Dad’s Legacy a Death Sentence for Life

People will clamor for Michael Dally’s blood this week, but Roland Baldonado, a soft-spoken father of five in Oxnard, won’t be among them.

Baldonado has no sympathy for Dally, the impossibly sleazy killer of an impressively blameless wife.

But Michael and Sherri Dally had two young sons, and only someone with Baldonado’s past can know the hell they may be about to enter.

“You can change your name, you can move away, but inside you never stop being who you are or feeling the things you feel,” he says. “These two boys will live together, they’ll cry together, they’ll cry for their mom, they’ll cry for their dad, they’ll cry for the rest of their lives.

“I cry for them and I’ve never met them. I don’t know them--and yet I do.”

Across the kitchen table, Baldonado wipes his eyes with a wadded-up napkin. It’s not easy for him to talk about this. When he was 4, his father was put to death in the gas chamber at San Quentin. It was an act widely applauded in Ventura County; Augustine Baldonado had been one of two hit men hired in the infamous “Ma” Duncan murder case, a past generation’s Trial of the Decade.

With the current Trial of the Decade winding to its own possibly fatal termination, Baldonado is pained by every headline.

“It’s almost like having a cancer you can’t get rid of,” he says. “It presents itself everywhere.”

*

Baldonado met his father just once, and then only for a few minutes. That was on death row. He was 3 and doesn’t much remember it.

Besides that, all he knows of Augustine Baldonado is secondhand.

By the time he was 25, Augustine was hooked on drugs. He had grown up quiet and affable, a baseball player on local teams in Camarillo. Then things happened. A baby son died. Augustine left the family. When he was washing dishes in Santa Barbara and weighing his limited prospects, he was asked to help kidnap and kill one Olga Duncan, daughter-in-law of the strange, severe “Ma” Duncan. Shocking those who knew him as a boy, he did.

“Maybe I wouldn’t have even liked him,” says Baldonado. “But I was never afforded the chance to decide.”

As Baldonado grew up, his mother didn’t talk about Augustine: Your father died. Far away.

The truth came out when Baldonado was about 12. On a shopping trip in the station wagon, he and his brothers kept after her. Finally she cracked.

Suddenly young Roland realized why his teachers seemed to stare at him strangely. He knew why he always felt a little uncomfortable in school. He had sensed the emptiness inside but now could gaze at its terrifying depth.

After graduating from Hueneme High School, he would worry with every job application. These people will know, he thought. They will know who I am.

After he married at 18, he would worry with each of his kids’ questions. What was your father like? Why did they have to kill him? Why can’t people leave it alone?

And he would ask himself: Why do my kids have to go through this, too? And why are we doomed to relive this ancient act when someone comes up with a TV movie about it, or a newspaper is looking for an anniversary story, or someone at City Hall decides to sponsor a historic “Ma” Duncan tour?

At 40, he has never had the answers.

*

If Baldonado took the time from his auto-repair business to sit on the Dally jury, he would not be wringing his hands over the death-penalty hearing that starts Monday.

“Taking lives is wrong,” he says. “Do we want to be as brutal as the people we’re punishing?”

This doesn’t mean Baldonado would spring open the penitentiary doors. But a lifetime in prison is punishment enough, he says--and it doesn’t make victims of the children.

But what about an eye for an eye? I ask.

On this quiet evening, it’s his wife and kids who have gone to Bible class but Baldonado who is quick to toss Scripture back: “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.”

Besides, he asks, what if the jury is wrong--as any jury can be. What if Dally’s old girlfriend, Diana Haun, really did plot the crime and commit it herself, as Dally’s lawyers have insisted?

“What if on her deathbed, she says, ‘I did it all alone! I just said he did it to spite him.’

“Maybe the jurors who sentence Dally to death could say they made the right decision with what they knew at the time. Maybe they’ll say, ‘I can live with that.’ But how about his boys? Can they live with that, too?”

Antiques--a spinning wheel, a restored piano, old farming tools--dot the Baldonados’ immaculate Oxnard home. Family pictures hang on the walls. But a portrait of Augustine taken by a San Francisco newspaper photographer resides in a folder on the desk.

“This means so much to me,” his son says.

The young man, he was 28 at the time, has a tired cast around his eyes. The photo is marked Aug. 7, 1962.

The next day, Augustine was led into the gas chamber. Observers watched through a glass partition.

His last words were silent, directed at his brother as the cyanide vapors spread: “Go see my kids.”