Davis murderer Daniel Marsh appeals 2014 conviction, hoping age leads to early release
Daniel William Marsh is appealing his murder conviction from prison eight years after he slaughtered a senior Davis couple in their bedroom. The one-time boy hero turned teenage murderer is banking on recent legislation to set him free in a move that has again horrified his victims’ families.
“Eight years after my grandparents were brutally murdered by a certified psychopath in one of the most violent crimes California has ever seen, my family is once again back in court fighting for justice,” Sarah Rice, granddaughter of Claudia Maupin and Oliver Northup, wrote in a lengthy statement Wednesday to The Sacramento Bee. “The murderer committed atrocious, violent acts on not one, but two people, bragged about it to his friends and then fully confessed to the police because of what he did to my grandparents.
“Now, he has the opportunity to walk free. When will this madness end?”
Marsh is serving a 52-years-to-life sentence in a San Diego-area state prison for the gruesome 2013 slayings of Davis attorney and musician Northup, 87, and Maupin, 76.
Marsh, 24, is looking to Senate Bill 1391, the 2019 law that bars 14- and 15-year-olds accused of violent crimes from being tried as adults. Marsh, 15 when he killed the Davis pair in April 2013, is asking state appeals judges to retroactively reconsider the case. An appellate hearing is set for Aug. 18 in Sacramento.
The legal question: Was Marsh’s murder case final when SB 1391 was passed?
How bill could lead to early release
If the appellate panel rules in Marsh’s favor, he could be released from prison in May 2022 on his 25th birthday, the sentence Marsh would have received had he been tried as a juvenile for the killings.
The law was upheld by the state Supreme Court earlier this year in the case of a 15-year-old charged with two murders in Ventura County. Criminal justice advocates at the time hailed the state high court’s decision as a major step in how the state treats its juvenile offenders.
But Rice and her mother, Victoria Hurd, have been blistering in their opposition to SB 1391 and Hurd, in particular, has emerged as a voice for crime victims in the years following the murders. Rice, meantime, has launched a social media campaign that calls on lawmakers to “scrap 1391.” The objective, she said, to recognize the friends, families and communities who have been affected by the legislation.
“We listened to him confess. He’s 24. He’s not a little boy,” Rice said Wednesday. “We’re trying to use as much social media as we can to cause some sort of uproar — to keep this awful person locked up.”
In a four-minute video recorded Sunday and viewed by The Bee, a weary Hurd, speaking directly into the camera, remarked on Marsh’s plans with disgust, recounting the horrors Marsh inflicted on mother Maupin and Northup.
Marsh stabbed both Maupin and Northup more than 60 times, Hurd said. He then eviscerated them and stashed items from their bedroom in their wounds. Only four years earlier, the one-time junior police cadet was hailed as a hero by the local Red Cross in Davis for saving his father’s life after the elder Marsh suffered a heart attack behind the wheel of the family car.
Hurd said that while in prison, Marsh had crime scene images of the wounds he inflicted tattooed onto his torso.
“Now, it’s 2021, and this murderer has appealed and is now asking to be retroactively considered for a new California law: SB 1391,” Hurd said on the video.
“He will be out on the streets of Davis, unsupervised, without parole, with a completely expunged record,” Hurd said on the video. “He will have served eight years.”
Family and lawyers say ‘he’s going to kill again’ if released
Yolo County prosecutors are equally alarmed.
Amanda Zambor, one of the deputy prosecutors who sent Marsh away in 2014, will fight the appeal at the August hearing.
She says the 2019 law fails to consider the lasting effects on crime victims or the danger people like Marsh present when they are released from custody.
Zambor says she is certain that Marsh, if freed, will kill again.
“Our concerns are two-fold,” Zambor told The Bee on Thursday. “We don’t think 1391 contemplated how this has affected victims down the road. It didn’t contemplate how this affects victims at all.”
“He’s going to kill again,” if released, Zambor continued. “He could seal his record. His aspirations are to be a serial killer. He’s smart. He plans ahead. He’s extremely dangerous. Where’s he going to kill next? What neighborhood is he going to end up in? It’s a scary notion to think he could walk among the public again undetected.”
Marsh was 15 and days away from his 16th birthday when he slipped away from his Davis home in the late hours of April 14, 2013. He was clad in black, his sneakers taped to cover tell-tale shoe prints, carrying a hunting knife and prowling his neighborhood when he came upon Northup and Maupin’s condominium. He sliced open a screen and eventually made his way into the home’s bedroom, where he brutally set upon the sleeping couple.
Marsh later bragged to friends about committing the murders and plotted others in Davis that did not come to pass before tips from friends to Davis police led to his arrest in May 2013.
Police interviews and a punishing five-week murder trial in Yolo Superior Court in 2014 detailed the depravity of the attacks and Marsh’s deep-seated demons — dreams and Internet images saturated with scenes of murder and gore that fed intensifying fantasies of carrying out his own grisly killings.
Marsh was convicted as an adult in 2014 and sentenced to 52 years to life in prison, with the possibility of parole in 25 years.
But four years later, a state appellate court sent Marsh’s case back to Yolo County juvenile court to determine whether Marsh should be retroactively tried as a juvenile or whether the case stay in adult criminal court.
The hearing was mandated under the state’s Proposition 57, which requires judges to determine whether juveniles may be prosecuted as adults.
The judge in October 2018 ultimately upheld Marsh’s sentence.
This story was originally published July 16, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Davis murderer Daniel Marsh appeals 2014 conviction, hoping age leads to early release."
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