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Annika Deasy — background data

• For almost 19 years, Annika Deasy, a Swedish citizen, has been incarcerated in a Californian prison for two murders.
• In 1981, her boyfriend, Bob Cox, first shot restaurant owner Joe Torre, in Stockton, and later Richard Helbush, a policeman, in Lakeport. Annika was present at both murders, although her role was entirely passive. Annika was considered an accessory to the crime. Prior to the trial, Bob Cox hanged himself while in custody in Lakeport.
• In a "plea-bargain", an agreement between prosecutor and defence counsel, Annika pleaded guilty to murder in the first degree. If she had declined to accept this plea-bargain, she would have risked the death penalty or a life sentence without any hope of repeal. She was sentenced to serve 25 years to life in prison. At the time, it was generally understood that this left open a later possibility of having the sentence commuted to 12-14 years.
• Since that time, one of the parties to the agreement, the State of California, has changed the rules and removed the possibility of a reduced sentence.
• An international convention exists, signed by both the USA and Sweden, which permits sentenced offenders to be transferred to their country of origin to serve the rest of their sentence.
• 

Annika Deasy is 45 years old. At the age of nine, she moved with her mother and her American stepfather to the USA. At the age of thirteen, she ran away from home and found her way to the hippie section of San Francisco. She gave birth to her son Sven at the age of fifteen. Then followed many years of drug abuse, heroin and LSD, and relationships with the wrong sort of men, although she still managed to give her son the loving care of a mother.

In the mid-1970s, she tried to get a grip on her life. She married, became Annika Deasy (her maiden name was Östberg) and started to attend a rehabilitation clinic. She was drug-free for two years and got a job. But her new husband left her in the lurch, and Annika lost all control over her life. Then catastrophe struck: two people were murdered and many other lives were laid in ruins.

Nineteen years have now passed since all this happened, and Annika has changed, matured and become a completely different person, with an entirely new outlook on life. Despite the death of her son in a car accident, only 15 years old, she has found the strength to go on living behind bars with her sorrow, pain and bitter memories of a miserable life.

"I can hardly claim to be one of God’s chosen," she admits, "but I’ve never taken anyone’s life. On the other hand, I have felt morally responsible for what happened because, if it hadn’t been for me, neither Joe Torre nor Richard Helbush would have crossed Bob Cox’s path. Which is why I pleaded guilty. But I feel I have now atoned for my crime."

At Chino jail, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, Annika Deasy has acquired a reputation as a model prisoner, respected by fellow prisoners and prison staff alike. She records "audio- books" for the visually handicapped, and helps new prisoners to prepare for a life without drugs.

In Sweden, Annika is well known. Everyone is familiar with the picture of the fair-haired woman with the sad eyes who has sat in prison longer than any other Swede. Her case is unique in Swedish legal history, and there is therefore strong support for a move to have her transferred to Sweden.



PAROLE DENIED FOR DEPUTY’s MURDERER. (Corona)

A Swedish woman serving a possible double-life sentence for the murder of a Lake County sheriff’s deputy was denied parole Tuesday by the California Board of Prison Terms.
Annika Maria Deasy, 47, was returned to the California Institution for Women in Corona, according to Lake County Chief Deputy District Attorney Jon Hopkins, who attended the parole hearing to speak against Deasy’s possible release. Deasy, a one-time San Francisco flower child, will next be eligible for parole in 2005.
Facing execution, she pleaded guilty in 1983 to two first-degree murder charges in connection with the shooting deaths of a retired Stockton restaurateur, Joe Torre, and Lake County sheriff’s deputy Sgt. Richard Hellbush – the last local law enforcement official to be killed in the line of duty.
Deasy and her boyfriend William Eugene Cox met Hellbush shortly after midnight on May 2, 1981, when the car they were in – purchased days earlier with a bad check – broke down on the side of Highway 29 near Manning Flat. Parking in front of them, Hellbush asked the couple for identification. Deasy did not have a driver’s license, but she nonetheless followed her boyfriend’s instructions to look for one in the purse she’d left on the passenger seat. "As Sgt. Hellbush’s attention was focused on her, COX shot him once in the back of the head and three times in the back," said Hopkins. "Then she (Deasy) told COX to drag the body into the ditch so it wouldn’t be visible (from the road), and after he did that and was starting to come back to the car, she told him to get his wallet, too."
Deasy and Cox also took Hellbush’s service revolver. They then fled toward Middletown in his patrol car. COX lost control of the vehicle on Highway 175 after being chased at high speeds by a sheriff’s deputy who had come to investigate Hellbush’s radio silence. A shootout between COX and three law enforcement officials – the sheriff’s deputy, a reserve, and a highway patrolman – followed, during which time Deasy helped Cox reload his weapons, according to Hopkins. When Cox came out of Hellbush’s patrol car shooting, "the reserve deputy dropped him with one shot to the shoulder," Hopkins said. Deasy then disobeyed orders and went to her boyfriend, who’d fallen in a field of grass, and began feeling around for his gun. "She said they’d made a suicide pact and that they weren’t going to be taken alive," said Hopkins. "We were going for broke, we weren’t going back to jail," she said in an interview with detectives.
Because Cox had dropped his weapon near the patrol car, the couple was taken into custody without further incident. COX hanged himself in the Lake County jail while awaiting trial. Deasy, who had been convicted of involuntary manslaughter in San Francisco in 1974, said she was a heroin addict at the time of the murders and that she had been supporting her habit by prostituting herself and passing bad checks.(The story continues about Deasy, no more about COX.)

From: genehamrick@webwizzards.com


- Prison Work..

- Case update.. (30th May 2005..unfortunately I only have it in Swedish. This will be her third parole hearing.)
- Update2..

To help Annika go to..
http://www.annikadeasy.org/help.html