People v. Riggs

• Decision Date: 10 July 2008
• Docket Number: No. S043187.,S043187.
• Citation: 79 Cal.Rptr.3d 648,44 Cal.4th 248,187 P.3d 363
• Court: California Supreme Court
• Parties: The PEOPLE, Plaintiff and Respondent, v. Billy Ray RIGGS, Defendant and Appellant.

187 P.3d 363

79 Cal.Rptr.3d 648

44 Cal.4th 248

The PEOPLE, Plaintiff and Respondent, v. Billy Ray RIGGS, Defendant and Appellant.

No. S043187.

Supreme Court of California.

July 10, 2008.

David S. Adams, Hood River, OR, under appointment by the Supreme Court, for Defendant and Appellant.

Bill Lockyer and Edmund G. Brown, Jr., Attorneys General, Robert R. Anderson, Chief Assistant Attorney General, Gary W. Schons, Assistant Attorney General, William M. Wood, Kyle Niki Shaffer and Kevin Vienna, Deputy Attorneys General, for Plaintiff and Respondent.

BAXTER, J.

A jury convicted defendant Billy Ray Riggs of the first degree murder of Jamie Bowie and of robbing her and unlawfully taking her vehicle. (Pen.Code, §§ 187, 211; Veh.Code, § 10851.)¹ It found true sentencing enhancements as to each count that defendant personally used a firearm (§ 12022.5) and that a principal was armed (§ 12022, subd. (d)) and, as to the murder, the special circumstance that defendant committed the murder in the course of robbing the victim (§ 190.2, subd. (a)(17)(A)). After a penalty trial, the jury returned a verdict of death. The trial court denied the automatic motion to modify the verdict (§ 190.4, subd. (e)) and sentenced defendant to death and to a determinate term, stayed, on the noncapital offenses. This appeal is automatic. (§ 1239, subd. (b).) We affirm the judgment in its entirety.

I. FACTS

A. Introduction

On Monday, April 16, 1990, 24-year-old Jamie Bowie left Phoenix, Arizona, in her Volkswagen Beetle to return to Los Angeles, where she was to begin a new job the next day. She never arrived in Los Angeles or spoke with her family or friends again. Several motorists who were driving on Interstate Highway 10 that day later reported seeing Bowie traveling west on the highway, and some said it appeared she was having car trouble and was being assisted by an African-American couple, who were also driving a Volkswagen Beetle. On May 12, 1990, a worker in an orchard in Indio found Jamie Bowie's decomposed body in a ditch. She had been shot twice with a shotgun.

Over one year later, on August 28, 1991, police in Fresno recovered Bowie's Volkswagen, which had recently been abandoned. They were able to determine that defendant had sold the car to a local car mechanic on April 18, 1990, two days after Bowie was last seen alive. On January 10, 1992, the television show "America's Most Wanted" broadcast a segment devoted to the Bowie case, which included descriptions and photographs of defendant and his common law wife, Hilda Riggs, who were wanted for questioning in the murder. Following tips from viewers of the show, the police arrived at the Riggses' apartment in the Los Angeles area shortly after they had fled. One week later, police followed up on further tips that led to the Riggses' new apartment in Los Angeles and arrested them. The Riggses were charged with Bowie's murder and robbery. Hilda Riggs pleaded guilty to first degree murder without special circumstances and agreed to testify against defendant. Defendant, who chose to represent himself, went to trial. The jury deliberated for less than one full court day before convicting defendant of all charges, and again for less than one full court day before returning a verdict of death.

B. Guilt Phase

1. Prosecution Evidence

Jamie Bowie was born and raised in Oklahoma and received a bachelor's degree in journalism and public relations from the University of Oklahoma in 1989. In October 1989, she purchased a blue 1978 Volkswagen Beetle convertible. Two months later, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the film industry. Although she had moved away from home, she remained close to her mother, Diana, in Oklahoma, and a college friend, Victoria Boucher, who lived in Houston, Texas. She talked with each of them on the telephone several times each week.

Bowie eventually accepted a job offer that was to begin on Tuesday, April 17, 1990. For the weekend preceding the start of her new job, which was Easter weekend, she arranged to visit with Boucher in Phoenix, Arizona. On Saturday, April 14, during the drive to Phoenix from Los Angeles, Bowie's car had engine trouble. She was able to make it to Phoenix and took the car to a repair shop to be fixed while she visited with Boucher and Boucher's grandparents, at whose house Bowie was staying. Because of the Easter holiday, the car would not be ready until Monday, delaying Bowie's planned return to Los Angeles by one day. On Monday morning, April 16, 1990, Boucher's grandfather drove Bowie to the repair shop where Bowie picked up her car and then left.

Bowie's brother, Bryan, who also lived in Los Angeles, spent Monday night at Bowie's apartment to await her return. He remembered hearing someone come into the apartment that night using keys. He assumed it was his sister and fell back to sleep. The next morning, he left the apartment and noticed that no one was there and that the front door was unlocked, despite the fact that he had locked it the night before. Later that morning, Bryan learned from his mother that Bowie had not called to say that she had arrived back in Los Angeles. Bryan returned to the apartment around noon and found that the apartment had been burglarized. There was no sign of forced entry. Clothes were strewn about the apartment, and the two televisions were sitting on the staircase with the cords wrapped around them. Several electronic items, including a radio, two video cassette recorders (VCR's), and a telephone answering machine, were missing.

The next day, concerned that Bowie still had not arrived in Los Angeles or contacted anyone, Bowie's family began searching for her along Interstate 10, the main highway between Phoenix and Los Angeles. Bryan and Bowie's father traveled east from Los Angeles and Bowie's mother traveled west from Phoenix. They stopped at gas stations, truck stops and restaurants along the highway. Several people they talked with remembered seeing—and testified at trial concerning—a young blonde woman fitting Bowie's description traveling west on Interstate 10 on April 16 in a blue Volkswagen Beetle convertible. Some of these witnesses noticed that the woman appeared to be having car trouble and was being assisted or followed by an African-American couple in a red-colored, hardtop Volkswagen Beetle. At trial, James Edwards testified he recognized Hilda Riggs as the female member of the couple helping Bowie, and he was "at least 80 percent" sure the man was defendant. After some initial uncertainty,² Gail Horton also identified defendant at trial as the man who was helping the blonde woman.

Despite the Bowie family's continued efforts to find her, there were no further developments in the case until, on May 12, 1990, a worker in a citrus grove near Indio found a body. The body was lying facedown in a ditch next to a dirt road running through the orchard and was severely decomposed and desiccated. A green, 12-gauge, double-ought buck shotgun shell was found three to four feet from the body.

An examination of dental records confirmed the body was that of Jamie Bowie. An autopsy revealed that Bowie had been shot twice with a shotgun, once in the middle of the back and once in the right arm. Bowie's right hand, in fact, was severed from her arm. Either of these wounds could have been fatal. Bowie's lower jaw also was fractured in three places, likely due to blunt-force trauma, such as a blow or several blows from a fist or the butt of a shotgun. It was not likely that a fall caused the broken jaw.

The lead investigator assigned to the case, Riverside County Sheriff's Investigator Salvador Pina, testified that in his opinion, Bowie was shot first with buckshot ammunition, which consisted of several large pellets, while the second round was birdshot, which consisted of more numerous and smaller pellets. Pina found birdshot pellets embedded approximately two inches in the ground underneath where Bowie's body was lying, indicating that Bowie was shot with birdshot while lying on the ground. The birdshot pellets found in the ground were inadvertently discarded before trial, however.

There were no further leads in the case until over one year later, when police in Fresno examined an abandoned Volkswagen Beetle and discovered that the confidential vehicle identification number (VIN) on the car matched the VIN of Bowie's missing car. Investigator Pina traveled to Fresno and learned that a local Volkswagen mechanic, Ronald Johnson, and his father, James Johnson, had purchased the car from defendant on April 18, 1990, two days after Bowie went missing, at an Economy Inn in Fresno. Both men identified defendant at trial as the person who sold them the car. A registration card for that date at the motel had defendant's name and driver's license number, written in defendant's handwriting.

Ronald Johnson testified that when defendant sold him Bowie's car, it had Texas license plates, and the Texas registration and title were in defendant's name. Johnson compared defendant's driver's license and the VIN on the dashboard of the car to the information contained in the title and registration documents and found that they matched. Defendant told Johnson not to sell the car, but he nonetheless sold it to Veronica Galvan about three months later. When Galvan registered the car in California, the smog certificate and the California title and registration for the car had the VIN of a Volkswagen registered to defendant in Texas. This VIN was for a 1973 Volkswagen, not a 1978. The car was later stolen from Galvan and then abandoned before the Fresno police discovered it. At some point the car was repainted a dark color, although the witnesses identified some areas of the car that still had the blue paint visible. The recovered car also had the same tear in the convertible top that was present when the Johnsons purchased the car from defendant. It was not entirely clear whether, when the...