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The media loves a story about a “good cop gone bad” and here is a blatant example of just such a man.
Anthony “Jack” Sully was born in 1944 in San Francisco but grew up in the San Mateo County city of Millbrae. As a young man he was interested in criminal justice and followed a path to becoming a police officer for the Millbrae force. An article in a November 1968 issue of The Times newspaper proclaimed his “permanent appointment…to the police department.”
Apparently, he soon soured on police work, as in the mid-1970s he left the department to found an electrical and contracting business run out of a warehouse in Burlingame.
Part of the problem, it seemed, was his temper and leanings towards violence. He was married twice, both marriages leading to divorces based on physical abuse of his wives.
After his second divorce in 1975, his life spiraled out of control and he developed a reliance on prostitutes and began a severe cocaine habit.
His lowest point came in 1983 when he snapped and killed six people between February and August: prostitutes and a pimp and a drug dealer. Nobody could ever figure out a clear motive.
For three of his victims, he dumped their bodies in metal barrels and filled them with cement, later leaving the barrels in Golden Gate Park.
Those barrels would be his undoing, as the police easily found his fingerprints on them, as well as his clear handprints in the cement. The police found other solid evidence at the Burlingame warehouse and he was quickly arrested, although he would languish in jail for three years before coming to trial in 1986.
He didn’t go down without a fight. He unsuccessfully tried to bribe a teenage boy into taking the blame for all six murders.
At his trial, the prosecution had a relatively easy case: the physical evidence clearly tied him to the murders. He was found guilty and made a speech lasting more than a half-hour proclaiming his innocence. When he was sentenced to death his anger flared and he shouted obscenities at the judge and jury.
He has appealed his sentence twice and been rejected both times. He currently sits on San Quentin Prison’s death row.
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