Crime and Punishment : If David Mason Keeps Tuesday’s Date With the Gas Chamber, a Life of Torment and Violence Will Have Come Full Circle

OAKLAND —  Death has shadowed David Edwin Mason all his life.

As a child growing up here, he tried to commit suicide countless times: choking himself, setting his clothes on fire, swallowing pills, cutting himself and throwing himself down a set of stairs.

Later it was easier to kill others: the elderly woman who had befriended him as a boy, the two aging widows who lived by themselves in their Oakland apartments, the prisoner placed with him in his jail cell.

“I know I’m going to die, and I don’t care,” Mason proclaimed in a tape-recorded “epitaph” as he prepared to shoot it out with police before his arrest in 1981. “In a way, I’m looking forward to it.”

Now, at age 36, the eldest son of strict fundamentalist Christians says his turn has finally come. After nine years on Death Row, he has volunteered to die Tuesday in the gas chamber at San Quentin Prison.

Convicted of murdering five people, Mason is the first inmate in California to abandon his legal appeals and go willingly to his execution. Unless he changes his mind, he will be only the second person in 26 years put to death by the state.

During his life in prison, Mason says, he has come to regret his violent crimes and to understand the pain he caused his victims’ families. He no longer has a death wish, he says, but accepts responsibility for his actions and believes his sentence is just.

Mason briefly tried to halt his execution last week by filing an appeal with the California Supreme Court alleging he did not get a fair trial. But after his request was denied, Mason’s attorney said his client is prepared to die and will file no more appeals.

Mason’s support of capital punishment and his decision to go to the gas chamber have left foes of the death penalty with little legal basis for stopping his execution.

His former attorney, Charles Marson, filed a long-shot appeal challenging his mental stability. But a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Friday that Mason is competent to choose to die and legal experts expect the ruling to stand. Late Saturday, Marson appealed again, this time to an 11-judge panel of the court. Meanwhile, preparations for Mason’s execution continued at San Quentin prison.

Unlike California’s last execution 16 months ago--when Robert Alton Harris became the first person to die in the gas chamber in 25 years--there is no great clamor for vengeance among the relatives of Mason’s victims.

In fact, the most outspoken family member, Dolly Lundberg, says she has exchanged letters with Mason and forgiven him for murdering her mother, Joan Pickard, 13 years ago.

“It’s the strength of my faith that gives me no feeling of revenge for him,” said Lundberg, whose family belonged to the same Pentecostal church as the Masons. “Frankly, David should be more concerned with his eternal situation than what society can do to him.”

When the cyanide gas finally fills the glass-walled chamber and Mason draws his last breath, it will be the end of a coldblooded killer who preyed on the weak and elderly, sometimes strangling his victims with his hands.

It also will conclude the final chapter in the saga of a sad and lonely boy who was unwanted at birth and routinely beaten by his parents.

Medical reports, school records, probation reports and recent court declarations filed by Mason’s sisters paint a grim picture of his childhood and the Mason household, where strict adherence to the rules was required, hugging and laughing were prohibited and punishment was swift and merciless.

David was one of eight children of steelworker Harris Mason and his wife, Margie, who moved from Georgia to Oakland soon after David was born.

When Margie became pregnant with David, she and Harris already had three daughters under age 2. She tried to induce a miscarriage by lifting furniture and riding horses.

“My mother made it clear to all of us, including David, that David was an unwanted child,” said Darlene Mason Hill, an older sister, in her declaration. “I remember being very young and hearing her say she wished David never had been born.” Both parents have declined to be interviewed about their son.

At 5, David attempted suicide by swallowing a bottle of pills and setting his clothes on fire. Margie sought to put him up for adoption, but her husband refused to part with his firstborn son.

All the Mason children were beaten with a switch for minor infractions, but David was the family scapegoat and often was singled out for the harshest treatment. Harris Mason later testified: “I used a belt on (David) whatever the occasion called for.” Margie Mason acknowledged she beat him with a “belt, a switch or a pancake turner.”

Even so, David became more difficult to control. He set fires at his church and school and, at 8, was found standing over his baby brother’s crib with a knife. His parents resorted to locking him in a room known as “the dungeon”--a bedroom with the windows nailed shut. They ignored psychologists’ recommendations that the family receive counseling.

When David was 11 and defecated in his pants, his mother pinned a baby’s diapers on him and made him wear his feces-encrusted underwear on his head, she acknowledged in court. On another occasion his father strapped him to a workbench, gagged him with a cloth and beat him unconscious, according to court documents.

School records show Mason has a slightly above-average I.Q. of 110. But physically he was slow to mature and his family called him “Inchworm” because of his small penis.

When he was 14, a school counselor warned: “He is desperately in need of help if he is to straighten out, to develop emotional security and friendly feelings for his fellow man before it is too late.”

Despite such findings by school officials, probation officers and doctors, no agency intervened in Mason’s life--a source of lingering bitterness to him now as he contemplates his death.

His parents finally dealt with him by sending him to a group foster home for boys and then to juvenile hall. He ran away several times and returned home with claims that he had been sexually abused by other youths or administrators.

Some of the hardships of Mason’s childhood were presented as mitigating factors at his 1983 death penalty hearing. But Alameda County Superior Court Judge Jacqueline Taber rejected the arguments and concluded that Mason “had the benefit of loving parents and a typical childhood.”

At age 16, Mason was convicted of setting a house on fire. At 17, he enlisted in the Marine Corps but was drummed out as unfit in less than three months.

Three years later, in 1977, he was arrested for robbing a San Leandro store and stabbing a female clerk in the back with an ice pick. He was sent to prison for three years and served a little more than half his sentence.

When he got out of prison in 1979, Mason returned to the East Bay. He had a new tattoo on his arm that said “Weiss Macht,” German for “White Power,” and soon embarked on a deadly crime spree.

During the next year and a half, he killed and robbed five people and committed at least five other robberies or attempted robberies before he was caught in February, 1981.

The first person he murdered was 71-year-old Joan Pickard, a kindly woman he had known since childhood. In March, 1980, he paid her a visit and she welcomed him inside. He bound her hands, beat her severely and strangled her. Then he stole her coin collection, which he later pawned for $85.

Five months later, he went to the nearby home of 83-year-old Arthur Jennings, strangled him and stole coins and jewelry. After his arrest, Mason claimed Jennings had molested him as a youth but later denied knowing him.

In November, he entered the apartment of 75-year-old widow Antoinette Brown, beat her and choked her to death, again stealing a small amount of money.

Less than three weeks later, he entered the home of another widow, 72-year-old Dorothy Lang, beat and strangled her and took her jewelry.

Mason netted less than $200 in loot from each of the murder incidents. But all three of the elderly women he killed had been partially disrobed. “There seems to be some sexual connotation to these killings,” a prosecutor’s report concluded.

Between the murders of Brown and Lang, Mason traveled to Butte County, where he took up residence with 55-year-old Robert Groff, a dog kennel owner. According to Mason, Groff declared at one point that he had deliberately infected Mason with herpes. Later, while Groff slept, Mason shot him in the head, looted the trailer and returned to the Bay Area.

In the following weeks, Mason was involved in two shootouts with police but narrowly escaped arrest. Convinced he was about to die, he tape-recorded his long, rambling epitaph in which he confessed to the four Oakland murders.

“In a way, I feel I did these people a favor,” he said.

He mailed the tape to his family, who turned it over to authorities. Police tracked him down at a Holiday Inn and arrested him without incident.

While Mason was awaiting trial, 24-year-old Boyd Wayne Johnson was assigned to the same cell and Mason became convinced he was a snitch. As Johnson slept, Mason and another inmate strangled him with a towel and then hung him from the ceiling to make it look like a suicide.

In 1984, Mason was convicted of all the murders except Groff’s--a killing he admitted to but was never tried for.

If Mason is put to death as scheduled at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday, he will become the 24th Death Row inmate in the United States to volunteer for execution since capital punishment was resumed in 1977.

Legally, Mason can back out up to the last minute by reinstating his federal appeals; state officials say if he changes his mind even after he is taken to the gas chamber, they will call off the execution and escort him back to his cell.

For all of Mason’s victims, there are few surviving relatives. None of them plan to watch him die.

Lundberg, who found her mother’s dead body, said witnessing the execution would be an act of vengeance that would violate her strong religious convictions. Nevertheless, she supports capital punishment and believes his death sentence should be carried out.

“When we’re guilty of a crime, we have to pay the penalty,” she said.