A former California police officer who has been on death row for decades after it was discovered he was a serial killer died of natural causes on Friday, authorities shared.
Anthony Sully, 79, was put on death row after being convicted of murdering six people in the 1980s.
Sully was being held at a medical facility outside the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, where he had been housed for decades, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation shared in a release.
In June 1986, Sully was sentenced to death for the killings of Kathryn Barrett, 24; Barbara Searcy, 22; Gloria Jean Fravel, 24; Brendan Oakden, 19; Michael Thomas, 24; and Phyllis Melendez, 20.
The victims had been beaten, stabbed, and shot inside an electrical supply warehouse in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1983.
San Jose Mercury News reported that three of the bodies had been found stuffed into barrels that were then dumped at Golden Gate Park.
Police investigating the murders discovered Sully’s fingerprints on some of the bodies, leading to his arrest.
From 1966 to 1974, Sully served the Bay Area as a police officer.
Citing news accounts from the time, Mercury News reported that Sully maintained he did not get a fair trial.
“I am not a monster, not a maniac, not subhuman,” he reportedly told the judge.
The department shared in a news release on Monday that the Marin County Coroner’s Office will conduct an autopsy to determine Sully’s official cause of death.