A convicted Yolo County murderer was denied parole last week, 28 years after he and a friend took part in a Knights Landing killing spree.
Anthony Louis King was 16 years old and living in the rural Yolo County town when, on Sept. 6, 1987, King and Kenneth Ray Bivert killed a man they had befriended in order to go joyriding in his car. Victim Steven Patton, 35, was shot in the face with King’s shotgun while fishing.
The pair killed again two days later, fatally shooting husband and wife Raymond and Dawn Rogers of Knights Landing for their car, which they planned to use as a getaway vehicle for a bank robbery. The couple also had been fishing when they were killed. Both suspects were apprehended several days later in Oregon.
King was convicted at trial of multiple counts of murder and robbery in July 1988, for which he received a state prison sentence of 27 years to life. Bivert, who had pleaded guilty to the murders six months earlier, received a term of 52 years to life.
Yolo County Chief Deputy District Attorney Jonathan Raven and relatives of Dawn Rogers spoke out against King’s release during the parole hearing at the state prison in Corcoran, where the two-member Board of Parole Hearings panel ruled that King still posed an unreasonable risk to society.
King, now 44, will again be eligible for parole in five years. Bivert, 45, remains housed at San Quentin State Prison.