As a convict in the California prison system, 41-year-old Jonathan Watson doesn’t have much more to lose. He’s already lost access to his freedom, so he figured that attacking two convicted child molesters and beating them to death with a cane would protect children from the abusers in the future. In a letter written to Mercury News, Watson confessed to beating 48-year-old David Bobb and 64-year-old Graham De Luis-Conti to death with a cane only one week after being transferred to Corcoran, California for a stint in the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison.
In his confession, Watson explained that he had tried to warn people that he would not be able to handle himself around the child molesters. According to his letter, he asked a counselor to get him transferred out of the facility, making it abundantly clear that his request was “urgent” and desperate. However, his request was not heeded, and hours later, two men were beaten to death.
After he was transferred to the substance abuse treatment facility, Watson was assigned a lower-level security classification, dropping him down from a Level III to a Level II. This meant that he no longer had to remain in a single cell but was moved into dorm-style living. He called the decision a “careless” mistake by prison officials. Although he created “quite a paper trail” of complaints regarding the transfer, no one ever took his warnings seriously.
Just six days after Watson was transferred to the Corcoran facility, a “child molester” was moved into his pod. Instead of referring to the man by name, he called him “Molester #1” and wrote that the molester began watching PBS Kids in front of the other inmates. Watson took it as a threat.
Watson wrote, “I could not sleep having not done what every instinct told me I should’ve done right then and there, so I packed all of my things because I knew one way or another the situation would be resolved the following day.”
The next day, only two hours before the brutal killings, Watson met with a prison counselor and demanded that he be switched back to Level III security “before I really (expletive) one of these dudes up.”
Instead of taking his threat seriously, Watson said the counselor “scoffed and dismissed me.”
Although he had already said that he might not be able to control his violent urges around the child molesters, he was returned to his pod.
“I was mulling it all over when along came Molester #1, and he put his TV right on PBS Kids again. But this time, someone else said something to the effect of, ‘Is this guy really going to watch this right in front of us?’ and I recall saying, ‘I got this.’ And I picked up the cane and went to work on him.”
After killing the first child molester, Watson left the pod to go turn himself into a prison guard. That’s when he encountered “Molester #2” and decided to kill him, too.
“As I got to the lower tier, I saw a known child trafficker, and I figured I’d just do everybody a favor,” he wrote. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”
After killing two child molesters, Watson approached an officer to turn himself in.
In his letter, Watson wrote: “I told him, ‘I’ve got some pretty bad news,’ to which he ironically replied, ‘You’re not going to hit me with that cane, are you?’ So after jesting for a moment, knowing this might be the last decent moment that I have for a long time, I told him what I’d just done, which he also didn’t believe until he looked around the corner and saw the mess I’d left in the dorm area.”
Watson was currently in the middle of a life sentence for a 2009 murder conviction.