On a pleasant Tuesday afternoon, October 2, 1984, 12-year-old Lance Turner, a Male student at Ralston Intermediate School in Belmont, California, was dropped off with friends for soccer practice. Lance was a happy and confident seventh-grader, a handsome boy with blonde hair and blue eyes who was popular with his classmates. His parents, Margo and Quincy Turner, were raising a thoughtful and smart teenager who loved playing sports and Dungeons and Dragons with his friends.
His older sister, Tracy, affectionately called him a "stud" because girls from school would often call the house for him.
That afternoon, with some time to spare before practice began at 5:00 p.m., Lance decided to head off on his own. He told his friends he was bored and was going to a rope swing near Waterdog Lake, a wooded area about three-eighths of a mile from the school's soccer fields. His friends decided not to join him, and they watched him run down a path toward the woods until he was out of sight. When practice ended, Lance was not with the other boys. His coach, Ray Williamson, confirmed he had never shown up.
A sense of unease quickly grew as the evening set in. At around 7:00 p.m., Margo Turner called the Belmont police to report her son missing. A search was immediately organized, with Lance's father, Quincy, and other parents from the soccer team combing the area around the school and the path to Waterdog Lake. At approximately 8:20 p.m., one of the searching fathers, William Russell, shone his flashlight into a gully filled with overgrown brush. The beam of light caught the sight of feet sticking out from the bushes. Lance's body was discovered hidden underneath.
The investigation revealed a brutal and violent attack. An autopsy determined that Lance had died from massive blood loss caused by multiple stab wounds. He had been stabbed 23 times, with two wounds to his heart proving fatal. The presence of defensive wounds on his arms and hands, along with other scrapes and bruises, showed that the young boy had fought bravely against his attacker. The community was left in shock, and police began the difficult task of finding who could commit such a heinous crime against a child.
The case was one of three murders committed by a man who would come to be known as The Peninsula Serial Killer. The investigation eventually focused on Jon Scott Dunkle, a local man who was also responsible for the 1981 murder of 15-year-old John Davies in Belmont and the 1985 murder of 12-year-old Sean Dannehl in Sacramento County. Dunkle was already serving a prison sentence for burglary when he confessed the three murders to a cellmate and later to the FBI in October 1986. He provided details only the killer could have known and even drew a map that led investigators to John Davies' remains.
On December 6, 1989, a jury convicted Jon Scott Dunkle of two counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of Lance Turner and John Davies. He was subsequently sentenced to death. For the murder of Sean Dannehl, Dunkle pleaded guilty and received a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. Throughout his legal proceedings, Dunkle’s mental competency was repeatedly questioned, but he was ultimately found fit to stand trial. During sentencing, the judge remarked that Dunkle seemed to take "perverse pleasure of seeing a human being suffer and die," and that his crimes were the work of someone who delighted "in doing evil."
The California Supreme Court upheld Dunkle's death sentence in 2005. He remains incarcerated on death row at San Quentin State Prison. The community of Belmont was scarred by the loss of a bright and popular young boy, whose life was cut tragically short in a senseless act of violence. Lance Turner is remembered as a happy child, loved by his family and friends, who happened to cross paths with a serial killer on an ordinary autumn afternoon.
