| In the interest of speed and timeliness, this story is fed directly from the Associated Press newswire and may contain spelling or grammatical errors. |
Wisconsin killer charged in 1978 Mojave Desert teen murders
Tuesday June 17, 2003SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. (AP) A quarter-century after a sister and brother were clubbed to death along a dirt road in the Mojave Desert, prosecutors have revived a murder case against a man imprisoned for a Wisconsin killing.
Prosecutors on Monday charged William Floyd Zamastil, 51, with the 1978 murders of Malcolm Bradshaw, 17, and his sister Jacqueline, 18, as well as special-circumstance allegations that could lead to the death penalty if he is convicted.
Zamastil is serving a life sentence in Wisconsin for a separate case of rape, kidnapping and murder.
He admitted the Bradshaw slayings in a telephone interview with a San Bernardino County detective in 1982, officials alleged. He was charged with the murder of Jacqueline Bradshaw two years later, but for undisclosed reasons the case was not prosecuted.
Zamastil could not be made available for comment Tuesday night, said an officer with the Waupun Correctional Institution in Waupun, Wis., who declined to give her name.
The Bradshaws were killed while hitchhiking from Las Vegas to their home in the Canoga Park section of Los Angeles after helping a friend move.
On Feb. 27, 1978, they were seen at a gas station in Barstow, a desert city on the main highway between Las Vegas and Southern California. They were later seen driving with a man in a pickup truck.
A sheepherder discovered their decomposed bodies a month later, one mile off the highway near Barstow. Autopsies showed they died of blunt-force injuries to the head.
Deputy District Attorney David Whitney would not say why the case was revived after so many years, other than to cite recent work by investigators led by sheriff's Sgt. Robert Dean.
``Thanks to the good work of his team they were able to re-energize this case,'' Whitney said Tuesday.
Whitney declined to say why prosecutors never followed through on the 1984 murder charge, but said some explanation will be revealed during litigation.
Zamastil was arrested in 1978 after the kidnap, rape and murder of a Wisconsin woman. Court records showed that Wisconsin investigators alerted other police agencies of his arrest by Teletype, noting that Zamastil, a vagrant, had a wife and child in Barstow and criminal records in Arizona, California and Washington.
In August 1982, Zamastil spoke with a San Bernardino County sheriff's sergeant by telephone and allegedly admitted to killing the teenagers.
Two years later, Zamastil stated in a letter to a homicide detective that since he was serving a life sentence in Wisconsin, ``it really makes no difference to me whether or not you people give me any time for the crimes I have committed out there in the past.''
Whitney said he will seek Zamastil's extradition to California, where he faces two counts of murder, two counts of second-degree robbery, and special-circumstance allegations of murder in the course of a robbery, multiple murder and murder by someone with a prior murder conviction.
``The victim's mother suffered the loss of her two children in California, and she is desirous of prosecution,'' Whitney said. ``We certainly agree that she is entitled to have some justice done for the murders of her two children.''
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