A Stockton man who hired a friend to murder his wife and her unborn child has died in prison, authorities said.
Jerry Bunyard, sentenced to death row for ordering the shotgun murder of his pregnant wife, Elaine Bunyard, and her full-term, healthy fetus, had been in prison since February 1981 after the San Joaquin County crime.
While serving a condemned sentence at California State Prison in Sacramento, he died Friday at an outside medical facility, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in a release Monday. A cause of death for the 76-year-old was not disclosed.
Bunyard was convicted in the Nov. 1, 1979, murder of his wife, who was due to deliver a baby girl in the coming days. Elaine Bunyard’s blood-soaked body was discovered by her 7-year-old daughter in the family home’s garage later that day. She had died from a shotgun blast to the head.
Authorities said Bunyard hired a childhood friend, Earlin Popham, to carry out the slaying. According to documents from the California Supreme Court in a 1988 appeal of the case, Popham had been living with the Bunyard family for a few weeks to work a construction job.
Popham, who pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, according to reporting by the Los Angeles Times, testified against Bunyard. He said Bunyard offered various reasons for wanting his wife dead. One was that the child she was carrying wasn’t his. Another was that he wanted to marry his girlfriend, who was from a wealthy family, yet he feared his wife would get everything he owned in a divorce. Yet another was that he had offered his wife $50,000 for a divorce and she refused.
Bunyard offer to pay Popham $1,000 within a week of killing his wife, court records show. He promised additional money when an insurance policy paid off. Bunyard also vowed to make Popham the caretaker of his ranch when he, his father and girlfriend all moved to Arkansas.
Sympathetic to Bunyard’s tales of marital unhappiness and in need of money, Popham agreed to the slaying. He then devised a plan to make the shooting look like a suicide.
On the morning of Nov. 1, Popham waited until Elaine Bunyard was washing dishes. Court records show he struck her in the head from behind with frying pans to knock her out. He then dragged her to the garage, where he propped her in a chair, stuck the barrel of the shotgun under her chin and pulled the trigger.
But he realized there was too much evidence for the death to look like it had been self-inflicted. There was a trail of blood from the kitchen, two broken pans and signs of a struggle. To try to make the attack look like a robbery, Popham knocked over furniture and stole $5 out of her purse.
Popham then drove to the construction site where Jerry Bunyard was working. He told him, “It was done,” and said to meet him at an A&W root beer stand at noon. There, Popham warned Bunyard, “It ain’t going to look like a suicide,” court documents note.
When Popham said he needed money, Bunyard took $175 out of a bank account and gave him $125.
Bunyard then went to the Tracton Bar and drank heavily. He went to his girlfriend’s house about 6:40 p.m. and was told by his girlfriend and his mother that his wife had been found dead.
Additional evidence led a jury to convict Bunyard of the multiple murders. Another friend, Randy Johnson, called authorities the day after the shooting to say that Bunyard had asked him “five to 10 times” to kill his wife and older daughter. Bunyard kept raising the fee — $1,000 at first, then $5,000, $10,000 and eventually $20,000. Johnson said he never told Elaine Bunyard about the threat, but said he had mentioned it to police and two of his own relatives before the slaying.
In 1988, the state Supreme Court not only upheld Jerry Bunyard’s death penalty conviction in the slaying of his wife, it ruled for the first time that murdering a fetus can also result in capital punishment. At the time, the death penalty statute did not specifically mention the murder of a fetus, but the court said, “It is clear that the multiple murder special circumstance is applicable to the killing by a single act of a pregnant woman and her viable fetus.”
Bunyard was the longest sitting death row inmate from San Joaquin County. With his death, there are still 567 condemned inmates in the California prison system, according to records from the CDCR.