CORCORAN (AP) – A California
prison inmate confessed in a letter that he beat two child molesters to death
with a cane while behind bars just hours after his urgent warning to a
counselor that he might become violent was ignored, a newspaper chain reported
Thursday.
Jonathan Watson, 41, confessed in
the letter to the Bay Area News Group in Northern California that he clubbed
both men in the head on Jan. 16 at the California Substance Abuse Treatment
Facility and State Prison in Corcoran.
Prisoner David Bobb, 48, died
that day. Graham De Luis-Conti, 62, died three days later at a hospital. Both
were serving life sentences for aggravated sexual assault of a child under 14.
“We can’t comment on an active
investigation,” Dana Simas, spokesman for the California Department of
Corrections and Rehabilitation, wrote in an email.
Watson is serving a life sentence
for a 2009 murder conviction.
Days before the attack, he said
his security classification was changed and he was transferred from a
single-person cell to a lower-security dormitory pod at the Central Valley
facility. Watson called the switch a “careless” mistake and said he had
protested the decision.
Watson wrote that six days after
he arrived at the prison, a child molester moved into the pod. Watson believed
the man began taunting other inmates by watching children’s television
programming. Watson said in the letter he couldn’t sleep that night “having not
done what every instinct told me I should’ve done right then and there.”
Two hours before the attacks the
next day, Watson told a prison counselor that he urgently needed to be
transferred back to higher-level security “before I really (expletive) one of
these dudes up,” but the counselor “scoffed and dismissed” him.
Watson said he returned to his
housing pod.
“I was mulling it all over when
along came Molester #1 and he put his TV right on PBS Kids again,” he wrote,
according to the newspaper chain. “But this time, someone else said something
to the effect of ‘Is this guy really going to watch this right in front of us?’
and I recall saying, ‘I got this.’ And I picked up the cane and went to work on
him.”
Watson said he then left the
housing pod to find a guard and turn himself in, but on the way, he saw “a
known child trafficker, and I figured I’d just do everybody a favor,” Watson
wrote. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”
Watson said he then told a guard,
who didn’t believe him “until he looked around the corner and saw the mess I’d
left in the dorm area,” Watson wrote.
Watson is in segregated housing
while he is under investigation for the killings. He hasn’t been charged yet.
“Being a lifer, I’m in a unique
position where I sometimes have access to these people and I have so little to
lose,” Watson wrote. “And trust me, we get it, these people are every parents’
worst nightmare.”
Copyright 2020 The Associated Press.
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