Murder at City Hall—And a Travesty of Justice in the Courtroom?
At about 10:25 on the morning of November 27, 1978—29 years ago today—William Melia, an engineer at San Francisco’s City Hall, noticed a man pacing nervously outside his first-floor window. He recognized the man as Dan White, until recently a San Francisco city supervisor—the equivalent of a city council member. Melia stepped out of the room to take a phone call, and he heard a window open and someone climb through it. He returned and saw that it was White. “I had to get in,” White said. “My aide was supposed to come down and let me in the side door, but she never showed up.” He turned and left, heading to the mayor’s office. Unknown to Melia or anyone else, White had a loaded .38 revolver in his jacket pocket. Over the next half-hour, he would murder the mayor and one other man.
White, a former policeman and firefighter, had resigned his position several days before, citing financial concerns and his low supervisor’s salary of $9,600 per year. But then he had changed his mind and asked Mayor Moscone to reappoint him. Several supervisors, including the popular, openly gay Harvey Milk, had urged Moscone to refuse. Milk and White had clashed politically on many occasions. White represented a conservative, working-class part of the city, while the liberal Milk represented the predominantly gay Castro district. The two disliked each other intensely, particularly after White cast the only dissenting vote on a gay-rights ordinance that Milk championed and Moscone signed into law.
After much deliberation, Moscone had made his decision. He would not reappoint White. White found out when a reporter called his house on the night of November 26. He was enraged that Moscone had not called him personally. He stayed up all night, pacing and eating junk food. In the morning, he dressed, placed a revolver in his pocket with a handful of extra rounds, and called up his aide to give him a ride to City Hall.
He reached Moscone’s office through a side entrance, bypassing the mayor’s bodyguard. He cheerily asked Moscone’s appointments secretary, Cyr Copertini, if he could see the mayor. She let Moscone know that former supervisor White wanted to see him and then offered White a newspaper. It was the first time in a week that the San Francisco Examiner’s headlines were not about the recent tragedy in Jonestown, Guyana, where more than 900 members of the San Francisco–based Peoples Temple cult had committed suicide at the command of its leader, Jim Jones.
White and Copertini breezily chatted about the fact that Caroline Kennedy was just turning 21. The mayor buzzed from his office, and Copertini told White he could go in. “Good girl, Cyr,” White said.
There was a brief argument, and then White pulled his gun and shot Moscone twice. After Moscone hit the floor, White leaned down and shot him twice more, in the head. White then reloaded his revolver.
Copertini heard the shots, four pops, but she thought they were car backfires from outside. As she stood by an office window looking for the source of the noise, White rushed out of the mayor’s office and down the hall toward the supervisors’ offices. Dianne Feinstein, the president of the Board of Supervisors, saw him pass by her office and called out to him. He stopped. “It’ll have to wait, Dianne,” he said, and he headed toward Harvey Milk’s office.
White ducked his head into Milk’s office and asked if he could see him for a minute. The pair went into White’s own former office and closed the door. After a few moments, White shot Milk five times, including a close-range shot to the head as Milk lay bleeding. White left and escaped via a nearby stairwell.
Feinstein was the first to reach Milk’s body. She called the police chief’s office. Then she learned that the mayor had also been killed. That meant that as the president of the Board of Supervisors, she would become the new mayor of San Francisco, and she now had a tragedy to lead the city through. She told the press what had happened, and shock overwhelmed the city.
That night, 40,000 people stood on the streets from Castro Street to City Hall, most carrying candles in a silent memorial to Moscone and, especially, the wildly popular Milk, who had been one of the first openly gay public officials ever elected in the United States. By then White had turned himself in to the police at a precinct near City Hall and had confessed his crimes to a police detective, who had tape-recorded his rambling confession. White faced the possibility of the death penalty if he was found guilty of first-degree murder at trial, which, to many San Franciscans, seemed a foregone conclusion. But the trial, which began in May 1979, turned out very differently.
The jury was made up mostly of white, working-class Catholics—people like White. Half of them lived in or near his former district, and none was from near Milk’s Castro district. There were no blacks or Asians, and the judge forbade the prosecutor to ask if prospective jurors were gay. Critics saw the jury as unfairly stacked in White’s favor.
The defense, led by an attorney named Douglas Schmidt, did not deny that White had killed Moscone and Milk. However, it stressed that White had been deeply disturbed at the time, overwhelmed by personal and career pressures that drove him to commit the crimes in a fit of passion. Such a defense, if successful, would lessen the charges from first-degree murder to manslaughter, which carried a much lighter sentence.
The prosecuting attorney, Deputy District Attorney Thomas F. Norman, pursued a very simple strategy. White, he maintained, had deliberately planned to kill Moscone and Milk. White’s own actions corroborated this: He entered City Hall through a window to avoid being searched for a weapon; he carefully avoided Moscone’s bodyguard; and he reloaded his gun between the two killings, which showed he was following a methodical plan.
As the trial went on, however, it became clear that many on the jury were sympathetic to White. When the prosecution played a tape recording of White’s confession, in which he made excuses citing the “pressures” he was under, some jury members broke into tears of sympathy.
The defense’s main argument was that White had suffered from severe depression that had led him to commit the murders. White’s sister, Nancy Bickel, testified that he often ate junk food, such as Twinkies or chocolate cupcakes, when he was depressed. One defense witness, the psychiatrist Martin Blinder, testified that he thought White’s unhealthy eating habits might have been an indicator of his depression: “I would suspect that if it were not for . . . all the tremendous pressures on [White] the weeks prior to the shooting, and perhaps if it were not for the ingestion of this aggravating factor, this junk food . . . I would suspect that these homicides would have not taken place.”
These witnesses, and White’s defense attorneys, weren’t suggesting that junk food had made White a killer; his binging was mentioned only as a symptom of his depression, not its cause. But many news reports at the time suggested otherwise, and their erroneous interpretation—which continues to this day—became known as the “Twinkie Defense.” It provoked outrage among many San Franciscans.
On May 21, 1979, the jury reached a verdict after 36 hours of deliberation. Dan White was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter in the killings of Moscone and Milk. He was sentenced to seven years and eight months in prison.
The light sentence excited more outrage. Protesters, many of them gay, stormed City Hall within hours, chanting “Avenge Harvey Milk!” and “Kill Dan White!” The protest became violent as the glass doors and windows of City Hall were shattered by rocks. Protesters and police fought in the street, and 11 empty police cars were set on fire. “Make sure you put in the paper that I ate too many Twinkies,” one rioter told a reporter. About 120 people were injured, and 30 protesters were arrested in what came to be called the White Night Riot.
Eventually the crowd dispersed. Many San Francisco police, however, were enraged in return. White had been a policeman, and officers had helped raise his defense fund. Some blamed the violent events at City Hall solely on the gay community. The same night, about a dozen policemen raided the Elephant Walk, a gay bar in the Castro district. They beat and kicked patrons of the bar while shouting “Banzai!” and homophobic slurs. Dozens of men, many of whom had nothing to do with the City Hall riot, were beaten bloody by police before the night was over.
Dan White was imprisoned, but he served only five years, one month, and nine days before being paroled. Mayor Feinstein, in an extraordinary move, made a public statement asking him not to return to San Francisco, but he went back anyway. After his release, he grew despondent, his marriage fell apart, and on October 22, 1985, he committed suicide, piping carbon monoxide fumes into his car while sitting in his garage.
Harvey Milk, always a champion of gay rights, would be remembered in the national gay community as a martyr. An Academy Award–winning documentary film, The Times of Harvey Milk, was released in 1984, and a movie is currently in development based on the journalist Randy Shilts’s 1982 biography, The Mayor of Castro Street; Bryan Singer, who made X-Men, is signed to direct. In 1992 Dianne Feinstein, whose political career began in earnest with her ascension to the mayoralty in the wake of the murders, was elected U.S. senator from California, where she continues to serve today.
Meanwhile, the myth of the Twinkie Defense lives on in the popular culture. It continues to be cited in news stories and magazine articles as an example of a ridiculous, responsibility-evading legal dodge. It has become a legal legend that refuses to die. (It was, for instance, offered as truth by a character in the 2006 film Half Nelson.)
Regardless of White’s defense, the case’s outcome was startling by any standard, a mere seven-plus years for the murder of two elected public officials. It led to a key change in the California criminal code. In 1982 California voters approved Proposition 8, which, among other law-and-order reforms, eliminated the “diminished capacity” defense—the defense that Dan White had used after murdering two people in cold blood.