by John Bateson
Dan White was a San Francisco city supervisor and onetime police officer who was charged with two counts of murder after assassinating fellow supervisor Harvey Milk and San Francisco mayor George Moscone in 1978. White’s attorneys claimed that their client was depressed and suffered diminished capacity at the time of the crimes, and Blinder, as an expert witness for the defense, vouched for it. He said that a number of factors contributed to White’s depression—he had just quit his job, he was estranged from his wife, he had lost interest in exercising, and his clean-cut appearance had become slovenly. It was when Blinder talked about White’s diet changing from healthy foods to sugar-laden soft drinks and snacks, however, in particular Coca-Cola and Twinkies, that his testimony became infamous. When the verdict was announced—White was convicted of the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter—people rioted in the streets of San Francisco and eleven police cars were set on fire outside City Hall. The common misperception was that White’s defense team—and Blinder in particular—argued that White’s consumption of Twinkies was behind the murders, and the jury bought it, as ludicrous as that seemed. In fact, the defense said that White’s newfound proclivity for sweets, including Twinkies, was symptomatic of White’s depression, and jurors agreed. (White served five years of a seven-year prison sentence. Two years after he was released, he killed himself.)
Notoriety from the trial didn’t bother Blinder. He was confident of his diagnosis, unafraid to take a position that few others shared, and willing to go head-to-head with anyone.
Bill Thomas was the coroner’s investigator who was on duty when Elizabeth Blinder’s body was found. He notified Dr. Blinder, who said that she left their house at eleven o’clock the previous night in an “angry” mood. She had a history of “crushing problems” he said, which at times overwhelmed her. When this happened, she would leave home for a few days to work them out. When Thomas asked who her doctor was, Blinder said that he was her sole health care provider. In response to Thomas’s question about whether Elizabeth Blinder owned a handgun, Blinder said she did, but he didn’t know what type.
A week later, Holmes was contacted by an ex-boyfriend of Elizabeth Blinder. He said they lived together for seven years until they broke up and she began living with Blinder. When they met, he said, she was known as Gail Elizabeth “Sunny” Doney and working as a prostitute in Berkeley. Dr. Blinder was one of her johns, the man said, and convinced her to move in with him. Later, Blinder took her to Reno and, after a bout of drinking and drugs, married her. According to the caller, the day after their wedding she told Blinder that she didn’t remember much from the previous day and didn’t know that she was now married.
The man told Holmes that a week before Elizabeth died, she asked him if he knew the name of a good divorce lawyer. Holmes confirmed this with Elizabeth’s mother, who said that her daughter phoned her the day before she died and said she was leaving her husband and getting a divorce. Elizabeth’s mother also said that Elizabeth had an argument with her husband the night before she died. When she went out to walk her dog, Blinder locked her out of the house. She and the dog ended up sleeping in her car.
Ten days later, Martin Blinder came into the coroner’s office to pick up his wife’s personal effects. Holmes asked him if the couple had had any domestic trouble in the days prior to her death. Blinder said no. He also denied that they had been arguing at the time she left the house. Holmes asked for the names of Elizabeth’s friends and contact information for her family because he wanted to talk with them. Blinder said his wife didn’t have any close friends and was estranged from her family, who lived in Florida. He didn’t have phone numbers or addresses for anyone.
After Blinder left, Holmes was called by a woman named Connie. She told him that she was Elizabeth Blinder’s best friend. Elizabeth was smart, an artist, and had been widowed from a previous marriage after her husband was killed in a car accident, Connie said. She recounted an incident from two months earlier in which Elizabeth called Connie and said she had just overdosed on medication. Connie and her husband rushed to the Blinders’ house in San Anselmo, rang the doorbell, then knocked repeatedly, but no one answered. The front door was unlocked so they entered and went to Elizabeth’s bedroom, which was across the hall from Dr. Blinder’s bedroom. Connie could hear Blinder in his room but didn’t contact him.
Elizabeth was in a stupor, but awake. They got her dressed, packed some clothes, and made several trips to the car before leaving the house. All during this time, Connie said, despite talking and making considerable noise, Martin Blinder didn’t come out of his room or look to see who was in his house. They took Elizabeth to Marin General Hospital, where she was treated, recovered, and was released.
Holmes interviewed Dr. Blinder twice. Blinder denied everything and made vague threats of slander. He said his wife had never been a call girl, he had never locked her out of their house, and as far as he knew she had no desire to get a divorce. The years that he and his wife were together “were probably the happiest years of her life,” he said.
A reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, writing about the case, talked to Margo St. James, a onetime hooker who founded a nonprofit agency in San Francisco that advocated for decriminalizing prostitution. St. James told him that she introduced Elizabeth Doney when she was a call girl to Martin Blinder. When the reporter asked Blinder about it, Blinder said, “That’s preposterous. I met her [Elizabeth] at a Chinese restaurant, Yet Wah, at a fund-raiser.”
In response to Holmes’s question about Blinder’s relationship with his wife, Blinder said, “I was there for her in every possible way. . . . I think we had an extremely loving relationship.”
Elizabeth Blinder’s mother told Holmes that during an argument with Blinder, Elizabeth said she wanted to shoot herself, and Blinder told her where to put the gun, above and behind her ear. She asked Holmes if that was where she shot herself. Holmes said it was.
Elizabeth’s ex-boyfriend told Holmes that during another argument with Blinder, and in his presence, Elizabeth fired the same gun she used to kill herself, this time aiming at a tree. For Blinder to say that he had never seen the gun is a lie, he said.
Several hours after Bill Thomas had gone to the Blinders’ house with a San Anselmo cop to notify Blinder of his wife’s death, Blinder called the coroner’s office. Thomas wasn’t in so he talked with Don Cornish instead. Cornish noted in a supplemental report that Blinder “seemed to want to absolve himself from any blame for his wife’s anger, frustration, and suicide. . . . I got the feeling he felt he hadn’t done too well” when he was first informed “and now had his act together.” In this conversation, Blinder placed the blame for his wife’s death on her mental problems and said that her leaving their house the previous evening “was in no way marital related.”
Meanwhile, Holmes received yet another call pertaining to the case. Martin Blinder’s first wife, Dorothy Braco, told Holmes to watch out for Dr. Blinder. “Don’t trust him. Don’t ever take him at face value,” she said.
They had been divorced ten years by this time, and clearly she was still bitter. Holmes knew to take what she said with a certain amount of skepticism. Even so, there were times when ex-spouses were the best judges of character—as well as times when they weren’t.
Elizabeth Blinder’s relatives believed that her death was a homicide rather than a suicide, and voiced their suspicions to Holmes. If she wasn’t planning to leave her husband, they said, why did she have more than $1,400 in cash on her when she died? Why would someone planning to kill herself bring the dog she loved with her in her car? Why would her husband have her body cremated before family members could get to California, which ruled out the possibility of any further tests being done?
Holmes listened with interest but concluded that there wasn’t any evidence to support a finding of murder. There was just a lot of supposition.
Before he met Elizabeth Doney, and after his first marriage ended, Martin Blinder dated another prostitute, a wom
an named Linda Sours. She told the same Chronicle reporter that they met when she accompanied Margo St. James on a visit to Blinder’s home. Sours and Blinder had a Pretty Woman type of relationship, Sours said, referring to the movie in which a wealthy businessman becomes infatuated with a high-class call girl, wining and dining her and buying her a new wardrobe. When the reporter asked Blinder about it, Blinder said it was “news to me” that Sours had been a hooker.
In a postscript to the story, thirteen years after Elizabeth Blinder killed herself, Martin Blinder’s first wife did, too. Dorothy Braco, who had warned Holmes about her ex-husband, jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge after Blinder asked—some would say demanded—that she deed back to him her half interest in Blinder’s expensive hillside home. They lived there during their marriage, and he continued to reside there after they divorced, but she had retained partial ownership.
Holmes didn’t handle Braco’s death because her body washed up on a beach in San Mateo County. Her black Volkswagen Jetta was found abandoned at the bridge, though, and her autopsy noted pattern injuries consistent with a fall from a great height, so it was easy to make the connection.
Hours before she jumped, Braco attacked Blinder with a knife, sending him to Marin General Hospital for two hours of emergency room surgery and blood transfusions. It was speculated that her intention was to kill him before killing herself so that their two grown children inherited the house and other assets without him bequeathing them to a current girlfriend. In response to accusations afterward that the noted psychiatrist used his vast intellect and psychological powers to manipulate and control Dorothy Braco, Elizabeth Doney, and others, Blinder said it was merely coincidental that his two wives killed themselves. He had loved both of them very much.
CHILDREN OF THUNDER
Blues guitarist Elvin Bishop is another acclaimed musician with long-standing ties to Marin County. His most famous song, “Fooled Around and Fell in Love,” was written about his wife, Jennifer Villarin. After they divorced, she continued to live in Marin, as did their twenty-two-year-old daughter, Selina Bishop.
In 2000, mother and daughter were murdered, along with three other people, in a bizarre plot designed “to speed Christ’s return to Earth,” according to the perpetrators. As details unfolded in the press, people were horrified, and the story became the subject of a sensationalized book, Unholy Sacrifice, by Robert Scott.
Glenn Helzer, age thirty, was a onetime stock broker who went by his middle name, Taylor. His brother, Justin, was two years younger. Both were raised in Northern California by devout Mormon parents and fulfilled their two-year Mormon missions. Upon returning to the Bay Area, Taylor Helzer married and had two daughters before he decided that he had no further interest in being a good Mormon or husband. He was charismatic, gregarious, and fun-loving, and the confines of religion and family wore on him. He took to wearing black clothes and engaging in all of the things that the church prohibited—smoking, drinking, drugs, and sex with whomever he pleased. When he was excommunicated, he didn’t care. He believed he was a prophet who could communicate with God directly. Justin, who was more introverted, followed him.
Ironically, considering their future deeds, the brothers met Dawn Godman in 1999 at a murder mystery dinner that was held in a Mormon temple. While everyone ate, the host gave guests clues to a make-believe homicide, which people tried to solve. In their black clothes, the Helzers stood out from everyone else, and Godman gravitated to them. She started dating Justin, but Taylor was the one who fascinated her. He told her that he was starting a group that would defeat Satan and eventually result in Taylor becoming the head of the Mormon Church. For financing, he said, the group would sell drugs, provide prostitutes to wealthy businessmen, and recruit underage girls from Brazil—where Taylor had been a missionary—to seduce married men who would be blackmailed into giving them money.
“He believed that by doing that, he was fulfilling a prophecy from the Book of Mormon,” Dawn Godman later said in court, long after she had become the third person in the scheme.
Eventually, Taylor Helzer settled on a simpler plan—he would extort money from one of his former clients, and kill the person or couple afterward. As a stockbroker, he had managed the financial portfolios of well-to-do people, so he had choices in terms of potential victims. The only problem was that he needed someone to launder the money, someone who would open a bank account and deposit extorted checks. That person would be killed, too, of course, so that there were no living witnesses beyond the core three.
Selina Bishop, Elvin Bishop’s daughter, was perfect. She was looking for love, met Taylor Helzer at a rave, and fell for the tall, handsome, ponytailed man who said his name was Jordan. She told all her friends about her new boyfriend and refused to heed their warnings. “Jordan” wouldn’t tell her his last name or phone number, wouldn’t allow her to take pictures of him, and had no interest in meeting anyone in her circle. Nevertheless, she was besotted. When he told her to open a bank account for him under a ruse, she did. The only thing she wanted to know was when his divorce from his estranged wife would be finalized so that he would be unencumbered. He didn’t give her an answer because he had more pressing issues on his mind. He had already bought a reciprocating saw at Sears that he would use to cut up the bodies, as well as the duffel bags from Kmart that would hold the remains. All he needed now was to select the victim.
Helzer targeted an elderly couple, Ivan and Annette Stineman, who lived in the East Bay city of Concord—the same city where the Helzers and Godman were renting a house. The Stinemans, ages eighty-five and seventy-eight, knew and trusted him. They were surprised but not alarmed when he and his brother, wearing suits and carrying briefcases, knocked on their door.
Earlier in the day, the Helzers had bought handcuffs and leg irons from an adult bookstore, which they carried in their briefcases along with pistols and Tasers. Once inside, the brothers bound the Stinemans, put them in the couple’s van, and drove to the Helzers’ house. The Stinemans were forced to call their bank and let the manager there know that several large checks were going to be written on their account. After that, they were given drinks laced with Rohypnol, commonly referred to as the “date rape” drug because it causes people to pass out. The Helzers thought the Rohypnol would kill the Stinemans, but when it didn’t they resorted to more violent means. Justin Helzer beat Mr. Stineman’s head against a tile floor and Taylor Helzer dragged Mrs. Stineman to the bathroom and slit her throat with a knife. Dawn Godman watched in silent disbelief, testifying later, “The only thing I could do was pray that they [the Stinemans] would die, so it would just be done with.”
The next day, in the bathroom, the brothers cut up the bodies with the power saw, then stuffed them in the duffel bags. Meanwhile, Godman practiced forging Annette Stineman’s signature, wrote two checks on the couple’s account totaling $100,000, and was able to have the funds moved to the account that Selina Bishop had opened.
Once the Helzers had access to the money, Selina Bishop’s role was over. So, too, for all practical purposes, was her life.
At the end of their last date, Taylor Helzer offered to give his unwitting girlfriend a massage. While she lay facedown on the carpeted floor in the living room and he rubbed her back, Justin Helzer entered the room behind them, carrying a hammer. Within seconds he had hit Selina over the head multiple times, cracking her skull. Taylor Helzer carried her into the same bathroom where the Stinemans had been dismembered, and for good measure slit her throat. Then Selina’s body was cut up as well. Justin Helzer used a toothbrush to scrub every square inch of the bathroom so that, despite all the bloodletting that had occurred, not a single drop of blood from any of the victims was found there.
Taylor Helzer’s plan for disposing of the remains of the Stinemans and Selina Bishop, which now were commingled in nine bags, was to rent a personal watercraft and dump the bags in the Sacramento Delta. Stepping-stones from their rented house in Concord were added to the bags to weigh them
down. The assumption was that the bags would sink to the bottom and remain there forever, removing all evidence of the murders. It didn’t turn out that way, however.
Instead of sinking, the bags slowly bubbled to the surface. A Jet-Skier found the first one after it washed up on a riverbank, and was horrified to find a human torso inside. Other bags were found by police investigators. Dental records and DNA analysis were used to determine the identities of the Stinemans, whose daughter had reported them missing, and of Selina Bishop, but offered no clues as to the identities of their killers. None of the victims had any known enemies; moreover, there was no apparent connection between the elderly couple and Elvin Bishop’s daughter. It was the murder in Marin County of Jennifer Villarin that provided the link.
Taylor Helzer had told Selina that he would take her to Yosemite. He had no intention of doing it, knowing that she would be dead before then, but Selina had asked her mother to house-sit for her because she and “Jordan” were going away for a few days. Jennifer Villarin, age forty-five, had been suspicious of Taylor Helzer, and several weeks earlier had tricked her daughter into introducing her to him. Helzer was worried that Jennifer knew too much and could identify him, so he drove to Selina’s studio apartment in Marin before dawn, let himself in with the key Selina had given him, crept toward the bed, and from close range fired multiple shots into the bodies of Jennifer Villarin and the man sleeping next to her, James Gamble, fifty-four. An upstairs neighbor heard the gunshots and called the police while Helzer fled.
After police connected the two homicides with that of Selina Bishop, everything became clear. The self-proclaimed “Children of Thunder”—Taylor Helzer, Justin Helzer, and Dawn Godman—were charged with five murders and subject to the death penalty if convicted.