By Jason Green
Bay Area News Group
SAN QUENTIN, Calif. — A former Peninsula police officer convicted of murdering six people in his Burlingame warehouse in the early 1980s died of natural causes last week, authorities said.
Anthony “Jack” Sully, 79, was pronounced dead around 2:20 a.m. Friday at a medical facility outside of the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, where he was housed, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in a news release Monday.
The Marin County Coroner’s Office will determine Sully’s official cause of death.
Sully was sentenced to death on June 3, 1986, for the murders of 24-year-old Kathryn Barrett, 22-year-old Barbara Searcy, 24-year-old Gloria Jean Fravel, 19-year-old Brendan Oakden, 24-year-old Michael Thomas and 20-year-old Phyllis Melendez.
The victims were beaten, stabbed and shot inside an electrical supply warehouse in 1983. Three of the bodies were found stuffed into barrels dumped at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.
Sully, a police officer from 1966 to 1974, maintained at his sentencing that he did not get a fair trial, telling the judge, “I am not a monster, not a maniac, not subhuman,” according to news accounts at the time.
In 2013, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Sully’s bid to overturn his convictions and death sentence.
The state has not carried out an execution in 17 years. In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order instituting a moratorium on the state’s death penalty.
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