Even in a city with more than 150 gang slayings a year, Timothy Joseph McGhee's murders stood out.
For years, authorities say, McGhee waged a campaign of terror in the northeastern part of Los Angeles. A shot-caller for a long-entrenched gang, he hunted rivals but sometimes killed indiscriminately, boasting in rap lyrics about the pleasure he felt in taking life.
He taunted law enforcement and led a sophisticated ambush that ensnared two Los Angeles Police Department officers in a barrage of gunfire. While locked up, he incited jail riots and assaulted guards, responding to one attack in which an officer survived by saying, "Next time I'll have to stab him."
On Friday, McGhee, once one of the nation's most sought-after fugitives, sat shackled in orange jailhouse scrubs as Superior Court Judge Robert J. Perry sentenced him to death for the murder of three people.
Slim, with a shaved head adorned with a tattoo of an eagle eating a snake, McGhee showed no emotion as the judge said the 35-year-old treated killing "as some kind of perverse sport, as if he was hunting human game."
Perry said he accepted defense arguments that McGhee's father abandoned him as a young boy and that McGhee was nevertheless a good father to his children and the children of his girlfriend. But the judge said he believed execution was the appropriate punishment.
"He is a committed killer and an obvious danger to society," Perry said.
Police and prosecutors described McGhee as a thrill killer who was among the most feared members of the Toonerville gang, which was formed in the 1950s and claims as its turf a largely middle-class area north of Los Feliz Boulevard between San Fernando Road and the Los Angeles River.
To convict McGhee, prosecutors relied heavily on former gang members, including accomplices in the slayings, as well as other witnesses and ballistic evidence.
Several witnesses were relocated for their safety. Others had to be ordered to testify.
Once they confronted McGhee in court, some rival gang members backed away from statements against him that they had given detectives.
During the death penalty phase of the trial, the prosecution presented evidence that McGhee was involved in a fourth murder -- the execution-style killing of a friend, Christina Duran, who had told police about his involvement in a killing.
Duran's videotaped interview with LAPD detectives helped convict McGhee of the 2001 murder of Margie Mendoza.
