By Bob Egelko
The San Francisco Chronicle
SAN QUENTIN, Calif. — An Antioch man who was sentenced to death in 2003 for raping and strangling a 5-year-old girl two decades earlier was found dead in his cell at San Quentin State Prison early Tuesday, an apparent suicide, officials said.
Guards found Larry Graham, 58, unresponsive at about 6 a.m., and he was pronounced dead 45 minutes later, said Terry Thornton, spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. She gave no further details.
Graham’s victim, Angela Bugay, was kidnapped from her family’s Antioch apartment on Nov. 19, 1983. Officers found her nude body a week later buried in a field a few miles away. It was one of a series of baffling and frightening child abductions in the Bay Area during the 1980s.
The crime went unsolved until 1996, when new DNA evidence led to the arrest of Graham. He lived in the same apartment complex as Angela, had briefly dated the girl’s mother before the killing and had a history of sexual offenses against children.
A Contra Costa County jury returned a death verdict against Graham in October 2002, after a three-month trial, and then asked the judge for directions to the cemetery where Angela was buried.
Graham was sentenced to death in January 2003. The state Supreme Court had not yet heard his appeal at the time of his death.
Thornton said Graham would be the 17th Death Row inmate to have committed suicide since the state reinstated the death penalty in 1978. During that period, she said, 45 condemned prisoners have died of natural causes.
California has executed 13 prisoners under the current capital punishment law, starting in 1992, and has 683 under death sentence.
Larry Graham was sentenced to death in 2003 for killing Angela Bugay, 5, in 1983.
Copyright 2009 San Francisco Chronicle