The trial of a Texas man accused of posing as a handyman to rob and kill seniors is due to take place on Monday, the Associated Press reported.

Billy Chemirmir, 48, is charged with robbing and killing 18 seniors. If convicted, he faces life imprisonment without parole. The prosecution has decided not to apply for the death penalty.

Chemirmir allegedly pretended to be a craftsman or broke into apartments to gain entry. Most of the victims lived in separate shared apartments for the elderly.

One of the victims, Leah Corken, 83, was found on the living room floor of her apartment in 2016. There were makeup stains on her bedroom pillow and her wedding ring was missing.

“I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know,” said MJ Jennings, Corken’s daughter. “I didn’t know it was murder.”

Families across Dallas have had similar stories of missing jewelry and puzzling deaths of their elderly but otherwise healthy loved ones.

In March 2018, 91-year-old Mary Annis Bartel survived after a man broke into her apartment and told her “don’t fight me” when he tried to suffocate her with a pillow and left with jewelry. Chemirmir was arrested the next day.

At a press conference after Chemirmir’s arrest, then Plano Police Chief Greg Rushin admitted a tendency to assume that the death of an elderly person is natural.

“There is no in-depth investigation … It would be very easy to cover up a crime,” said Rushin.

More coverage from the Associated Press can be found below.

MJ Jennings views a photo of her mother Leah Corken as she sits at her home in Dallas on Wednesday November 3, 2021. Corken was one of 18 women in the Dallas area charged with capital murder and suspected of multiple other deaths. Most of the deaths occurred in upscale independent shared apartments for the elderly, where Chemirmir was accused of breaking into apartments or posing as a handyman and, in some cases, was even caught trespassing.
LM Otero / AP Photo

Chemirmir’s attorney did not respond to the AP’s request to comment on the story, but has previously labeled the evidence against Chemirmir as circumstantial. Chemirmir, who immigrated to the United States from Kenya, became a legal permanent resident in 2007.

Eight of the people he is charged with lived lived at The Tradition-Prestonwood, and he has been linked to the death of a ninth resident in a lawsuit.

Just days before Glenna Day, 87, was found dead there in October 2016, she told friends something was wrong.

“They asked how things were going. She said, ‘Well, I think I should move because my friends are dying,'” said her daughter Sherril Kerr, who added that the death caused her mother to see her doctor to go for a check up.

When Day was killed, the accomplished artist had been working to restore a friend’s painting and had just been dancing in a senior citizen center.

Chemirmir was charged with two deaths earlier this year in another Dallas retiree community – The Edgemere – and linked to a third via an autopsy report.

The Tradition deaths began after his release from prison in July. According to lawsuits against The Tradition, Chemirmir was escorted from the site in late 2016 and asked not to return. A November 2016 police report said the suspect – who is not named but whose description matches Chemirmir’s – was seen there several times and said he was looking for pipe leaks.

Chemirmir is accused of killing three of her roommates on Preston Place in Plano in the two weeks leading up to the attack on Bartel.

When the victims ‘children began to find each other, they founded Secure Our Seniors’ Safety. The group advocated new Texas law requiring medical assessors to notify families when a relative’s death certificate is changed and to require spot checks by officials in gold shops.

They say more work needs to be done, including more transparency in independent shared flats. In legal proceedings, the families accused the institutions of not having the advertised security.

“We didn’t know evil was roaming the hallways,” said Shannon Dion, whose mother was killed at The Tradition and who is the group’s president.

The tradition said in a statement that it relied on investigations by police and medical experts. Preston Place said it had settled the lawsuit but did not want to comment on the details. Edgemere did not respond to requests for comment.

When Scott MacPhee read an article about Chemirmir’s arrest, the death of his 82-year-old mother at their Plano home made sense. Carolyn MacPhee was found in her bedroom on New Year’s Eve 2017, a little over eight months after her husband died. Her glasses were bloody, a door and handkerchiefs in the bathroom. Two diamond rings she always wore were missing.

“I read the story that goes, ‘Well, holy crap, that connects all the dots,'” he said.

Robert MacPhee said police suspected her mother had a nosebleed and died of an aneurysm, so the family did not perform an autopsy. It turned out that Chemirmir, under the pseudonym Koitaba, had looked after her father, who had Parkinson’s disease, at home.

About nine months after Chemirmir’s arrest, Jennings learned that authorities believed her mother had been murdered.

“All of a sudden, all of the things I saw in this room that day … all made sense,” she said.

Jennings said Corken lived around the world and moved to The Tradition from Florida to be close to her.

“She was my best friend, she really was,” Jennings said.

FILE – This undated photo courtesy of the Dallas County, Texas Sheriff’s Office shows Billy Chemirmir. Chemirmir is due to be tried on Monday, November 15, 2021 for the death of one of 18 women accused of killing in Texas over a period of two years.
Dallas County Sheriff’s Office / AP Photo

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As lawmaker, Rob Bonta co-sponsored a proposed election measure that would have given Californians another chance to overturn the death penalty, a repeal they narrowly opposed in 2012 and 2016.

As California’s attorney general, Bonta is still against the death penalty and believes the state is moving in the same direction.

“I think the death penalty is inhuman. It doesn’t deter. Studies show that it had different effects on defendants of color for a long time, especially when the victim is white, “Bonta said in an interview. Three weeks earlier, his former legislative colleagues had confirmed Governor Gavin Newsom’s nomination of the Alameda Democrat to succeed Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who is now the US Secretary of State for Health and Human Services.

Bonta said the death penalty was both irreversible and “fallible,” citing the exoneration and release of numerous death row inmates across the country – 185 since 1973, including five in California, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The nonprofit says it has also found “strong evidence” that at least 20 prisoners executed since 1989, all in southern states, were actually innocent.

Despite the nationwide votes over the past decade, Bonta said he thought California was “on the way to ending the death penalty. I think this is the way to get there, away from mass imprisonment, over-criminalization and over-condemnation.

“The Californians said that about the people who voted them into office,” he said.

One of them was Newsom, who announced a moratorium on executions shortly after taking office in 2019. Others included Bonta’s three attorney general predecessors, Becerra, Kamala Harris, and Jerry Brown, all of whom stood against the death penalty.

But when the Californians voted directly on the death penalty, they approved it: in 1972, when they overturned a Supreme Court ruling declaring it a violation of the state constitution; 1978, when they expanded a death penalty law that legislature passed over Governor Brown’s veto; and in 2012 and 2016, when majorities of 52% and 53% rejected initiatives to reduce the maximum sentence to life imprisonment without parole.

Although Newsom and a group of prosecutors have asked the state Supreme Court to make it harder to obtain death sentences by tightening standards for jury deliberation and voting in capital cases, there is no pending death penalty appeal in California. So the only current path to a repeal seems to be another electoral measure, which proponents say won’t happen until at least 2024.

Things could change if Newsom was recalled and replaced with a Republican who would almost certainly lift its moratorium and seek execution dates for more than 20 convicted prisoners who have lost all appeals against their convictions and sentences. This would revive a legal challenge to California’s lethal injections procedures, which 15 years ago a federal judge found so flawed that they posed an unreasonable risk of prolonged and excruciating death.

The state, which has 704 inmates on death row, has not executed anyone since January 2006, while 103 convicted inmates have died in prison, mostly of natural causes – 22 since the coronavirus pandemic began last spring. Bonta said he needed more study before deciding whether to defend the current method of executing individual drugs.

“Part of my role is to be the administrator of the law,” he said, “but I will not defend something that is unconstitutional.” It has nothing to do with my personal convictions ”but rather whether there is evidence that the injection procedures could cause an“ unnecessarily slow and painful death ”.

Bonta will appear to be a more confident opponent of the death penalty than others in high office. Harris and Brown, for example, were publicly silent on the 2012 and 2016 overturn initiatives, and Harris appealed to restore the state’s death penalty law in 2015 after a federal judge ruled that the law was no longer constitutional due to arbitrary delays of 25 years or longer in crucial cases.

Bonta’s appointment “bodes well for the state and those of us who are interested in this issue,” said Mike Farrell, former “MASH” star, president of Death Penalty Focus, a Sacramento-based anti-death penalty -Group, is.

Anne Marie Schubert, District Attorney for Sacramento, is a challenger in next year’s attorney general election and says voters shouldn’t expect a strong defense of the death penalty or its implementation from an opponent like Bonta.

“Voter will should matter,” and “attitudes can have an impact,” said Schubert, a former Republican who became independent and advocated the death penalty. “You say, ‘We are going to defend the death penalty,’ but are you going to delay cases and divert resources away from the Capital Disputes Department?”

She said she was particularly concerned about a bill pending in the Legislature, AB1224, by Congregation Member Marc Levine, D-San Rafael, that would allow for a review of an inmate’s previous death or life sentence without parole. Levine was the lead author of the proposed constitutional amendment to repeal the death penalty, which Bonta endorsed in 2019.

AB1224 would allow a judge to reduce any of these sentences to life with the option of parole after considering the inmate’s age, mental health, and records of the inmate in prison. If the inmate has served at least 20 years without violence, the judge would have to reduce the sentence unless prosecutors can show that the inmate would commit violent acts in the future. Backed by public defenders and rejected by prosecutors, the move would require two-thirds approval in the Assembly and Senate and the governor’s signature to become law.

By overturning existing death or life sentences without parole, “you are destroying families who were promised by judges that these people would never get out,” said Schubert. She said such a reversal of longstanding state policy appears to be part of Bonta’s agenda.

Bonta did not take a position on AB1224, but said he would be willing to ask judges to reconsider individual death sentences – as long as all sides agree on a case.

He said he plans to “work with prosecutors and family members of victims who want to go to court together to punish an accused of the death penalty for anything else, such as life without parole or some other sentence.”

“I will show ways to advance reforms in the criminal justice system in general and in relation to the death penalty in particular,” said Bonta.

Bob Egelko is a contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko

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