When Nesmith sprang off the bed, he must have grappled with the gunman, causing the revolver – which broke down from the front – to pop open, spilling the bullets, The crime scene reveals that the bullets from O’Conner’s were splayed all over the place. Wait, wait, wait! What do you mean, you can’t remember? How can that be? What just happened here? I came to with the faculty of being able to remember with my gun in my hand.”Īnd somehow, some way O’Conner, the black-belt bully with a revolver in his hand, is nowhere to be seen.
My mind – my mind is a complete blank from the time I did jump up. “What did you do when you jumped off the bed?”Ī. So, what happened? What happened? How did he avoid getting shot again? “And so, I did spring up off the bed,” Nesmith testified. This 18-year-old killing machine is taking a bead on your head, and you think you’re going to just bounce off that bed, make your way to a closet, find an antique gun you haven’t used for years, and defend yourself? “And so I sprang off the bed and I thought I’ll try to get my gun in the hall closet … If I can just get to that gun, maybe I’ll have a chance.” Yes, I think to myself, you have to put up some sort of a fight. Yes, I nudge the only other observer in the courtroom gallery, reporter Thom Barley of the Orange Coast Daily Pilot. “I thought I’ve got to get up and put up some kind of a fight if I want to live or he’ll just keep shooting.” I’m sitting there in this mostly vacant 7th floor courtroom listening to this testimony, and I’m thinking I must be listening to a dead man. “I was certain that I heard a second shot,” Nesmith testified. “This must have been just like a split second nearly.”ĭuring Nesmith’s quick assessment of his condition, however, O’Conner was also doing some things. And I sort of tensed my shoulder muscles and I felt I had strength left in my body yet. “But anyway, I wondered if I was per chance paralyzed. My ears were ringing … I was bleeding profusely, kind of strangling in my throat at the time.
“Well, I just simply looked ahead and I realized I could see and that I could hear. 12, 1975 before the Honorable Judge Byron K.
The transcript of his one-hour testimony on Nov. Today, more than three decades later, I still have trouble believing it. Nesmith, somehow survived a similar gunshot wound to the head a few miles away and just two weeks later.Īnd now he is on the witness stand to tell his story of how he escaped becoming a murder victim. 7, 1975.īut his second victim, Rolland E. O’Conner’s first victim, Margaret Baker Lissy, a 56-year-old housewife, was killed by a single gunshot wound to the head during a bold daytime robbery at her Anaheim Hills home on Jan. O’Conner pleaded not guilty, even though he led Anaheim detectives on a videotaped re-enactment of his crimes, and also not guilty by reason of insanity. It was also significant because the defendant was 18-year-old Glenn O’Conner, one of the youngest persons in the country ever to face the severest penalty allowed by law, and without a doubt the youngest in Orange County history.
#Shoot point blank cypress trial#
The trial was of headline-making caliber, mainly because it was the first death penalty trial in Orange County since California voters reinstated capital punishment after it was banned by the U.S. “What I physically did was simply lie there, I guess for a split second, wondering – am I a dead man or am I alive? And I recall thinking to myself, that I still had the capability of vision. “I really didn’t – didn’t do a lot of fast thinking,” Nesmith testifies. I have thought about this often since I first heard Nesmith’s amazing testimony in 1975. One of his many problems at that moment was that his deadly assailant was still there – an 18-year-old, self-proclaimed killing machine with training in martial arts who was getting ready to shoot again. And he had just been shot at near point-blank range in the temple. He was a slightly-built, short and tired 65-year-old retiree. One of his eyes was permanently blinded, and his vocal chords were severely damaged, causing his whispery delivery.
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