JUSTICE, AGAIN
STEVEN CRITTENDEN SENTENCED TO 63 YEARS TO LIFE IN PRISON, WILL BE TAKEN OFF OF DEATH ROW AS PART OF THE PLEA DEAL
ROSEVILLE >> A case lasting more than three decades reached a more resolute conclusion Friday morning when Steven Crittenden, 53, whose 1989 murder convictions in the killing of a Chico couple were overturned before the Butte County District Attorney’s Office had prepared to retry Crittenden, pleaded guilty and was sentenced based on a plea deal struck between Crittenden’s defense team and the prosecution, led by District Attorney Mike Ramsey.
Crittenden was a 19-yearold Chico State student when he was accused of killing wellknown Chico doctor William Chiapella and his wife Katherine Chiapella while burglarizing their Downing Avenue residence on the afternoon of Jan. 13, 1987.
Crittenden pleaded guilty Friday to two counts of first-degree murder and one count of firstdegree robbery for the killings, in addition to kidnapping and escaping from jail while awaiting trial in 1987. Until Friday, Crittenden had never admitted guilt for the crimes.
Placer County Superior Court Judge Jeffery F. Penney reviewed the terms of the deal and ultimately sentenced Crittenden to a 63-years-to-life term, also waiving all credit for time Crittenden served until 2015, in lieu of a potential retrial. Ramsey also confirmed that Crittenden, who had been on death row at San Quentin State Prison, will be moved off of death row.
Crittenden will not have a chance at a parole hearing until 2035 under current California law.
Surviving members of the Chiapella family were in the courtroom Friday and read victim impact statements, all of them addressing Crittenden directly as the defendant looked straight ahead, listening. The Chiapellas’ grandchildren, Geoffrey Chiapella, Will Chiapella and Danielle De Lanoy all spoke, as well as the Chiapellas’ children, Beth Reil, Anne De Lanoy and Joseph Chiapella.
“Your statements were very articulate, meaningful and heartfelt, and I’m sure they had an impact on the defendant,” Penney said.
As part of the arrangement, Crittenden also wrote a confession letter to the family, which was read into the record by Jeffrey Thoma, one of Crittenden’s attorneys. According to fellow defense attorney Robert Marshall, Crittenden handwrote the letter and edited it before his attorneys typed it earlier this week.
The DA’s Office noted the letter could be used if Crittenden ever attempted to deny his responsibility for the crimes in the future.
Steven Crittenden pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder and one count of first-degree robbery in the killing of a Chico couple, in addition to kidnapping and escaping from jail while awaiting trial in 1987. Until Friday, Crittenden had never admitted guilt for the crimes.
A gruesome crime
During the fall of 1986, the Chiapellas hired Crittenden to do yard work after the Chico State student responded to a campus bulletin board posting.
Crittenden, as he told it in his confession letter, arrived in Chico in July of that same year and with each passing month, his financial situation worsened, particularly after he lost his campus job with the Chico State football program.
The Chiapellas were to pay him $20 weekly to mow their yard and rake leaves. Crittenden, however, only worked there once and didn’t show up again. He resorted to breaking into vending machines and stealing car stereos, which he was arrested for, but those things did little to help his finances.
In January 1987, he began plotting to burglarize the Chiapellas’ home.
“Why them? Because it seemed they had money,” Crittenden wrote in the letter.
He began calling the Chiapellas daily, hoping to catch a moment when they were away to break in. He said they picked the phone up all three times when he called them on Jan. 11 and 12.
On Tuesday, Jan. 13, he said he called around 1:30 p.m. and got no answer, so he rode over to their home on his bicycle.
What has been disputed between Crittenden, the Chiapella family and the prosecution, is whether he surprised the Chiapellas or vice versa, but at some point during the break-in, they came home and encountered Crittenden.
Ramsey retold the events as follows: Crittenden first attacked Katherine Chiapella, punching her and driving her to the ground. William Chiapella, responding to his wife’s screams, was also attacked.
Crittenden punched them, hit them with a fire extinguisher, stabbed them several times with a pocket knife he brought with him, then used kitchen butcher knives and further plunged them into William Chiapella’s chest.
While Katherine Chiapella was still alive, Crittenden coerced her into writing him a check for $3,000, which he cashed at a Bank of America soon after.
He returned to the scene of the crime days later in an attempt to cover his tracks.
Joseph Chiapella discovered his parents three days after they were killed.
“The scene their son, Dr. Joseph Chiapella, came into was just horrific,” Ramsey said. “He saw his father slaughtered on the bedroom floor, called his wife, then turned around, then there was his mother slaughtered on the kitchen floor. ( This was) one of the more brutal crime scenes we’ve ever run across.”
Crittenden was arrested eight days after the gruesome killings, and his trial took place in Placer County in 1989, a change of venue decision that was based on the publicity in the case as well as the admiration and sympathy for the Chico husband and wife in the local community, Ramsey said.
Long, winding court road
While awaiting trial, Crittenden attempted to escape from the Butte County Jail multiple times. On May 11, 1987, he freed himself from the jail and coerced a resident in a nearby neighborhood to drive him to Sacramento. He was later recaptured in Sacramento.
A Placer County jury convicted Crittenden in a 1989 trial for the murders of the Chiapellas, counts of robbery and the use of knives in the killings, as well as escape and kidnapping charges for when he fled to Sacramento.
The jury also returned a death penalty verdict, finding various “special circumstances” of multiple homicide, murder during a robbery and torture to be true.
Yet the case was far from over.
The California Supreme Court upheld the death penalty verdict in December 1994. Nearly two decades later, however, a federal judge overturned Crittenden’s convictions in 2013 on the basis that the original prosecutor in the case, Gerald Flanagan, was substantially motivated by race in excluding the only prospective Black juror at Crittenden’s trial. Crittenden is Black.
The prosecution appealed the decision in the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled in favor of the lower court decision to overturn the verdict in a split, 2-1 decision in 2015. That decision led the Butte County District Attorney’s Office to prepare to retry Crittenden and again seek the death penalty.
In early 2019, Crittenden’s defense team and the prosecution, led by Ramsey, appeared to have a deal that Crittenden would agree to be tried in Butte County in exchange for the prosecution agreeing to no longer seek the death penalty.
Yet shortly after Gov. Gavin Newsom took office, he announced a moratorium on the death penalty at San Quentin State Prison, where Crittenden was being held pending his retrial, as long as Newsom remained in office. As a result of that decision, Crittenden would no longer agree to a Butte County trial.
Another round of negotiations between the defense and the prosecutor Ramsey was launched. The end result was a plea deal that spared Crittenden of a potential death sentence, however, he was required to plead guilty to all the counts the earlier Placer County jury convicted him of in the 1989 trial.
“Basically, this is a long slog we have done to make sure that justice is done,” Ramsey said. “I’ve talked quite a bit to the surviving Chiapella family (who) agree that this isn’t perfect justice, but it is as close to justice as they can get, particularly with the confession that was written to them.”
Family addresses Crittenden
Crittenden’s confession letter concluded, “I am not asking for your forgiveness, and I do not deserve it. I’m merely trying to speak from my heart and convey the fact that I am truly sorry for all the hurt, pain and suffering I have caused.”
The Chiapella family pushed back against Crittenden’s statements, saying he never truly showed remorse until it benefitted him, and some family members said the letter was full of half-truths.
After Thoma read Crittenden’s confession letter aloud, the Chiapella family had a chance to respond. They delivered powerful statements in the courtroom describing their memories of William and Katherine Chiapella, and what Crittenden took from their family when he killed them.
Geoffrey and Will Chiapella, grandsons of the Chico husband and wife, were the first to speak.
Both were attending Neal Dow Elementary School, directly across the street from the Chiapellas’ home on Downing Avenue, at the time of the murders.
Geoffrey Chiapella, then six years old and in kindergarten, said his memories of his grandparents are sparse. What he remembered more vividly is the period of time after the murders. One day, he said he was out in the school yard, looked through a fence across the street and saw a large police presence at his grandparents’ house.
“I was a young kid, but I knew something was very wrong across the street with all the police cars,” Geoffrey Chiapella said.
He asked Crittenden directly, what if he and his brother had ventured across the street to the house on that fateful day? What if their parents came by the house to pick them up? What would Crittenden have done to cover his tracks?
Will Chiapella, who was named after his grandfather, Dr. William Chiapella, also reflected on the difficult time after the murders, describing how classmates would tease him about the details of the crime. He said when entering a Google search of his name, all but one result ties back to the murders of his grandparents.
hen Will Chiapella moved to San Francisco to attend college, he said he considered driving across the bay to San Quentin to visit Crittenden. Young and idealistic, as he described, he wanted to learn why Crittenden committed the crimes, and thought he might even be willing to forgive Crittenden. As years went by, he decided not to.
“I’m glad I never did,” he said.
Danielle De Lanoy, born in June 1987, was never able to meet her grandparents. She talked about the memories she missed out on with them, and how she had to learn about them through photos and other family members.
When addressing Crittenden, she said he never took responsibility or showed remorse for the crimes.
“I don’t think you have changed; I don’t think you will change, and I will be at the parole hearings to remind (them) of that,” she said.
The Chiapellas’ three children then followed, describing some of the fondest memories of their parents, how they instilled strong values in them and had high expectations for them.
The elder William Chiapella, a renowned local doctor, sometimes had to respond to patients at Enloe Medical Center into the late hours of the night, and sometimes even made house calls.
One of her father’s proudest moments, Anne De Lanoy said, was when he treated patients aboard a ship in South America in an impoverished area. One Christmas, he asked his children to each pick one gift from under the tree and give them to children hospitalized at Enloe.
Their mother, they remember, was the one who held the family together.
“He led by example,” Reil said of her father. “While my dad worked many hours, my mom kept the family running.
“She was the one with the listening ear, the backbone of our family.”
Joseph Chiapella was the last member of the family to speak.
He went into the haunting detail of going into his parents’ home three days after the murders. He saw mail strewn about the house, and saw the phrase “only the beginning” written in red lipstick on a mirror.
He saw his father first. Joseph Chiapella said his father had been struggling with arthritis, causing immense pain, and had also been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. He thought maybe he had committee suicide.
Joseph called his wife, Judy, and then turned to his left and saw his mother lying on the floor. That image, he said, stayed with him for some time, and came back recently with the thought of another day in court.
He said Chico State’s president at the time, Robin Wilson, offered to name a walkway after the Chiapellas.
“I thought that was wrong,” Joseph Chiapella said.
He said he suspected the university was simply trying to cover its tracks. He said the university has never issued a formal apology or answered for how they vet their students.
Joseph Chiapella also expressed some regrets. He lived in Butte Creek Canyon at the time, and said he wanted to move closer to his parents. With work piling up, he was unable to help them with work around the house. Instead, they posted an ad at Chico State looking for help.
“I could’ve mowed the lawn,” he trailed off.
Blown-up photos of Katherine and William Chiapella were displayed in the jury box of the courtroom. As Joseph Chiapella concluded his statement, he stood up, walked over to a photo of his mother and reached his hand out to it, before returning to his seat next to his family.
“In my experiences, I told the family those were some of the most articulate, heartfelt … statements about how this has affected this family for now three decades,” Ramsey said.
Moving forward
Ramsey was asked outside of the courthouse why his office decided not to retry Crittenden, as it appeared that was the most likely course of action for several years following the court of appeals ruling.
“Because the retrial of Mr. Crittenden would’ve been some years, still, in the future — let’s put it that way,” Ramsey said. “It was also a situation, in discussions with the family, rather than do a retrial, and then the inevitable appeals that come from a retrial … there would be no closure to the family. This was an offer that would have this closure, that it would be done, that we would then move forward and look at the next step probably 14, 15 years from now.”
That timeline leads to 2035, when Crittenden will be eligible for a parole hearing, which could, in theory, lead to his release, though Ramsey said it is “very unlikely” that happens.
It is not perfect justice, as Ramsey said, but it is some form of closure for the family who hasn’t had it for the better part of three decades.
Yet as many of the family’s statements indicated, they know they will likely have to confront Crittenden again, as early as 2035, to ensure Crittenden stays behind bars.
“What he took from all of us is irreplaceable,” Reil said.