Cop killer denied parole – ContraCostaTimes.com

Quoting from Cop killer denied parole – ContraCostaTimes.com By Denise Nix, Staff Writer

Gerald Mason

Six years into his life sentence for killing two El Segundo police officers in 1957, Gerald Mason was denied release this week by a parole board that said he continues to minimize his crimes and fails to show real remorse.

The three-member panel also concluded late Thursday that Mason, 75, should not come before the parole board again for the maximum period of 15 years.

During the four-hour hearing in a Sacramento conference room, the board members heard from the prosecutor and family members of the slain officers, as well as Mason’s attorneys and Mason via a speakerphone from South Carolina, where he is imprisoned.

El Segundo police Lt. Craig Cleary, who attended, along with two sheriff’s homicide detectives, to show support for the family, said the “big question” that remained unanswered was: “Why did you do these crimes?”

“Typical of Mason – we never really got a clear-cut answer,” said Cleary, who took on the unsolved case decades later.

“In essence, he minimized his conduct and really didn’t have a clear answer on why he did what he did, and – to the board’s perception or conclusion – he did not take responsibility for his actions even after 46 years,” Cleary said in a phone interview Friday.

Late on July 21, 1957, Mason’s crime-spree began on a secluded Lovers Lane in Hawthorne, where four teenagers were parked in a 1949 Ford.

At gunpoint, Mason tied-up the teens and raped a 15-year-old girl in the front seat.