Thornton Becomes 9th Man the County Has Sent to Death Row : Crime: The other eight convicted killers are appealing their sentences and none has an execution date.

When Mark Scott Thornton was condemned Monday to die, the Thousand Oaks killer became the ninth man sent to Death Row by judges from Ventura County since 1978, when California reinstated capital punishment.

The other murderers are all appealing their sentences. Most of the victims were women and children.

None of the killers has an execution date, and prosecutors do not expect any of them to be put to death before 1997. In fact, authorities say it will likely be the turn of the century before a local judge is asked to sign a death warrant.

The convicts are:

* Christopher Sattiewhite, then 24, kidnaped and murdered Genoveva Gonzales, an Oxnard mother of four. Gonzales’ body was found in a drainage ditch along Arnold Road in Oxnard on Jan. 26, 1992.

The 30-year-old woman had been kidnaped by Sattiewhite and a second man, Frederick L. Jackson.

Jackson raped her twice and then Sattiewhite shot her three times in the head.

Jackson has also been convicted of first-degree murder. A jury is hearing evidence to determine whether he should also be sentenced to death or life in prison without parole.

* Gregory Scott Smith, then 23, was found guilty in April, 1992, of kidnaping, raping and murdering an 8-year-old Northridge boy--Paul Bailly--and setting his body on fire near Simi Valley.

A jury recommended death for the day-care aide from Canoga Park. Smith never contested the charges against him, pleading guilty without a trial. At his penalty hearing, his lawyers contended that Smith had the mind of a child and called the defendant a “defective human being” who should not be executed.

Prosecutors described Smith as a vindictive predator who took sexual pleasure in killing Paul. They contend he purposely put extra gasoline on the boy’s face and groin to obliterate those parts of his body.

* Larry David Davis, then 32, was sentenced in 1990 to die after being convicted of raping and murdering a local beauty queen.

Dawn Michelle Holman, 20, had placed third in a Miss Ventura County pageant prior to her death. Davis kidnaped her from outside a grocery store on Channel Islands Boulevard at Victoria Avenue at 3 a.m. on Aug. 28, 1988.

Investigators later determined that, as Davis drove, Holman tried to escape from the moving vehicle. She apparently lacerated one of her lungs and cracked several of her ribs during her attempted escape.

She ran 160 feet onto the San Buenaventura Golf Course, where Davis caught her. She was found half-naked and strangled.

* Tracy Cain, then 29, was arrested in 1986 for fatally bludgeoning his next-door neighbors, William and Modena Galloway. Cain ran out of money while having a cocaine party one night and broke into the victim’s house, where 63-year-old William Galloway was known to keep large sums of cash.

Cain, a physically powerful man, kicked in the door leading into the couple’s house, grabbed a rocking chair and fatally beat William Galloway, who had gotten out of bed to search for the source of noises that had awakened him.

Cain then bludgeoned Modena Galloway, 55, with the same chair and left the couple’s house with their money.

A jury in July, 1988, voted to send him to Death Row--a recommendation that was upheld by a judge. The state Supreme Court last week rejected an appeal by Cain, but he still has federal appeals.

* Curtis Fauber, then 31, was sentenced to death in May, 1988, in a murder that revolved around drugs and money.

Fauber and a friend, Brian Buckley, robbed Tom Urell, 52, a business executive who had been selling them drugs, according to court testimony.

The assailants broke into the victim’s Oxnard Shores home, found Urell asleep in bed and tied him up with duct tape. Using an ax he had found while ransacking the home, Fauber hit Urell in the back of the head with the blunt end of the weapon one or two times, prosecutors said.

Fauber received the death penalty, while Buckley pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

* Theodore Francis Frank, then 57, was given the death penalty for what has been described as one of the most horrific crimes in Ventura County history: the murder of 2 1/2-year-old Amy Sue Seitz in 1978.

The girl was kidnaped from the front yard of her baby-sitter’s house in Camarillo, bound hand and foot, force to drink beer and then raped, tortured and mutilated with locking pliers before being strangled.

Her body was dumped in a drainage ditch in Topanga Canyon.

Frank was arrested several months later, after molesting an 8-year-old girl in Panorama City. He admitted to assaulting 100 to 150 children of various ages over a 20-year period. He was sentenced to death in Orange County, where his penalty trial had to be moved because of heavy publicity.

* Robert Cruz McClain, then 52, was sentenced to death in 1981 for raping and fatally shooting a young hitchhiker, then dumping her body in a trash can at a park near Santa Paula.

McClain, fresh out of prison for sexually assaulting two 11-year-old girls, was with his nephew when they raped and fatally shot 20-year-old Joni Donnell Kelley.

The men, along with a third man who testified against them, then drove to Solano County, where McClain and nephew Theodore Willis, then 18, kidnaped and killed a 31-year-old woman. They raped and strangled her and slit her throat.

Willis received life in prison. McClain, who as a teen-ager was diagnosed as a “sexual psychopath,” still maintains his innocence.

* Alejandro Gilbert Ruiz, then 54, was the first person in Ventura County to receive the death sentence after it was reinstated in California in 1978.

He was convicted of murdering his third wife and later killing his fifth wife and her teen-age son.

Ruiz married Tanya Staats in 1972. Staats was developmentally disabled from a childhood car accident. Ruiz would leave her for weeks at a time and, when he returned, the two would get into fights, according to testimony.

Staats disappeared in 1974, and Ruiz told police that his wife had left him and that he did not know where she could be found. Three years later, Ruiz’s fifth wife and her 14-year-old son were found dead.

The bodies of Pauline Wachs and her son, Tony Mitchell, were found in a shallow grave in the back yard of their home in Piru, both shot through the backs of their heads.

Also in the grave was a small figurine, which investigators described as a voodoo doll, with a pin stuck through it.

Ruiz was convicted of first-degree murder in 1980 for the deaths of Wachs and her son. He was also convicted of second-degree murder in the case of Staats, even though her body was never found. Jurors said there were too many similarities in the two cases, authorities said.