Violent days ticking away for `Bonzai'
Wednesday execution scheduled for Vickers
Sunday, 2 May 1999
METRO/REGION 1B
By Hipolito R. Corella
THE ARIZONA DAILY STAR
Robert Wayne Vickers asked for a quick execution in 1981, three years after he murdered a cellmate who drank his Kool-Aid.
``I told my lawyer & attorney General to pull my appeals and gas me,'' he wrote to Bruce Babbitt, then governor. ``I know it don't take to long to do that, `So whats the hold up fella?' If ya don't do it soon, `i'm gonna draw more blood then your cheap mop's can absorb.''
Vickers is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection Wednesday, after 18 years in which he has seemed committed to fulfilling that vow.
In 1982, after a federal judge granted him a stay of execution, Vickers burned to death a fellow death row inmate who had made a sexual remark about his niece.
Vickers used Vitalis and toilet paper to commit that crime. He has crafted weapons out of virtually anything - toothbrushes, newspapers, plastic foam - and used them whenever he had the chance.
The door of his cell was covered with a thick layer of plastic to keep him from throwing bodily waste or stabbing at those who walked by.
It wasn't a violent crime that brought Vickers to the Arizona State Prison in Florence in 1977. He was 19 when he was sentenced to three to nine years for a Tempe burglary.
But Vickers, who was first arrested in the sixth grade, walked into the prison with a history of violence. He had gained a reputation at the Catalina Mountain School north of Tucson for stabbing other boys with pencils, and would be convicted in 1978 of a jailhouse stabbing that would add 10 to 15 years to his original sentence.
At the time Vickers said he was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood and attacked the inmate because he was black.
In October 1978, Vickers' cellmate, Frank Ponciano, failed to wake Vickers for lunch, taking Vickers' Kool-Aid from his food tray.
Vickers strangled Ponciano and stabbed him repeatedly with a sharpened toothbrush. Then he carved his misspelled nickname, Bonzai, into the dead man's back, an idea he said came from the character Zorro.
A corrections officer realized Ponciano was dead under the covers of his bunk when Ponciano didn't react to the lighted cigar Vickers shoved into the sole of the victim's foot.
Vickers had called the officer to his cell to remove the victim.
They had been cellmates less than two weeks. Ponciano had been serving a life term for a Coconino County murder.
Vickers was sentenced to die for the Ponciano murder.
Seventeen hours before Vickers was to die in the gas chamber, then-U.S. District Judge Carl Muecke in Phoenix granted him a stay of execution. He ruled that Vickers and another inmate scheduled to die then were covered under a 1980 moratorium on executions.
Hours after the ruling, Vickers told reporters that he hoped someone ``snuffs Judge Muecke's momma'' and that he would carve the judge's name on his next victim.
Three months later, in March 1982, Vickers killed again.
He made a firebomb out of an ice cream container filled with five bottles' worth of Vitalis and toilet paper. He threw it on fellow death row inmate Wilmar ``Buster'' Holsinger, 55, setting him ablaze.
When the firebomb failed to generate enough flames to engulf the obese and disabled Holsinger fast enough, Vickers doused him with more hair tonic, court records show.
Vickers explained later that he killed Holsinger because after seeing a photograph of his niece, Holsinger asked Vickers if he had ever performed a sex act on her.
Although the death sentence for killing Ponciano was later overturned, a federal appeals court last year upheld Vickers' death sentence for the murder of Holsinger.
The Arizona Department of Corrections is scheduled to execute Vickers at 3 p.m. Wednesday.
``He has, technically, exhausted all of his appellate remedies,'' said Assistant Attorney General Paul J. McMurdie, who is in charge of the criminal appeals section. ``It's moving on.''
Still, McMurdie said he expects the usual flurry of last-minute appeals to be filed in state and federal courts.
Neither Alan Kyman, the attorney of record on the case, nor lawyers from the Arizona Capital Representation Project returned telephone calls seeking comment this past week.
Vickers - who turned 41 recently - has spent the most time on death row of the state's current 118 condemned prisoners. He is the only one to die for murdering other inmates.
He will be the 17th inmate executed here since Arizona reinstated the death penalty in 1992. He will be the fifth inmate put to death this year.
Vickers has refused requests for interviews from the media, said Camilla Strongin, a spokeswoman for the Arizona Department of Corrections.
He also refused to choose the method of execution; the state decided that he will die by lethal injection. Inmates sentenced to die before 1992 can pick the gas chamber or lethal injection.
He refused to attend a clemency hearing Tuesday in Florence.
Vickers' voluminous prison file is filled with two decades of disciplinary reports, from asking corrections officers to slip him some cigarettes to attacks on guards and other inmates.
Vickers and another inmate tried to escape in 1980, squeezing through the ventilation system to reach the prison roof, where they were captured.
His file shows that Vickers has easily slipped out of handcuffs by either squeezing through them or using handcuff keys he has made out of plastic lighters.
Far more of the disciplinary reports document the confiscation of weapons - mostly ``shanks'' - he has fashioned from an assortment of items, including the leg of a metal locker, a scrap of steel, toothbrushes and plastic foam he melted, then hardened into a knife to attack inmates and jailers.
In June 1986, Vickers stabbed a corrections officer in the ribs with a spear. He made it from a sharpened piece of metal from a typewriter and a 30-inch handle he'd made out of newspapers.
Vickers is so dangerous that until he was moved last month to a special holding cell to await his execution, he was housed in a pod for the most violent on death row, Strongin said.
The pod also houses Robert Charles Comer, on death row for the 1987 killing of a camper at Apache Lake and the rape of another there.
James Hamm, who served 18 years in prison for murder and now is a leader in the prisoner-advocacy group Middle Ground, said the corrections system shares the blame in creating the vicious man to be executed Wednesday.
``He was a burglar. And they threw him in a prison system that was too much to handle,'' said Hamm, who testified about prison conditions in Vickers' retrial for the Ponciano murder.
``The result is that more than one person is dead.''
While Vickers' penchant for violent outbursts is well-documented, his family background in the prison file is mostly limited to information he has provided officials in pre-sentencing reports.
Vickers was born in Phoenix in April 1958. He has a sister.
According to court and prison documents, Vickers said his father and an uncle took him along to commit burglaries when he was a child.
After his parents split up, Vickers said, he and his sister were left with relatives.
The pair eventually became wards of the state and lived in a series of foster homes. Vickers told a probation officer for a 1985 pre-sentencing report that he and his sister were sexually molested by a woman in one of their many foster homes.
The names of Vickers' relatives were removed from court documents.
According to the report, Vickers did not know the whereabouts of his natural parents but has maintained some contact with his sister and an aunt, records indicate.
Vickers claimed to have fathered a daughter. He also claims to have been in a common-law marriage in California until he returned to Arizona in the mid-1970s.
No relatives have contacted the Corrections Department regarding the execution, officials said late last week.
Vickers still uses a swastika to dot the ``i'' in letters he signs ``Bonzai Bob.'' It is a nickname he earned in prison for his vicious attacks, some of which he readily admits to prison officials occurred solely because the victims were black.
Yet some of his letters are decorated with smiley faces, and one 1988 letter to a Corrections captain asking for contact visits with a lady friend is written on stationery bordered with flowers and a Bambi-like wilderness scene.
Vickers' letter to the governor's office didn't end with his 1981 request for a swift execution.
In 1983, he again wrote Babbitt, asking that he be executed quickly so he could donate his heart to a Fort Huachuca boy who needed a transplant. The boy died a day before Babbitt's office received the letter. At the time, a doctor said the heart of a person killed in the gas chamber would be unsuitable for transplant.
Another letter to the governor that same year asks for permission to wear a three-piece suit when he is executed. ``I wanna die dressed,'' he wrote. ``Gonna be some ladies there. I don't want to go nude or in state clothes.''
He also asked that his last meal be prepared by a woman.
Neither request will be granted Wednesday.
Originally Posted by Soldier
