Jerry T. Bunyard, a California inmate condemned to death for hiring a childhood friend to murder his pregnant wife in 1979, died July 10 at California State Prison in Sacramento. He was 76 years old. He never faced the sentence a jury imposed on him.
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation confirmed Bunyard was pronounced dead at 4:44 p.m. at an outside medical facility. The Sacramento County Coroner will determine his official cause of death. Fox News Digital first reported the details of Bunyard's death and the underlying crime.
More than four decades passed between the murder of Elaine Bunyard and the death of the man convicted of arranging it. In those years, California's death penalty apparatus ground to a near-total halt, and in 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order imposing a moratorium on executions, granting a reprieve to every condemned inmate in the state. Bunyard was among them. He died of causes still unknown, in a medical facility, not in an execution chamber.
The crime that put Bunyard on death row was calculated and brutal. On November 1, 1979, Elaine Bunyard was found dead in the garage of the San Joaquin County home she shared with her husband and their seven-year-old daughter. She had been killed days before she was expected to give birth.
Prosecutors said half of her face was blown off by a massive shotgun blast.
The evidence, as reviewed by the California Supreme Court, laid out a chilling sequence. Bunyard believed his wife had gotten pregnant by another man. He wanted out of the marriage and into a relationship with a new girlfriend. He offered Elaine a $50,000 divorce settlement. She refused.
So Bunyard turned to Erwin Popham, a childhood friend described in court records as a drifter, small-time criminal, and frequent drug user who had lived with the Bunyard family on and off. Bunyard asked Popham to kill his wife. Popham initially declined. Eventually, he agreed.
The price was $1,000, to be paid within a week of the killing, plus additional money once Bunyard collected on his wife's life insurance policy.
The California Supreme Court's review of the evidence described Popham attacking Elaine Bunyard while she washed dishes in the kitchen. He struck her repeatedly on the head with frying pans, then dragged her unconscious body into the garage. There, he placed her in a chair, propped Bunyard's own pump shotgun under her chin, and pulled the trigger.
Popham had originally planned to stage the scene as a suicide. But the extreme amount of blood made that impossible. He shifted course and tried to make it look like a robbery instead.
He then drove to Bunyard's construction job in Patterson and delivered a three-word message: "it was done."
A seven-year-old girl lost her mother that day. An unborn child never drew a breath. And the man who arranged all of it spent the next 45 years alive, housed, and fed by the state of California.
Bunyard was convicted of first-degree murder for the killing of Elaine Bunyard and her unborn child. A court condemned him to death. The year of his conviction and sentencing is not specified in available records, but the crime occurred in 1979, meaning Bunyard spent more than four and a half decades on death row without the state carrying out its own judgment.
California's death row currently holds 567 inmates. That number alone tells the story of a system that imposes a penalty it has no intention of enforcing. The state has not executed anyone since 2006. Newsom's 2019 moratorium formalized what had already become a de facto reality: death sentences in California are symbolic gestures, not consequences.
When a state tells a jury's verdict it doesn't matter, when it shelves the most serious punishment its own courts can impose, it sends a message. Not to the condemned, who live out their natural lives in custody. The message lands on the victims' families, who watch the clock run out on promises the justice system made and never kept. The grief of losing a family member does not diminish because a governor signs an executive order.
Several questions remain open. The CDCR's announcement did not state Bunyard's cause of death. The Sacramento County Coroner has been assigned to make that determination, but no timeline has been given.
Equally unclear is the fate of Erwin Popham, the man who carried out the actual killing. Court records referenced by the California Supreme Court detail his direct role, but his legal outcome, whether he was charged, tried, convicted, or is still alive, is not addressed in the CDCR's statement or in the reporting on Bunyard's death.
The gestational age of Elaine Bunyard's unborn child is also not specified, though the record states she was killed days before she was expected to give birth. That detail makes the crime not just a murder but the extinguishing of a life about to begin.
Bunyard's case is not an outlier. It is the norm in a state that maintains the legal architecture of capital punishment while refusing to use it. California voters have repeatedly rejected ballot measures to abolish the death penalty, in 2012 and again in 2016. In 2016, voters went further, approving a measure to speed up executions. The state's political leadership ignored that mandate.
Newsom's moratorium did not require legislative approval. It was an executive order, one man's decision to override the expressed will of the electorate and the judgments of the courts. Death notices for condemned inmates who pass away from natural causes have become the only way California's death row shrinks.
The CDCR reported that 567 inmates currently sit on death row. Every one of them is covered by Newsom's reprieve. Every one of them was sentenced by a judge, after a trial, under laws the people of California enacted. And every one of those sentences now amounts to life in prison, a punishment the jury was never asked to impose.
There is a word for a system that makes promises it refuses to keep. It is not justice. Mockery of serious matters takes many forms, and few are as corrosive as a government that treats its own court orders as suggestions.
Housing a death row inmate for 45 years is not cheap. California's death row has long been among the most expensive correctional operations in the country. Every year Bunyard remained alive in state custody was a year the taxpayers of California funded the incarceration of a man the courts said should die, while their elected governor ensured that sentence would never be carried out.
Bunyard arrived on death row as a man in his early thirties. He left it in a body bag at 76. In between, Elaine Bunyard's seven-year-old daughter grew up without a mother. The permanent consequences of a parent's death do not pause while the appeals process grinds on for decades.
The CDCR's terse announcement, a time of death, a pending coroner's report, a name and a number, closed the file on Jerry T. Bunyard. But it did not close the question his case forces into the open: What is the point of a death penalty that exists only on paper?
If California will not enforce the sentence, it should stop pretending it has one. And if it keeps pretending, voters should find leaders who take their own laws seriously.
