California Inmate Jonathan Watson Beat Two Child-Sex Offenders to Death With a Cane at Corcoran

CORCORAN, CALIFORNIA — Jonathan Watson beat two child-sex offenders to death with a walking cane inside the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility on January 16, 2020. He was already in for murder.

Watson, then 41, of Humboldt County, had served about ten years of a life term for first-degree murder and discharging a firearm causing great bodily injury or death. He had been at Corcoran since September 4, 2009. The first man he struck, 48-year-old David Bobb of San Diego County, was serving life for the aggravated sexual assault of a child under 14. Bobb died on the way to an outside hospital. The second, 62-year-old Graham De Luis-Conti, also in for the aggravated sexual assault of a child under 14, died three days later. Both had been housed in a substance-abuse dorm of more than 5,400 inmates.

The Letter: PBS Kids, a Cane, and a Counselor Who Scoffed

In February 2020 Watson mailed a confession to the Bay Area News Group. He said a man he called „Molester #1“ kept turning the dayroom television to PBS Kids in front of other prisoners, which Watson took as a taunt. He picked up another inmate’s cane. On his way to alert a guard and surrender, he wrote, he came upon the second man and decided to attack him as well. He also said he had a paper trail of grievances, and that roughly two hours before the attack he told a counselor he needed to be moved back to higher security „before I really mess one of these dudes up.“ He said he was scoffed at and dismissed. His classification had recently been dropped from Level III to Level II, pulling him out of a single cell and into dormitory housing — a week before the killings.

A 2015 Associated Press analysis found male sex offenders in California prisons were being killed at about double their share of the population: roughly 15 percent of inmates, nearly 30 percent of murder victims. In May 2022 the state Office of the Inspector General confirmed that nobody at CDCR was disciplined, despite Watson’s complaints and the reclassification that put a murderer in a dorm with convicted child-sex offenders. Watson’s own parole eligibility was pushed to 2038.

The AEGIS Alliance is not in the business of romanticizing prison killings. Two men serving life for raping children are dead. A murderer who warned staff he was about to explode was left in the room with them. That is a classification failure, not a folk tale. Related: the second death at Corcoran, Richard Huckle’s killing at Full Sutton, the later killing of Lostprophets singer Ian Watkins, a California inmate who choked a child molester to death, and Crime News.