Wilson De La Roi (1918-1946): Double Murderer Who Escaped Gas Chamber 11 Times!

Wilson De La Roi mugshot and Last Words

Plot 54 Grave 356

Wilson Melvin De La Roi’s short, violent life became one of California’s most extraordinary examples of a condemned man repeatedly pulled back from the brink. 

Born in 1918, he entered the state prison system as a teenager after being convicted in 1939 of murdering Randolph “Randy” Wertz, an elderly prospector near Redding. The killing was frenzied—Wertz was struck more than thirty times with a five-cell flashlight—and De La Roi compounded the brutality of the crime by bolting for the courtroom door the moment the jury returned its verdict. In a burst of panic, he sprinted down a stairway and into a hallway that, to his astonishment, led him straight into the county jail. Deputies caught him before he could double back. His youth spared him then; the jury recommended life imprisonment, and at just twenty-one years old he entered San Quentin a lifer.

Within two years he was transferred to Folsom, where long-term inmates and repeat offenders were typically assigned. On July 15, 1942, violence again erupted—this time inside the prison laundry. William Deal, a fellow inmate, staggered out bleeding from stab wounds inflicted with a handmade knife. Witnesses identified De La Roi as the assailant, and investigators recovered a bundle he had discarded moments after the attack. Deal died quickly, and the incident set in motion one of the most protracted and dramatic series of death-row reprieves in California history.

The state sought the death penalty for Deal’s murder, and a Sacramento County jury agreed. Yet from the moment he was sentenced, De La Roi’s path to execution became a revolving door. Between 1942 and 1946 he moved on and off San Quentin’s death row eleven times, each reprieve or stay extending his life by days, weeks or months. Some came from state courts reviewing petitions and writs of habeas corpus; others were temporary reprieves from Governor Earl Warren, who examined the case repeatedly and ultimately concluded that it did not qualify for executive clemency. By mid-1946 even hardened prison officials remarked that De La Roi, still in his twenties, had now “bettered the cat’s proverbial nine lives.”

Much of the legal maneuvering centered on a habeas corpus petition asserting that key witnesses at the Folsom murder trial had committed perjury at the behest of a prison official. The California Supreme Court took the unusual step of appointing a referee to hear testimony. Months of interrogations and hearings followed, with inmates James Allen and Stanley Robinson alternately recanting and reaffirming their trial statements. The court ultimately rejected De La Roi’s claim, finding that the trial testimony was credible and the recantations were inconsistent, fear-driven, and unsupported by the wider evidence. With that ruling, his last legal lifeline snapped.

In October 1946 the twelfth scheduled execution date was set, and this time no court intervened. Governor Warren declined to act, state and federal courts refused new appeals, and the warden began the final preparations. Reporters noted that De La Roi remained oddly buoyant. He spent the evening before his execution in his death-row cell playing popular tunes on his guitar and listening to records with a Salvation Army chaplain. One of the songs he chose was “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal, You,” a darkly comic selection given the events to come.

On the morning of October 25, 1946, he ate a breakfast of ham and eggs and was visited by his two sisters. Witnesses described him as calm and even cheerful. A few minutes before 10:02 a.m., he walked into San Quentin’s gas chamber, grinned, and asked for antacid tablets. “You see,” he quipped, “I think I’m going to get gas on my stomach.” They were among the most memorable final words recorded in the prison’s history.

Eight minutes after the cyanide pellets dropped, Wilson De La Roi was pronounced dead at age twenty-one. His life had spanned two murders, eleven reprieves, years of frantic legal battles, and a final moment of gallows humor that fixed him in the public imagination. He was buried quietly, far from the front-page headlines that had chronicled his long dance with death.

Unmarked grave of Wilson De La Roi (photo Michael Colbruno)

He is buried in an unmarked grave between the Main Mausoleum and cemetery main office. 

Sources: San Mateo Times; Bakersfield Californian; Berkeley Daily Gazette; Idaho Falls Post-Register; Associated Press reporting; California Supreme Court, In re De La Roi (1945); Find a Grave