The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [90]
Lindberg, who also took methamphetamines, never lived up to his narcissistic imagination. During an eight-year crime spree beginning at age 12, he proved himself to be little more than a thug who preyed on the defenseless. His victims included a cop’s 11-year-old son, whom he chased and shot in the throat with a BB gun; a day laborer, whom he attacked with a tree limb for the money in his pocket; a skateboarder, whom he repeatedly kicked in the stomach as he stole the board; the peers he angrily chased, firing a shotgun, over a perceived slight; an on-duty prison guard, whom he brutally ambushed; and an elderly woman, whom he pummeled during a home-invasion robbery for drug money.
But he committed his most heinous act on Ly. At 8 p.m. on Jan. 28, 1996, Lindberg took Domenic Michael Christopher, a Kmart co-worker, to his apartment after they finished a shift that consisted largely of watching the Super Bowl on television in the store’s break room. According to his own writings, Lindberg hoped to mold the impressionable 17-year-old, who liked karate and hadn’t been in trouble before, into his protégé. They smoked pot, talked about “robbery and shit like that” and left on foot—Lindberg carrying a butcher knife he’d stolen from his grandmother’s kitchen, according to police files. They stopped for dinner at Jack in the Box, and then walked the streets searching for a victim. At one point, they encountered a group of teenagers standing in a front yard, attempted to start a fight, failed and moved on.
Minutes later, they found and trapped the unsuspecting Ly, whose last seven minutes of life were the stuff of horror flicks. Lindberg called him a “Jap,” demanded his car keys, cursed him, punched him, stomped on his head, kicked his face, slashed his throat and stabbed him 22 times—in part, to celebrate a victory earlier that evening by what Lindberg hailed as “America’s team,” the Dallas Cowboys.
Among Ly’s final words were “What the fuck?”
“I thought [Lindberg] was a cool guy, you know, cool. He’s funny. He is…He’s cool, you know what I mean?…If I’d known he was psycho, I wouldn’t have hung with him.”
CHRISTOPHER TO POLICE
A MONTH AFTER THE MURDER
LAW-ENFORCEMENT OFFICIALS SAY Lindberg was the first person Orange County sent to San Quentin State Prison’s death row under California’s hate-crime statute. Christopher, his now-remorseful accomplice, is serving a sentence of 25 years to life and is eligible to request parole in 2023.
Lindberg’s days are filled with exercising, writing pen pals, creating art, playing chess, day-dreaming about Nordic lore and writing satanic poems that mock Ly’s death. Thanks to an automatic appeal of every death-penalty case, he’s also waiting for word from California’s highest court on the pending hate-crime question. The answer could remove him from death row.
During supreme court oral arguments in June, deputy state public defender Ronald F. Turner pleaded Lindberg’s case. He told Chief Justice Ronald George and six associate justices that his client’s death-penalty punishment must be overturned. Turner argued that two special circumstances the jury found to be true—that the murder was committed during the commission of an attempted robbery and that Ly’s race was a key factor in the crime—were, in fact, false.
“We’re not dealing with a rational individual here,” said Turner. “This was just a thrill kill, a bravado murder…motivated by male testosterone and nothing else.”
In a February 2005 letter to the Weekly, Lindberg echoed Turner’s assertion. “[The Orange County district attorney’s office]