Jonathan Watson Warned a Corcoran Counselor, Killed Two Child-Sex Offenders With a Cane, and No Staff Were Disciplined

CORCORAN, CALIFORNIA — Jonathan Watson beat two men to death with another prisoner’s walking cane on January 16, 2020, inside a dorm at the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility. He was already serving life. David Bobb, 48, died on the way to an outside hospital. Graham De Luis-Conti, 62, died three days later in a hospital bed. Both victims were serving life sentences for aggravated sexual assault of a child under 14. Watson then found a guard and confessed. The state later decided that none of its employees had done anything worth a punishment. That decision, not the cane, is the part of this case that still needs a public airing.

Watson was 41, from Humboldt County, and about a decade into a life term for the 2008 murder of Garrett Benson, a 27-year-old UPS driver, plus a count of discharging a firearm and causing great bodily injury or death. Prison Legal News, working from the corrections department’s account and from Watson’s own letter, reported that his security level had just been dropped from Level III to Level II. The drop moved him out of a cell and into a dorm. He told the Bay Area News Group he had grieved the move and left what he called a paper trail, and that the transfer was about a week old when he picked up the cane. A lower classification is supposed to mean the department believes a man can live among other men without killing one of them. Watson’s record said he had already killed a man on the street. The dorm said the department was willing to test that record next to people the population is known to hunt.

His account, mailed to the Mercury News in February 2020 and widely quoted after the chain published it, is not a mystery novel. A man he identified by the conviction, not the name, had the dayroom television on PBS Kids. Another prisoner asked, in substance, whether they were really going to watch that. Watson wrote that he said he had it, took a cane that was not his, and beat the first man, including stomping his head. Bobb was that man. Watson wrote that he then walked toward the guards to surrender and, on the way, saw a second man he called a child trafficker. “I figured I’d just do everybody a favor,” he wrote. De Luis-Conti was the second man. Both had been convicted of the same class of child-sex crime. Watson also wrote that roughly two hours before the attack he had told a counselor he needed to go back to higher security “before I really mess one of these dudes up,” and that he was scoffed at. He said he would plead guilty if Kings County, which has the jail that sits beside the prison, took him to court. He hinted he would do it again if he were housed the same way. CDCR identified him as the attacker. Spokeswoman Dana Simas said the department would not comment on an open investigation.

The inspector cleared the staff. The admirers sent money.

The investigation of the employees ended in a way the investigation of the killer did not. On May 16, 2022, the California Office of the Inspector General wrote to Prison Legal News about case numbers 20-0033252 and 20-0032396. The journal reported the conclusion in January 2023. The department had handled the matter in a “satisfactory” manner. There was, the inspector found, insufficient evidence that the counselor knew of a risk and failed to act. Nobody was disciplined. Read that against the letter and the gap is the scandal. A confessed killer said he warned a counselor, in plain language, that he was about to attack, and that the warning was dismissed. The oversight body decided the warning was not proved well enough to cost anyone a job. A prisoner’s letter is not a hearing. An inspector’s “insufficient evidence” is also not a finding that the dorm was a safe place to put a murderer a week after taking his cell away. “Satisfactory” is a word a bureaucracy uses when it grades itself. It is a strange word for a day when two men left a unit with fatal head injuries.

The public reaction was uglier than the memo, and the department noticed that part. After the letter ran, people who liked what Watson had done tried to put money on his books. Prison Legal News reported that CDCR blocked deposits into the commissary account. The block is the tell. The state would not punish the counselor. It would punish the fan mail. Admiration for a dorm killing is not a victim-services program, and the department was right to refuse the cash. It was also a smaller intervention than the one Watson says he asked for two hours before the first blow. A transfer is a classification decision. A commissary block is a public-relations decision. The second one got done.

A 2015 Associated Press review of California prison homicides had already described the pattern. Men convicted of sex offenses were about 15 percent of the male population and nearly 30 percent of the prisoners killed inside. The numbers are a forecast, not a license. Putting a man serving life for a street murder into a dorm, a week after a contested downgrade, next to men whose crimes make them targets, is how a forecast becomes a body. Bobb and De Luis-Conti were convicted of raping children and were serving life for it. They were still entitled not to be beaten to death with a cane while the state later called the housing satisfactory. The sentence they were serving was the punishment. The cane was a second one, imposed by a man who wrote that a life term left him with little to lose.

A confession is not a charge, and a cheer is not a sentence

What Kings County did with the confession is the silence in the file. In February 2020, news organizations reported that no murder charge had yet been filed. Watson was already never getting out on the Benson case in any ordinary sense, and prosecutors sometimes decide that a second life term is not worth the courtroom when the defendant is offering to plead and the victims’ families are not in the courthouse hallway demanding a caption. That calculation, if it is the one that was made, has never been laid out in a charging document the public can read. Later roundups, including accounts published years after the cane, still describe no public murder case arising from January 16. Absence from the news is not proof a file was never opened. It is proof the public was never shown a jury, a plea, or a reason. The AEGIS Alliance will not invent a dismissal to fill the hole. The hole is the reporting.

The cheerleading is easier to document than the docket, and it is worth refusing. Posts that called Watson a hero were celebrating two murders because of the crimes the dead men had been convicted of. The celebration skips the counselor, the classification drop, and the UPS driver whose killing put Watson in the building. A prison that cannot keep a targeted prisoner alive cannot keep any prisoner alive when the politics change. Watson told the newspaper the housing was the issue and that he might repeat the attack. Treating that letter as inspiration is how the next dorm gets a script.

The AEGIS Alliance is not in the business of romanticizing a cane. The related record on this site is a record of deaths, not of trophies: De Luis-Conti’s death three days after the same attack, the killing of Richard Huckle at Full Sutton, the later prison stabbing of Lostprophets singer Ian Watkins, and another California case in which a child-sex offender was choked to death. The pattern is institutional. A system warehouses people it has already condemned, acts surprised when the warehouse produces a second homicide, and then clears itself. Corcoran added a commissary block so the surprise would not come with a deposit slip.

Benson’s name belongs here because Watson’s life term did not begin as a parable. On the record Prison Legal News cited, it began with the killing of a 27-year-old delivery driver in 2008. Any account that starts with a children’s television channel and ends with applause has edited the driver out so the cane can look like justice. The sentence Bobb and De Luis-Conti were already serving was the punishment a court had imposed. A counselor’s note, if the conversation happened as Watson described it, would have been the intervention. The inspector says the proof of that conversation was not there. The bodies were.

Readers who want the category, rather than the myth, will find this under Crime News and U.S. News. The facts that hold are narrow and ugly. On January 16, 2020, a man serving life for murder used a cane to kill two men serving life for child rape, after a security downgrade he says he begged to have reversed. He confessed in writing. The inspector general called the department’s handling satisfactory and cleared the staff. The department blocked the donations. A separate murder case, if one was ever filed in Kings County, has not been shown to the public in the years since. That is a failure of housing and a failure of transparency. It is not a folk tale, and The AEGIS Alliance will not print it as one.