Stephen Deflaun gazed intently at all the autopsy photos of a boy and a man projected on the large screen inside a courtroom of the San Luis Obispo County Superior Court.
He’s on trial for allegedly shooting and killing both of them more than 20 years ago.
The SLO County District Attorney’s Office claimed that on July 8, 2001, Deflaun murdered 37-year-old Stephen Wells and his 11-year-old nephew, Jerry Rios Jr., after quarreling at the Morro Strand State Beach campground. Deflaun faces a slew of criminal charges from the DA’s office pertaining to murder with a firearm and assaulting a peace officer with a firearm. In response, he entered pleas of not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity.
Deflaun was arrested on the scene in 2001 and held in jail. Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in the past, he was deemed unfit in 2004 to stand trial, but that changed last year.
On March 28, Deflaun’s trial started with the “guilt phase,” meaning the jury will determine if he was responsible for the two murders based only on the facts presented to them.
On April 10, once the jury left the courtroom, presiding Judge Jacquelyn Duffy ruled that the jurors will not hear about Deflaun’s past incompetency to stand trial and the fact that he was found not guilty by reason of insanity in a 1982 Massachusetts case for possession of a knife.
Duffy also sustained prosecutors’ objection to a series of photographs depicting Deflaun’s childhood. His defense attorney, Ray Allen, stated that the pictures present a trajectory from a relatively healthy mental state to signs of mental illness starting at age 14. The judge said she had concerns about its relevance.
If the jury finds Deflaun guilty, the trial will move to the “sanity phase”—the period where they’ll hear more about his mental health history, likely to include details about the incompetency to stand trial and the 1982 verdict.
On April 11, hours after the prosecution—led by SLO County Assistant District Attorney Eric Dobroth—rested its case, Deflaun took to the witness stand as part of the defense team’s arguments. His other defense attorney, Tim Osman, previously told the court that Deflaun faces a mental illness that makes him believe he hears voices in his head.
During his testimony, Deflaun claimed that these voices influenced him to kill Wells and Rios Jr. He elaborated that the voices belong to an entity called “the program.”
“It’s an unnamed religious group in America, run by the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency],” he said. “Its primary purpose is to torture me probably until death. It’s used primarily for entertainment and used to humiliate me.”
Deflaun added that he’s been a victim of “the program” for 50 years, forcing him to flee from Massachusetts to California in the 1980s. Soon after that, he purchased a brown van and kept a journal to document his travels through the state. Eventually, Deflaun drove that van to the Morro Bay campground where the murders took place.
While recounting his early years, Deflaun stated that a doctor had diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia after he began therapy in 1976.
“I may have been at the time but I’m not now,” he said.
At one point during his testimony, Deflaun scanned the courtroom. He added that “the program” was active at that very moment.
“As I look around the courtroom, all the people I’m looking at, [visions and thoughts] are being transmitted,” he said. “They’re stealing my vision and thoughts and giving it to other people.”
Deflaun’s comment about still hearing voices stood out to Judge Duffy. After the jury was dismissed on April 11, she ruled that Deflaun, who had been unrestrained throughout the trial so far, would be subtly restrained at the witness stand. His hands would be free, but his feet would be controlled, with the restraint connecting to a metal hook under the witness stand that’s not visible to the jury.
“I don’t want the jury to know you’re in custody,” Duffy told him on April 11.
The following morning, Deflaun was already seated at the witness stand when the jury assembled. Using a flutter of hand gestures, he continued his testimony by describing how he fired six bullets from his revolver into Wells and Rios. He said he shot the man first and then the boy, and shot them again afterwards. Deflaun told the courtroom that the voices told him to.
“[They said], ‘If you don’t shoot them again, we’re going to put you in an iron lung and suffocate you,'” he said.
The defense presented Deflaun’s journal as evidence. In the July 8, 2001, entry, he had noted Wells to be a “fed agent asshole.” Deflaun explained that he realized the phrase was the voices’ code for “fed agent assassin.” He claimed he believed Wells was sent to kill him after they fought about parking spaces in the campground. Calling himself “suicidal,” Deflaun said that he first wanted to die at Wells’ hands but changed his mind at the last minute.
Los Angeles-based Wells; his wife, Elizabeth; their three children; and their nephew, Rios Jr., were on a road trip when they stopped to camp in Morro Bay. Deflaun was a camper who was parked nearby. His testimony stated that he had consumed a 12-pack of beer before he met the family. Forensic toxicologist Bill Posey—a witness of the defense team—confirmed that Deflaun’s blood alcohol content was at 0.12 percent based on a drug screen conducted approximately two hours after the murders. He roughly estimated that the blood alcohol content could have been at 0.16 percent at 7 p.m. close to when the murders occurred.
Following the killings, Deflaun said that he engaged in a shootout with two park rangers where he sustained gunshot wounds. He was taken to Sierra Vista Regional Regional Medical Center in SLO afterward.
The guilt phase of Deflaun’s trial is ongoing. Δ
This article appears in Apr 13-23, 2023.
Another poster boy for the NRA. If he hadn’t been in jail all these years this nutcase would surely be a QAnon follower.