Coulterville woman seeks a pardon for 1975 murder

Editor’s Note: This story describes incidents of domestic violence and animal cruelty that could be triggering for some people.

When Lorrie Sue McClary was released from prison 18 years ago, she was driven straight to her parents home outside Coulterville on a hillside with a stunning view above Lake McClure.

The lake was so close, she thought. She could hardly wait to go swimming.

But it was much farther than it looked and there was no path. Like her freedom, it would prove a deceptively long journey.

The first person to hug her after she got out of the car that day, even before her parents, was Don Mills of Mariposa.

Mills, now deceased, was the son of the 79-year-old San Bernardino woman that McClary had been convicted of murdering in 1975.

But the victim’s son always knew better.

He understood McClary was a victim too: A scared 16-year-old runaway who took the fall for a violent 23-year-old killer boyfriend.

Fifty years later, McClary hopes society is ready to see it that way too.

Petition of rehabilitation

McClary is now 67 years old.

She spent 30 years, nearly half her life, in prison for a murder that even the courts acknowledge she did not commit .

She has spent the nearly two decades since her release trying to convince others of her innocence.

Today, April 2, she will appear in Mariposa County Superior Court seeking what’s known as a Certificate of Rehabilitation.

If granted, the certificate would be forwarded to Gov. Gavin Newsom for his signature and to receive a pardon.

In a court brief filed earlier this month, Mariposa County District Attorney Walter Wall writes that the DA’s office conducted its own investigation and has no objection.

That investigation, the DA wrote, found McClary has “lived an honest and upright life” and has “exhibited good moral character.”

A governor’s pardon would allow McClary to apply for compensation to the California Victims Compensation Board, calculated at the rate of $140 per day for an erroneous incarceration, it could equal $1,507,450.

She’s not holding her breath.

Wanting to be loved

She now lives next door to her father just outside Coulterville, where they have chickens and an arthritic rescue dog.

McClary’s got two bad knees herself, cataracts and a left arm that doesn’t work.

For awhile, she worked at the Visitors Center in Coulterville.

She gets by on Social Security and disability — barely.

She has been training to be a medical coder, but can’t get hired with her criminal record.

On a recent unseasonably warm March day, McClary was sitting in a La-Z-Boy as she recalled events methodically and with precision, like the paralegal she became while incarcerated.

There are moments over the next couple of hours, however, when the emotions overtake her. Still.

“I was unpredictable, immature, lonely and severely overweight,” said McClary, describing the 16-year-old version of herself.

“Still am.”

“I just wanted to be loved,” she said quietly.

The murder of Anna Mills

In 1975, shortly after running away from home at the age of 16, she met Fred “Sonny” Eugene Wilson. He was 23 and already had a violent rap sheet.

“He started paying attention to me and it was so much attention that I thought it was love,” McClary said.

They were homeless and hitchhiking in San Bernardino County, when Anna G. Mills, 79, pulled up along the side of the road and asked them if they needed help.

She offered housing in a cabin on her property in exchange for gardening and chores around her home.

“She was the sweetest person you’d ever want to meet,” McClary said wistfully.

On Aug. 29, 1975, two weeks after arriving, Wilson got into an argument with Mills who criticized the quality of his yard work and his laziness.

McClary was gardening outside when she walked in and found Wilson strangling Mills in the kitchen.

McCLary tried to pull Wilson off Mills when he struck her with a frying pan and knocked her unconscious.

When she woke, Mills was dead and McClary was tied to a chair.

Wilson threatened to kill her family if she ever betrayed him.

Then, as if to prove the point. Wilson hogtied one of Mills’ cats to the kitchen table and skinned it alive.

McClary breaks down sobbing when recalling this. Fifty years later, she still can’t be around cats or hear them cry.

Three days later, she helped Wilson bring Mills body to her car, which they drove down a dead-end road and scattered the belongings of Mills’ purse to make it look like a robbery.

“I was not even allowed to go to the bathroom without him,” McClary said.

Wilson and McClary returned to Mills’ house and they began stealing items they could fence. Wilson forced McClary to forge checks with Morris’s name on it.

“I’m 16 years old, I already saw him kill someone. If I didn’t follow instructions, more people were going to die,” she recalled.

The interrogation

Wilson and McClary were caught a month later, Sept. 30, 1976.

They were taken to the San Mateo County Jail where two San Bernardino County detectives interrogated McClary in a room next to Wilson, who was also being questioned.

During a nearly two hour interrogation, McClary asked to speak to an attorney on four separate occasions.

But the detectives ignored her and continued to talk and asked her questions.

The detectives called her a liar and threatened her with the death penalty.

“We have enough information to fully prosecute you for murder,” the detective told her.

Later that afternoon, police executed a search warrant at Mills home and brought McClary and Wilson to the crime scene together in the same squad car.

In the back of the squad car, Wilson’s head was resting against McClarys. To the detectives they may have looked like star-crossed lovers, a felonious Romeo and Juliet.

But something more sinister was going on.

Wilson whispered in McClary’s ear and told her because she was a juvenile, nothing would happen to her if she admitted to the murder.

And if she didn’t, he would kill her entire family, describing what he would do in gruesome detail.

She saw what he did to the cat.

When detectives arrived with their two suspects at Mills’ home for the search warrant, McClary told the detectives she “wished to tell the truth.”

In a second interview, she told detectives the version Sonny Wilson gave her. The version detectives apparently wanted to hear too.

McClary said she walked into the kitchen and saw Mills attacking Wilson with a knife, so she wrapped a rope around Mills’ neck to pull her off.

In hindsight, the story sounds implausible: Elderly lady attacks man with knife; 16 year old girl strangles lady to protect boyfriend.

McClary even agreed to film a reenactment at the crime scene.

A conviction

A juvenile court quickly determined that even though McClary was 16 years old, she had an intelligence and sophistication that made her unfit for the juvenile justice system.

In February 1976 she was put on trial as an adult in San Bernardino County Superior Court for first-degree murder.

Before reaching its verdict, the jury asked to see the filmed reenactment one more time.

She was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

In December 1977, the California Supreme Court unanimously overturned the conviction because McClary’s Miranda rights were violated in the first interrogation.

The court ruled the second interrogation and the filmed reenactment at the crime scene were likely coerced.

In a second trial in April 1978, Wilson finally took responsibility for the murder, testifying that McClary had nothing to do with it.

Wilson admitted he pressured McClary into stealing items from Mills home after the killing and writing forged checks from her bank account.

Wilson was offered a plea agreement for second degree murder, even though he confessed to strangling Mills.

McClary was convicted of felony murder during the course of a robbery, known as PC 189.

A conviction meant McClary was agreeing that she was either the killer or aided and abetted in the murder during the commission of a robbery. A distinction McClary said she didn’t understand at the time.

Despite Wilson’s confession, McClary was once again sentenced to life in prison.

Life in prison

McClary served most of her 30 years at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla.

“Life as a convict is to walk the fine line,” she said.

“You can be a source for the cops, or walk the fine line down the middle.”

The threats didn’t always come from the other inmates.

A corrections officer at the prison was convicted last year of sexually assaulting at least 22 female inmates.

McClary alludes to dark events she knows about, but will never speak of.

Instead, while in prison, McClary became an advocate for incarcerated women who are the victims of domestic violence.

In the 1970s, when she was convicted, only a handful of cases where women were accused of murder had considered evidence of past abuse.

At McClary’s two trials, her toxic and violent relationship with Wilson was only brought up in passing.

Even the term, battered women’s syndrome, also known as intimate partner violence, was not formally recognized until 1979.

In the 1980s, McClary was befriended by the late Ellen Barry, co-founder of the National Network for Women in Prison and California Coalition for Women Prisoners.

“Without the courage of women like Ms. McClary, and the hard work that she and other battered women in California’s prisons have done over the last 45 years, we would not have made the significant progress that we made in educating the community about battered women’s syndrome aka intimate partner violence,” Barry wrote.

In 1998, the California Parole Board unanimously approved her release, based on supportive letters from the prison warden and several psychiatrists.

But at the last minute, Gov. Pete Wilson overturned the decision. At the time, the governor’s spokesperson said “the heinousness of the crime, McClary’s lack of remorse and her manipulativeness,” were factors in the decision.

“We make no apologies,” the spokesperson said.

The former San Bernardino District Attorney who prosecuted the case in 1975, Dennis Kottmeir, also opposed her release.

Kottmeir believed McClary was still a threat to society because she would not confess to the killing.

“I tried a lot of murder cases,” Kottmeir told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1997. “She always impressed me as someone who should have gotten the death penalty.”

The aftermath

Looking back, McClary believes the politicians and prosecutors were motivated by a desire to look tough on crime, even if it meant pinning a grisly murder on a 16-year-old girl.

In 1975, California was obsessed with violent crime: Patty Hearst was captured after being kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Golden State Killer was active in Visalia, Robert Harris had murdered two boys in San Diego and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford in Sacramento.

Thirty years later, in 2005, the California Board of Parole approved McClary’s release — for a second time. She was discharged from parole in 2008 and has been living in Coulterville ever since.

In 2025, a San Bernardino County Judge vacated her second murder conviction from 1978, in part because it didn’t meet the statutory definition of the crime. McClary wasn’t the killer, and only engaged in robbery and check forgery after the killing.

The judge designated her an accessory after the fact. McClary was sentenced to two years time already served.

Wilson, the actual killer, did only six years in prison for second-degree murder and was paroled to Helena, Mont.

Then, he vanished. A man was caught a few years later using Wilson’s Social Security number. McClary assumes Wilson’s temper got him into trouble. She is certain he’s dead.

“I never had a relationship after what he put me through. I’ve never had kids. I’ll be alone for the rest of my life. That makes me angry,” McClary said.

But she still has her name and a chance to make it good again with a pardon. A process that begins today with a Certificate of Rehabilitation.

As McClary says goodbye to a reporter, she pauses outside her home, staring off in the distance at Lake McClure, down a steep and treacherous embankment marked with burn scars.

So close — and so far.