Cooper Pressed on His Activities After Escaping Prison

SAN DIEGO —  Murder defendant Kevin Cooper said Friday that he was unable to remember exactly what he did while hiding in a vacant Chino Hills house, and told a prosecutor he only recalled what he did not do.

“And what didn’t you do?” San Bernardino County Dist. Atty. Dennis Kottmeier asked.

“I didn’t kill the Ryen family. I did not attempt to kill Christopher Hughes. I did not attempt to kill Joshua Ryen,” Cooper said.

The hacked and stabbed bodies of Doug and Peg Ryen, both 41; their daughter, Jessica, 10, and Christopher Hughes, 11, were found June 5, 1983, in the Ryens’ Chino Hills home. Joshua Ryen, 8, at the time of the attack, survived a slashed throat.

In his second day of cross-examination, Kottmeier questioned Cooper extensively on the two days he claims to have spent in a vacant house near the Ryen residence after escaping from the nearby California Institution for Men on June 2, 1983.

“My problem right now is you’re trying to make me go, detail by detail, what I did. I don’t remember, detail by detail, everything I did. Right now, all I can remember is what I didn’t do,” Cooper said after Kottmeier pressed him to remember the contents of a sandwich he made his first night in the house.

Kottmeier accused Cooper of making himself at home in the residence as he tried to show that Cooper was armed and ready to kill anyone he encountered there.

He pointed out that Cooper at one time had to interrupt a phone call to retrieve his cigarettes from another room, and Kottmeier challenged Cooper on his selection of a pair of oversized sweat pants from a closet.

“You’re not concerned about pants that would fall down around your ankles and leave you running without any clothes on?” Kottmeier asked.

“That’s not necessarily true about them falling down around my ankles,” Cooper said, explaining that he rolled the waist up to keep them on.

Cooper denied arming himself and said he was on his guard, but relaxed.

He recalled two phone calls to a friend in Los Angeles, Yolanda Jackson, and denied becoming angry when she refused to help him and urged him to return to prison.

If convicted, Cooper, 26, could be sentenced to die in the gas chamber. He was arrested July 30, 1983, in Santa Barbara.