Dead man waiting

If Vanessa had lived, she would have turned 40 in May. Instead, her life has been reduced to a scrapbook of photos fixing her forever in childhood. One, circa 1980, shows Iberri with Tony Orlando-like hair and mustache, his arm draped over Vanessa's shoulders as they smile from atop a blanket at the beach. Another captures the girl beaming in a full-length satin gown as a bridesmaid at her cousin's wedding. In a snapshot taken the night before her murder, Vanessa wears a Mona Lisa half-smile, her long brown hair pushed back from her face by a tortoise-shell headband.

"Every day that you live, you think about all the things other families go through -- birthdays, graduation, college, boyfriends -- for me that's all gone," he said of the milestones missing from the album. "I never got to see her get married. I'll never experience having grandkids."

The legal drama that has unfolded over nearly three decades is filed in a brown paper grocery sack that lives at the end of the living-room sofa, beneath a knock-off Charles Russell painting and a Navajo dream catcher. A mounted buffalo head stares glassy-eyed from the facing wall across a room crammed with Western artifacts and the quotidian belongings -- TV, magazines, toolbox -- of a life endured rather than lived.

"Vanessa and me, we used to go to a lot of flea markets and garage sales," Iberri recalled as he pawed through the bag in search of a newspaper article from the most recent ruling in Edwards' case. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld denial of further review in September.

That's not the end of the condemned man's legal recourse, though. He has at least two more court appeals challenging his sentence, another to the governor for clemency and a paralyzed battle over capital punishment on which he can rely to stave off the executioner for another few years.

California's top legal minds agree that the state's system for capital punishment is dysfunctional, if not irreparably broken.

"The leading cause of death on California's death row is old age," said state Supreme Court Chief Justice Ronald M. George, reiterating an observation he made at the time the state Legislature approved a new $220-million death row at San Quentin. The project to house the state's death row population, the nation's largest, has yet to break ground and is now predicted to cost $400 million.