REMEMBERING THE VICTIMS OF DARRELL KEITH RICH (EXECUTED IN CALIFORNIA ON MARCH 15, 2000)

On this date, March 15, 2000, Darrell Keith Rich A.K.A Young Elk was executed by lethal injection in California. He was the eighth person put to death by that State since 1976. To learn more about this serial killer, please go to this blog. Hear from the victims’ families.

QUOTE 1: "I'm just glad it has come to this and that it's finally going to be over," the girl's mother, Sharon Tidwell, said. Annette's stepfather David Tidwell, said, "We're wasting time -- just kill him. He better pray there's not a life after death -- if there is, he better hide."

QUOTE 2: But the meek fashion in which he met his death had little effect on the witnesses, most of whom never took their eyes from him during the procedure. David Tidwell, stepfather of 11-year-old Annette Selix, whom Rich raped and then threw off a 105-foot bridge, sat stone-faced in one of the dozen chairs arranged in a semi-circle around the octagonal chamber. As he watched through the thick glass panels as Rich died, he held tightly onto the hand of the woman sitting next to him, a rape victim who had survived an attack by Rich and wanted to see him die for his crimes. "I can finally live in peace," the woman said later in a statement read by Nathan Barankin, spokesman for state Attorney General Bill Lockyer. "He won't be there to haunt me anymore."

QUOTE 3: Scott, who witnessed the lethal-injection execution of Darrell Rich in March 2000 as the Shasta County district attorney, remembers the event with almost clinical precision.

"I do not want to minimize or downplay the fact that the man's life was taken that night," Scott said of the so-called "Hilltop Rapist," who killed four young women in a 1978 crime spree.

"But what I observed that evening could not in any way be described as cruel or unusual punishment. It was a very calm process in which he appeared to go to sleep. And that was it."

AUTHOR: Family members of Darrell Keith Rich’s victims - Darrell Keith Rich was executed by lethal injection in California on March 15, 2000.