not rehabilitated in the slightest. They are recycled.

They are feted with milliondollar trials and preposterous appeals. They are fed, housed and entertained, and become the darlings of the press, fainthearted judges, misty-eyed jurors and palpitating parole officers. Then they are chucked down the front steps of the gaol, to pick themselves up and get back to the baroque arts of rapine and bodily assault.

We must seek an end to this constant misconstruction of simple justice. If our amiable gang of parole officers are so all fired anxious to empty out the prisons, then let them go bond on their precious thugs. The next time one of their homicidal proteges starts reaping his bloody harvest, let his correctional patron stand trial and share a stiff sentence. Let him who frees a rapist stand trial his stead.

We must cease this assemblyline recycling of madness. And end this compassionate nonsense of letting loose the lunatics whenever the whim is upon our merciful penologists.

The next time a parole officer or sweet-tempered jurist starts commuting sentences or passing out princely probation favors, let him sit down to an al fresco roadside picnic with Ronald Doyle Wilburn and his battered human appetizers, and think over the matter very carefully.