Kevin Cooper (born Richard Goodman; January 8, 1958) is an American convicted of four murders in the Chino Hills area of California in 1983.
Before the Chino Hills murders, Kevin Cooper was accused of kidnapping and raping a 17-year-old girl in Pennsylvania after she interrupted him during a burglary. He was never tried or convicted on those allegations because he fled to California after escaping from custody.
Kevin Cooper escaped from the California Institution for Men two days before the murders and was believed to have hidden in a vacant house next door to the Ryen residence.
Cooper’s DNA was identified on cigarette butts recovered from the vacant house where investigators believed he had been staying. DNA testing identified blood on a T-shirt found along a roadside as Kevin Cooper’s. Prosecutors argued the shirt was connected to the murders and had been discarded while he fled. Cooper was later arrested after driving a station wagon that had been stolen from the Ryen family following the murders. Additional physical evidence, including shoe impressions and other forensic evidence presented at trial, was used by prosecutors to argue that Cooper was the perpetrator.
Cooper has continued to maintain his innocence and has repeatedly sought additional DNA testing. Subsequent testing has not exonerated him, and his conviction has remained in place through numerous appeals.
Early life
Cooper was born Richard Goodman on January 8, 1958, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. When he was two months old, his mother placed him in an orphanage. At the age of six months, he was adopted by Melvin and Esther Cooper, who renamed him Kevin Cooper. As a child, Kevin Cooper was subjected to physical abuse and ran away from home numerous times. As an adolescent, he was sent to juvenile custody numerous times.
Previous criminal record
Cooper's criminal past included theft and burglary. He was sentenced to a one-to-two-year prison term in 1977 for burglarizing a home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Cooper was involved in kidnapping and raping a minor female who interrupted him during a burglary in Pennsylvania. Cooper agreed to the stipulation on the advice of his lawyer who mistakenly believed this admission would help Cooper avoid the death penalty in the Chino Hills case. During the purported crime, he threatened to kill the teen-age victim. Cooper's thumb print was left on the open dining room window of the high school teen victim's house, and his palm print was left on her car that he stole.casetext.com
Over the next five years, he was convicted and sentenced to jail twice for burglaries and was released on probation in 1982. He escaped from custodial settings in Pennsylvania 11 times.
In late 1982, Cooper fled to California after escaping from a Pennsylvania psychiatric facility. In California, Cooper was soon convicted of two burglaries in the Los Angeles area. He began serving a four-year sentence under the alias David TrautmanPeople v. Cooper, 53 Cal. 3d 771 (1991) at the California Institution for Men (CIM) in Chino on April 29, 1983, where he was assigned to the minimum security section. On June 2, 1983, Cooper climbed through a hole in the prison fence and walked away from the prison across an open field.Cooper v. Brown, 565 F.3d 581 (2009), p.582
Chino Hills murders and arrest On the morning of June 5, 1983, Bill Hughes arrived at a semi-rural home in Chino Hills, California, where his 11-year-old son Christopher had spent the night. Inside, he found Douglas and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter Jessica and his own son dead. They had been chopped with a hatchet, sliced with a knife, and stabbed with an ice-pick. Josh Ryen, the 8-year-old son of Douglas and Peggy, had survived. His throat had been cut. Peggy Ryen's purse was in plain sight on the kitchen counter, but no money had been taken. The family station wagon was gone; it was discovered several days later in Long Beach, California, about 50 miles southwest of Chino Hills.
The San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department deputies who responded to the call identified Kevin Cooper as the likely killer. He had admittedly hidden out in the vacant house next door, the Lease house, 125 yards away, for two days. He had made repeated calls from this house to two female friends asking for money to help with his escape, but they had refused. Cooper testified at trial that he had left that house as soon as it got dark on June 4 and had hitchhiked to Mexico. It was established that Cooper checked into a hotel in Tijuana, about 130 miles south of Chino Hills, at 4:30 pm on June 5.
There, Cooper befriended an American couple who owned a sailboat. He hitched a ride on the boat with them as a crew member cruising the Baja and Southern California coasts.
Seven weeks later, while still staying on the couple's boat, Cooper was accused of raping a woman at knifepoint on a boat docked nearby. While visiting the sheriff's office to report the crime, the rape victim saw a wanted poster with Cooper's photograph and identified him as the rapist. Deputies and coast guard personnel detained him as he tried to swim ashore. Cooper was never charged with rape or assault in this matter.
Trial On Cooper's motion, the court changed the venue of the trial from San Bernardino County to San Diego County. Cooper pleaded guilty to the charge of escape from prison.
In videotaped testimony, Josh Ryen said that the evening before the murders, just before the family left for the Blade barbecue, three Mexican men came to the Ryen home looking for work. Ryen did not identify the killer, but said in an audiotape with his treating psychiatrist that he saw the back of a single man attacking his mother. Ryen told a sheriff he thought three men had done it because "I thought it was them. And, you know, like they stopped up that night," but he did not actually see three people during the incident.
Cooper testified in his own defense. He admitted escaping from CIM, hiding out and sleeping at the Lease house, but denied committing the murders or being in the Ryen house. Cooper said he left the Lease house on foot, hitchhiked, stole a purse, and eventually made his way to Mexico. The defense pointed out the inconsistencies in Ryen's testimony, presented evidence of other events apparently not involving Cooper that might have had something to do with the killings, and presented an expert witness that criticized the forensic investigation.
A jury convicted Cooper of four counts of first degree murder and one count of attempted murder with the intentional infliction of great bodily injury, and then imposed the death penalty.
During the penalty phase of Cooper's trial, a stipulation was entered that “Kevin Cooper was the man who abducted (the female minor) on October 8th of 1982 from the Heath residence, kidnapped her, and later raped her in Frock Park." Cooper agreed to the stipulation on the advice of his lawyer who mistakenly believed this admission would help Cooper avoid the death penalty in this case.
Assessment by courts, governors and independent groups California Supreme Court The Supreme Court of California upheld Cooper's conviction in May 1991.
Cooper was scheduled to be executed on February 10, 2004, but on February 8, 2004, a three judge panel consisting of Judges Pamela Rymer, Ronald Gould and James Browning heard Cooper's petition and rejected it by a vote of 2–1.
Judge Browning, the lone dissenter, was able to assemble enough judges to get an en banc ruling blocking the execution to allow further DNA testing. Ultimately, the US Supreme Court unanimously upheld the stay, effectively making it impossible to carry out the death warrant.
The postponement followed a campaign by various groups in the Bay Area and around the country, such as the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, the ACLU, Death Penalty Focus and The Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Denial of clemency by California Governor Schwarzenegger On January 30, 2004, the office of Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger issued the following statement regarding his decision not to grant clemency to Kevin Cooper:
On December 17, 2010, Cooper filed a second clemency petition to Governor Schwarzenegger. This petition laid out new developments in the evidence that were not known when the first one was denied in 2004.Petition for Executive Clemency, Kevin Cooper, December 17, 2010 The second clemency petition also cited the conclusions and observations of twelve appellate judges of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, including the fact that blood taken from Cooper after he was arrested was contaminated with the DNA of another person,Cooper v. Brown, 565 F.3d 581, 599 (9th Cir. 2009) that a sheriff's deputy had lied at Cooper's trial about destruction of key evidence,Exhibit 11, 29:22-31 of Petition for Executive Clemency 2010, citing transcript of miscellaneous hearing before the Hon. Marilyn Huff, Friday April 1, 2005 and that three witnesses, never interviewed by the prosecution, had come forward with strong evidence of other possible perpetrators.[Petition, page 2]
Just before Governor Schwarzenegger left office in January 2011, his office wrote a letter to Cooper's lawyer stating that the application "raises many evidentiary concerns which deserve a thorough and careful review of voluminous records."Letter to Norman Hile from Andrea Lynn Hoch, Legal Affairs Secretary to Governor Schwarzenegger, dated January 2, 2011 The letter further stated that since the Governor had only two weeks left in office, he had decided to leave the matter for Governor-elect Jerry Brown's determination.
During Kamala Harris’s tenure as California Attorney General (2011–2017), Cooper's legal team submitted multiple requests for advanced DNA testing of key evidence in the case. Harris’s office declined these requests, citing procedural grounds. Critics argued that this decision prioritized legal formalities over potentially exculpatory testing. The issue became a focal point of controversy in later years, as Harris faced scrutiny for not approving testing while she had the authority to do so.
U.S. Ninth Circuit Court and U.S Supreme Court deny appeals Cooper has filed multiple appeals and applications for a writ of habeas corpus, all of which have been denied. On December 4, 2007, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied Cooper's third federal petition for a writ of habeas corpus. The panel concluded: "As the district court, and all state courts, have repeatedly found, evidence of Cooper's guilt was overwhelming. The tests that he asked for to show his innocence 'once and for all' show nothing of the sort."Cooper v. Brown, 510 F.3d 870 (9th Cir. 2007). While Judge McKeown concurred, she expressed doubts about the certainty of Cooper's guilt, saying that critical evidence had been lost due to mishandling by the investigators.
On May 11, 2009, the Ninth Circuit denied Cooper's request for a rehearing en banc of the 2007 panel decision. Four judges (Fletcher, Wardlaw, Fisher, and Reinhardt) filed dissents, indicating that they disagreed with the decision. Judge Fletcher stated that there was a strong likelihood that the police tampered with the evidence and accused Judge Huff of both deliberately ignoring the Court's instructions to perform proper testing and intentionally rigging the testing in favor of the state, while Judge Wardlaw stated "as far as due process is concerned 25 years of flawed proceedings are as good as no proceedings at all." Eleven judges joined the dissents (fourteen votes were required to grant the request for a rehearing), though Judge Stephen Reinhardt hinted that the gap may have been closer. Judge Rymer, who authored the original panel decision, filed a concurrence defending both the original decision and the decision to deny an en banc hearing, arguing that Fletcher should have deferred to the AEDPA rather than questioning the integrity of the state's expert.