The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [92]
“All I want to do is hurt and kill…. I’m a pure fucking evil dog and that’s no shit.”
—LINDBERG IN A LETTER TO A RELATIVE
TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MURDER
IN ANTICIPATION OF THIS STORY, I initiated contact with the condemned Lindberg at San Quentin several years ago. In return, I received handwritten letters loaded with smiley faces. Lindberg also likes to tell people that he’s insane, a word that’s tattooed on his upper left arm.
When I told him that I was going to write about him and requested a face-to-face interview, he first told me that a key witness who’d pissed him off during the Ly trial had died. He wrote, “Sounds like foul play!” Then he explained the conditions of our meeting.
“You’ll be locked into a small cage with me, and won’t be allowed a recorder or anything,” he wrote. “At first I was going to say NO. But if your [sic] wanting to do it then OK. Here’s your visiting form. You just fill it out and send it with a letter to me. Always, Gunner.”
The Department of Justice’s death-row-visitation form is lengthy, containing detailed questions about addresses, phone numbers, financial information, work history, schooling and relatives. It’s a treasure trove of personal data. And Lindberg wanted me to provide him with mine.
Suspicious, I called a high-ranking prison official, who laughed when I told him what Lindberg suggested.
“He knows damn well that he’s not supposed to receive that,” the official told me. “You have to be exceptionally careful with these people. Are you sure you want to be locked in the same room with him?”
I remembered that Senior Deputy District Attorney Debbie Lloyd, who prosecuted Lindberg, had told me that he is “a sick, sick dangerous man.”
“Would he be chained to a chair or a table?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Like he told you, it’d just be you and him in a small room.”
No, thanks.
“I thought [Ly] was a kid. Next thing I know, we’re [on the tennis courts], trying to hassle the guy, you know? Have some fun, you know? Screw around with the guy. We’re just playing around. The next thing I know, the dude’s on the ground…. He was gone. Weird. Toast.”
—CHRISTOPHER EXPLAINING THE MURDER TO POLICE
AFTER HIS ARREST
LINDBERG IS A MESS OF CONTRADICTIONS. He’s a white supremacist who has also described himself as “half Apache Indian.” (“Stay White,” he liked to write to friends.) He has claimed to believe in Christianity, but simultaneously espoused a satanic view of life. (“You must kill to learn on your way to learning infanate [sic] wisdom knowledge from beyoned [sic] the grave,” he advised in a handwritten instruction manual.) He has declared his hatred of Asians, but his best friend, a cousin, was half-Japanese.
“Gooks and Nips…sound like a bunch of mice talking, like a fast-forward cassette,” he told fellow inmates inside the Orange County Jail, where he violently attacked two Vietnamese inmates while awaiting trial for killing Ly.
Predictably, Lindberg’s background was, according to a court-ordered psychiatric analysis obtained by the Weekly, “tumultuous and dysfunctional.” His mother and grandmother, an expert concluded, “apparently gave Gunner too much love…and covered for him when he got into trouble.”
He never had a steady father figure, either. His biological father, a marine stationed at the old El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, abandoned the family in 1977 after the birth of Lindberg’s younger brother, Jerry. Gunner, born at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Orange, was just two years old. Their mother then dated a series of men, prompting relocations to such places as Riverside, Oceanside, Las Vegas, Missouri and Kansas.
The mother married a marine stationed at Camp Pendleton in 1988. After a reassignment, the family moved to the U.S. military base on Okinawa. The following year, Gunner and several junior-high-school classmates stole a vehicle and sparked a wild, high-speed chase that ended with a collision. Japanese authorities were not amused. They expelled Gunner from the island. Afterward, he told friends he hated Asians.
Back in the U.S., Lindberg