A Sense of Closure : The Mother of One Teen-Ager Slain by Harris Says Her Long Ordeal Will Not End Until the Killer Is Executed

SAN DIEGO — Sharron Mankins has this recurring vision of the day Robert Alton Harris took the life of her son, Michael Baker.

“I can just see these terrified boys,” she said.

It is July 5, 1978. Harris abducts Michael Baker and his best friend, John Mayeski, both 16, from a hamburger stand. He needs their car for a bank robbery. He forces them into the car and drives them a few miles away to a remote wash near a reservoir.

“I wasn’t there, of course, but I see this with such clarity,” she said in a strong voice. “Michael, after seeing John shot first, running, pleading. I see Michael running and pleading for his life. He’s begging for his life. And Harris says: ‘Shut up. Die like a man.’ And he shoots him. Michael drops, writhing in pain. And he dies.”

In her first extensive interview since her teen-age son was killed more than 13 years ago, Mankins said last week that she has “to live with that, all the rest of my life.” It is why, she said, Harris should be executed as scheduled April 21 in the gas chamber at San Quentin. He would be the first inmate put to death in California in 25 years.

“The whole thing is, (Harris) needs to be punished,” she said. “When he is executed, I will feel more at peace with myself. There will be finality to this case.”

It is only recently, Mankins said, that she has felt enough peace to consider talking in public about her--and her family’s--heartbreak. After years of keeping silent, she said, “I’m just not afraid of talking about my feelings anymore.”

She and her family have been touched twice by senseless death. Nearly five years after Michael Baker was killed, his younger sister, Tammy Baker, 19, died in a motorcycle crash. Again, it was within a few miles of home.

“When that happened, I thought: ‘Oh, no. Not again,’ ” Mankins said. “Two children. Two. In one lifetime. It makes you wonder. But I believe that what doesn’t rip you apart makes you stronger as a family.”

There is a curiosity connecting the two deaths, Mankins said. Tammy Baker was banking at the San Diego Trust and Savings branch when Harris robbed it of $3,009. She lay flat on the floor while he made his getaway in the car he had stolen from Baker and Mayeski earlier in the day. “Isn’t that strange?” Mankins asked.

There is also one significant difference between her son’s death and her daughter’s death, said Mankins: His lacks a sense of closure.

“It is so devastating to lose one child in a murder,” Mankins said. “I accepted Tammy’s death. But I have never really accepted Michael’s death, because of the circumstances.”

Harris, sentenced to death in 1979, has survived four previous execution dates, including one two years ago when he was spared by a federal appeals court judge with just days to go. The Harris case has been to--and rejected by--the U. S. Supreme Court five times.

It used to be that any mention of a development in the case brought Mankins to tears, said her husband of 17 years, Sam Mankins, 56, an elementary school teacher.

So did sight of the videotape that inevitably appears on San Diego television when the Harris case generates news, Sam Mankins said. The tape shows a smirking, handcuffed Harris walking down a county courthouse hallway during his trial.

“I hated it,” said Sharron Mankins, 48, a bookkeeper at a San Diego high school. “I wouldn’t talk. I’d just start crying.”

Sam Mankins, in turn, sought to protect her--even from their children. “Any emotions, he would hustle her into the bedroom, so we wouldn’t see it,” said Lisa ByBee, 30, one of the couple’s four living children.

Last year, sitting quietly through a federal court hearing in San Diego, Sharron Mankins felt her anger rising. At the hearing, Harris’ defense lawyers contended that prosecutors had improperly used a jailhouse informant’s testimony to help prove Harris’ motive for the killings.

A judge turned down the claim, saying there was no basis for it. While she was listening to the lawyers drone on, “I realized: ‘This is ridiculous,’ ” Sharron said. “I said to myself: ‘This has got to end.’ ”

“We said that if the defense position was that they were going to do everything to see the (death) sentence commuted, we were going to try to do what it takes to see that it gets carried out,” Sam Mankins said.

On March 2, the U. S. Supreme Court turned Harris down for the fifth time, declining to review another of his claims--that he suffered from mental problems that had not been adequately presented at the 1979 trial. That set the stage for an execution date, now set for April 21.

When word of the Supreme Court opinion came down, Sharron Mankins began keeping a diary as an outlet for her emotions. She has been carrying it around since, lugging it to work and scribbling when the mood strikes. The first entry: “Well, here we go again.”

It has been a long haul, she said. “I hated it, hated it all for the first 11 years,” she said. “Even two years ago I wouldn’t talk. I’d just start crying. But I feel stronger now.”

The memories from the day of the killings are still vivid, Sharron Mankins said. She and her husband began the day with a pleasant drive to the beach.

They had been married three years before, each bringing three children to the marriage. Sharron had divorced Steve Baker, a San Diego police officer. Sam lost his first wife to cancer. They married 10 weeks after they met and all six kids moved in together. “Like ‘The Brady Bunch,’ ” Sharron said.

With his mother and stepfather off at the beach, Michael Baker and John Mayeski went job-hunting, hoping to lift or haul or do odd jobs for a few dollars at a moving company located nearby.

No luck there. The teen-agers decided to drop the job search for the day, grab some lunch and go fishing, Sharron Mankins said. Off they went in John Mayeski’s car to the neighborhood Jack-in-the-Box.

When Sam and Sharron Mankins came home from the beach, San Diego police had cordoned off their street, searching for a bank robber who was believed to be in the neighborhood. “We never dreamed it involved us,” she said.

Officers let them through to their house. “A short time later, an officer came to the door and asked us for a picture of Mike,” she said. “I asked why. He said the car had been used in a bank robbery. Mike hadn’t turned up. I couldn’t believe it. I was frightened to death.”

Sam Mankins went searching for Mike. “I was frantic,” he said. “I went in expanding concentric circles, looking anywhere, any place I thought might be a possibility.”

Sharron went down the street, to the Mayeski house. A few desperate hours passed before officers told her they had found the bodies in the brush near Miramar Reservoir. John Mayeski had been shot in the head and back. Michael Baker had been shot in the back and abdomen.

Sam Mankins was still out searching. Sharron was overcome with terror.

“I had what I call my Shirley MacLaine experience,” Sharron said. “I saw this woman running down the street. It was me. But I saw it as if I was watching it happen to someone else. A police officer came after me and finally caught me. All I wanted to do was get home. I needed to find someone from the family.”

Instead, she went to the hospital, with Mayeski’s mother, who also was hysterical.

“I was just floating,” Sharron said. “The denial. I couldn’t believe this was happening. I came home from the hospital later that day. I kept waiting for (Michael) to come through the door or barrel down the stairs. I was numb for weeks.”

Convicted six months later for the murders, Harris was sentenced to death in March, 1979. The California Supreme Court affirmed the death sentence in 1982.

For the last eight years, the case has bounced back and forth between the U. S. Supreme Court and the U. S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the federal appellate court that serves California.

“His attorneys have done a marvelous job,” Sharron said. “They’ve done what they set out to do, which is keep (Harris) alive. But after 13 1/2 years, he needs to face his punishment. He’s been fairly tried. We understand that now the argument is essentially over the death penalty, pro or con.”

There is no question where Sam and Sharron Mankins stand on that issue. “If you kill a child, terrorize them, murder them, I think our most severe punishment is correct,” Sam Mankins said. “And in this state, that is death.”

Last week, Harris’ defense lawyers asked Gov. Pete Wilson for a clemency hearing. Sharron and Sam Mankins have urged him to deny it, saying in a letter they sent to Sacramento earlier this month that a hearing “is neither deserved nor warranted.”

“Every member of the slain children’s families urges you to carry out this execution without forcing us to agonize through another ordeal,” the letter said.

Sharron Mankins said she and one of her daughters, Linda Herring, 26, an Escondido homemaker, want to witness the execution. They are waiting to learn whether that is possible, she said.

“I want to go to see them walk (Harris) in (to the gas chamber), strap him in to that chair,” Sharron said. “I don’t need to watch him go through the throes of death. I may even look down.

“But I want to be there when they close the curtain on him,” she said. “And I want to be there when they open the curtain and pronounce him dead. I’ll feel that. That will feel like finality.”