East Bay serial killer, rapist on death row dies of unknown cause
Anthony McKnight, a convicted serial killer and rapist who murdered five women, was found dead in his prison cell at San Quentin.
SAN QUENTIN — A convicted serial killer and rapist who murdered five women in the 1980s in the East Bay, has died in prison of unknown causes, the state Department of Corrections announced Friday.
Anthony McKnight, 65, was found unresponsive in his prison cell at San Quentin State Prison around 9:30 p.m. Thursday. He was pronounced dead at 10:09 p.m. He had been on Death Row since his sentencing in November 2008.
McKnight was linked by DNA to the 1985 murders of five women in Alameda County: Betty Stuart, 22; Diane Stone, 17; Talita Dixon, 13; Monique Davis, 18; and Beverly Bryant, 24.
McKnight was already in prison when investigators linked him to the five murders: He had been serving a 63-year sentence since August 1987 for convictions of attempted first-degree murder, rape, assault with a deadly weapon, oral copulation and kidnapping to commit a sex offense, also committed in Alameda County.
McKnight was enlisted in the Navy at the time of the crimes, assigned to the Alameda Naval Air Station, but living in Oakland.
In a 1987 story in the Oakland Tribune, prosecutor Ken Burr wrote in a letter to the probation department that McKnight was a serial rapist of sex workers.
“And if he had his way the six women who testified against him would never have been found alive,” Burr said at the time.
According to prior media accounts, McKnight openly smiled and laughed when then-Alameda County Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Horner sentenced him to death in 2008.
According to media archives, the prosecution claimed that McKnight’s rampage began in October 1985, when he kidnapped a woman, slashed her throat, stabbed her in the chest, raped her and then left her for dead in a truck in West Oakland.
Prosecutors said at the time that McKnight also raped and beat another woman in October 1985 at a construction site using a lug wrench. She escaped by hiding in a drainage ditch.
By December, he had stabbed another two women, one who was stabbed 10 times, the other who was slashed across her face. Another woman was raped and choked in January 1986 in Emeryville, and left battered and bloodied in an industrial area.
By 1986, the body of Bryant was found brutally beaten and raped in the courtyard of Howard Elementary School in Oakland. It was then that police investigators from four different agencies realized they were looking for a serial killer.
By the time the woman’s body was found in that four-month span, another four other women had been found dead in similar circumstances, including the body of 13-year-old Talita.
Detectives were able to link McKnight to the murders in 1999 thanks to his DNA profile matching evidence at one of the crime scenes. He was the main suspect in the murders in the 1980s, but investigators had a hard time connecting him to the crimes until DNA technology became available.
His cause of death is pending the results of an autopsy.