Man who killed
over alleged gay remark set to be executed next month

A judge set a February 21 execution date for a Stockton, Calif., man who raped and killed a 17-year-old Lodi girl whose body was found beaten and stabbed in a nearby vineyard 25 years ago. Michael Morales, 46, was convicted of murdering Terri Winchell, whose skull, cheek bones, and jaw had been fractured. Prosecutors theorized that Morales killed the girl in 1981 in a revenge attack for spreading rumors that his cousin was gay. Morales was tried in Ventura County because of extensive pretrial coverage in San Joaquin County. Ventura County superior court judge Charles McGrath set the execution date Wednesday. The California supreme court upheld Morales's 1983 conviction and the federal courts eventually did as well. In 1996 the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the federal courts to entertain a variety of challenges to the conviction, which ultimately were rejected. Among other things, Morales challenged the finding that the murder was committed while torturing the victim as the basis for the death sentence and alleged that prosecutors concealed an agreement with a jailhouse informant to extract a confession from Morales. The ninth U.S. circuit court of appeals eventually rejected those and other arguments in July 2003. "There is no reason to doubt that after he failed to kill her by strangling her with the belt, he beat her head in with a hammer, and when she still lived, dragged her out of the car, raped her, and stabbed her several times," Judge Andrew J. Kleinfeld wrote for the appeals court, a decision the U.S. Supreme Court upheld in October. Twenty-five years after the murder, Winchell's mother, Barbara Christian, said she'll never forget her daughter. "After I was notified by Sgt. Andy Jackson that they were recovering her body from a cold, dark vineyard in Lodi, I looked at the laundry basket with her clean clothes still in it and I thought, This is the last time I will ever be able to fold her clothes," she said. "My heart wrenched with grief." Morales's lethal injection at San Quentin State Prison will be the fourth California execution in 13 months. (AP)