San Quentin Death Row Inmate, "Ninja Murderer," Dies

By Bay City News Service:

A former Los Angeles police officer and death row inmate at San Quentin State Prison died of natural causes in a hospital early Tuesday morning, some two decades after he was sentenced to death.

L.A. County native and San Quentin inmate Steven Homick, 74, was pronounced dead in a Bay Area hospital a short time before 12:30 a.m., according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

An L.A. County jury sentenced Homick to death in 1995 for the murder-for-hire killings of 67-year-old Gerald Woodman and his wife, 63-year-old Vera Woodman, in a garage at their condominium in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles after a family celebration of Yom Kippur in 1985.

Prosecutors say the couple’s two sons hired Homick and his brother, Robert Homick to kill their parents. The slayings came to be known in the media as the “Yom Kippur murders” and the “ninja murders.”

Homick was one of six people arrested in connection with the murders and the only defendant sentenced to death in the case. Since California reinstated capital punishment in 1978, 65 death row inmates have died from natural causes, according to the CDCR.