OCEANSIDE — Vanessa Iberri and Kelly Cartier noticed the balding man in the red Datsun pickup as he drove past them into the Blue Jay Campground of Cleveland National Forest. The 12-year-old girls were leaving the campground ahead of Vanessa's mother, heading for a creek-side picnic spot where they all planned to eat lunch.
The truck turned around, passed the girls again and disappeared around a bend of the dirt road. The driver, Thomas Francis Edwards, an expert marksman who worked at a shooting range, pulled over and waited.
"Hey, girls!" Edwards yelled from the cab when the hikers caught up with his parked pickup. When they turned to look, Edwards, who didn't know either girl, leveled a .22 Ruger automatic pistol at Vanessa's forehead and pulled the trigger, striking her between the eyes. His second shot grazed Kelly's forehead. She had flinched in shock at the first blast, dodging a direct hit.
Vanessa Iberri died two days later. Kelly Cartier survived to testify against Edwards, who was sentenced to death five years and four trials later. It was a frustrated prosecution despite the eyewitness account and solid evidence against Edwards provided by campers who happened upon the grisly scene seconds after the shootings.
It has been 27 years since Vanessa's death, and ever since that day, her father, Joe, has devoted much of his energy to seeing his daughter's killer executed.
"People ask me, 'How do you keep your sanity?' And I tell them I keep on because I'm fighting for my daughter. She still lives within me," he said, tapping his heart.
Edwards was convicted of Vanessa's murder in 1983, and then, after two penalty-phase mistrials, sentenced to death in 1986. Now 65, he is one of 677 prisoners on California's death row at San Quentin State Prison. The execution chamber has been idle for the last three years, as carpenters have worked on rebuilding it and courts pondered whether the state's lethal injection procedures pass constitutional muster. For Iberri, the delays have been torturous.
"All these trials I've been to, and that guy is still up there on death row with three meals a day and TV and DVDs," Iberri fumes with a rage that has been fueled anew with each appeal accorded Edwards.
