A man on San Quentin’s death row for the gruesome killings of two people on the UC Santa Cruz campus died Tuesday.
Royal Kenneth “Ken” Hayes, 81, died at an outside hospital, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in a statement. The cause of death is unknown pending an autopsy, it said.
Hayes had been sentenced to death for the murders on Dec. 29, 1981, of a San Francisco couple, Lauren de Laet and Donald MacVicar, with whom he had made a cocaine deal. On the pretense of handing over the drugs, he took them to a remote area off Empire Grade Road, shot them, cut off their hands and heads, and buried them in shallow graves.
Two months later, a mushroom hunter found skull fragments and reported them to sheriff’s deputies. (At the time, the Santa Cruz community was on edge because of the murders committed by “Trailside Killer” David Carpenter.) MacVicar’s body was found on March 10, 1982, and de Laet’s the followng day.
The week after the discoveries, a woman named Deborah Garcia came forward to say she had been forced by Hayes to participate in the crime, and he was arrested.
At his trial, in Santa Cruz, Garcia and Diane “Annie” Weller testified against Hayes, having been given immunity.
The women both said they had, at separate times, lived with Hayes in Hawaii from 1979 to 1981. They said he was abusive toward them and that they were afraid to disobey his orders.
Both were with him in late December 1981, when they stayed for a week at the Millbrae Travelodge with de Laet, 36, and MacVicar, 32. On Dec. 27, they testified, MacVicar brought $160,000 to the motel as a payment for cocaine.
Two days later, they said, Hayes told de Laet and MacVicar to meet him at a Santa Cruz doughnut shop so he could give them the drugs. Instead, with Garcia and Weller as accomplices, he drove the pair to a corner of the University of California campus, took them separately into the woods and shot them.
The Santa Cruz jury convicted him of the two first-degree murders, among other charges, but could not agree on a penalty.
The penalty phase was retried in Modesto, and that jury in May 1986 decided on the death penalty. Hayes had been on death row since August of that year.
In November 1983, while awaiting the Santa Cruz trial, Hayes married Bonnie Rooney, 49, who had been known as Sister Mary Clare during her 31 years as a nun at the Poor Clare Sisters of St. Joseph Monastery in Aptos. She met Hayes while working with a Catholic prison ministry.
Hayes had been accused of two killings before the Santa Cruz homicides. In 1962, he admitted killing a security guard in Portland, Ore., but was found not guilty by reason of insanity.
After serving time in a mental hospital — from which he escaped at one point — he moved to Minnesota. There, he was charged with the fatal 1975 shooting of a Minneapolis night club manager in the club’s bathroom. He was acquitted of that crime, though even his attorney acknowledged he was caught with the gun still in his hand.
