The Psychopath's Story

by M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
In August, 2024, the Salinas Valley State Prison denied a man convicted of a crime committed in 1973, his fifteenth request for parole. In of itself this is not unusual, however the nature of the relationship that developed between him and one of his victims engendered a book and movie during the 1980s. The story also details how a deeply disturbed and dangerous individual can masquerade and manipulate members of society that have no idea they are staring evil in the face.

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Bill and Hope at her mother's ranch c.1970s

​On February 27, 1973 deputies with the Tulare County Sheriff's Office received a call about a crime that turned out to be the murder of William Ashlock, an executive from Los Angeles.

Gerald Daniel Walker would eventually be tried and convicted for the crime, and sentenced to spend the rest of his life behind bars. Even if he would have ever secured parole, he still has a fifty-year sentence in federal prison pending.

This is the strange story that started in February, 1973 in a ranch house at the foot of the Sierra Nevadas on 600 acres...

The following was excerpted from A Death in California (1981):

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At 10 minutes before noon on Friday, Feb. 23, 1973, a handsome, well dressed man carrying a carved pipe stepped into the reception room at Dailey & Associates, an advertising agency on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. He said he was a reporter for The Los Angeles Times. He said he had a lunch date with Bill Ashlock, an executive with the firm, to interview him for an article on the city's 10 most eligible bachelors. He said his name was Taylor Wright.

The lunch lasted nearly four hours, which made Bill late getting to Hope Masters' house. He was living, most of the time, with Hope in Beverly Hills, though he still kept his bachelor apartment downtown. Bill and Hope, who was a member of a socially prominent family, were planning to spend the weekend together at her mother's ranch on 500 mountainous acres in the shadow of the Sierra Nevadas.

The delay irritated Hope, and the news that the reporter would be driving up the next day, to take pictures for his piece, did not improve her mood. But by the time she and Bill were turning up the winding road to the ranch, she had relaxed, as she always did in this secluded place, with only the main house and the caretaker's cottage, a world away from the clamor and the contradictions of her life in Beverly Hills.

Like Bill Ashlock, Hope Masters was in the process of her second divorce, and her broken marriages exemplified some of those contradictions. She had eloped at age16 with the boy next door, and had two children before she was 20. She'd divorced her husband because she considered him a boring stay-at-home, and married a dashing young public-relations man, Tom Masters. They had a child, then she and Tom had separated because she considered him too much of a playboy.

Hope and her children lived in one of the most expensive residential areas in the United States, while her income of $435 a month, some from each husband, some from her mother-entitled her to food stamps.

At 31, Hope, was just over five feet and weighed 90 pounds; she had smoky green eyes in a small-boned, oval face, champagne-colored hair streaming past her shoulders, and she looked more like a sultry teen-ager than the mother of three children. Bill was 40, and looked 25. He was passionate about fitness, usually lunching on yogurt and jogging three miles a day.

Hope recalls the moment she was introduced by Bill: ''Hopie, this is Taylor Wright.''
''Hi, Taylor. Where did you get that terrific tan?''
''I've been skiing.'' Bill sat on the sofa, with Taylor in the rocking chair opposite. Hope set out wine and cheese, and she and Taylor talked, with Bill mostly listening. Hope was a compulsive talker; she says she talked so much to Taylor - about her life and problems, her mother and  her stepfather, a corporation lawyer, who Hope said was as stiff and unbending as  an American eagle - that later she couldn't remember everything she'd said.

Taylor said he was from the Middle West but that he now lived in Paris and hadn't been in the United States for three years; this journalistic assignment was just something to do until he went abroad again. Bill made a fire and they sat up till nearly dawn, drinking wine and talking. They talked of their past relationships and of their future.

What happened in the hours, in the days and weeks, that lay ahead is one of the strangest and most perplexing stories in the annals of American crime. It is a story whose principal actors - Hope Masters and the man who called himself Taylor Wright- represented vastly different levels of society. One was a complex and vulnerable member of a rich, prominent family; the other, as it turned out, was at once a bright, persuasive charmer and an unpredictable menacing force. The actions of each of
them proved often to be totally implausible and difficult to comprehend. Some of  questions the case raises will probably never be fully answered, matters that go beyond one murder case into fundamental questions of human behavior, its dynamics, imperatives and, especially, its ambiguity. But scores of interviews conducted over the past year with family members, detectives, defense attorneys, a county prosecutor, judges and prison officials do provide insight and perhaps answers to all that happened, why it happened and whether it reflected a system of fairness and justice.

Hope Masters c.1970s

William Ashlock was found wrapped in a bedspread and shot in the head in a bedroom of the River Valley Ranch in Springville, California. His body was discovered after Tulare County Sheriff's Office received a call from Beverly Hills that something terrible had happened at River Valley Ranch.

Walker (using the name of Taylor Wright which was a name he stole from a jewelry salesman who he had nearly beaten to death in Michigan) told the sheriff's office that Hope had witnessed Ashlock's murder and her life was in danger.

Walker had murdered Ashlock the first night he stayed there. He tied up Hope and alternated between threatening her and pledging to protect her. 

When she asked why he killed Bill, he explained that he was a hit man and his real target was her. He’d been hired, he claimed, by Hope’s second husband, with whom she was in the middle of a divorce, to do a "Sharon-Tate like" massacre and her children also had to be killed.

After Walker called police, Hope contacted her parents who were partial owners of the property, telling them she had witnessed a "hit" and had been raped by the killer.

Over the weekend, Walker spun wild tales of guilt and motives, ultimately persuading Masters to corroborate his alibi. Trapped in the beginning stages of Stockholm Syndrome, she agreed—though her cooperation would later cause her to become an outcast from local society.

Hope Niven Masters is the daughter of Waldemar Van Cott Niven (1911-1978) a prominent Beverly Hills attorney and former husband of Lucy Estelle Doheny, granddaughter of the late oilman E.L. Doheny. This family had their own brush with mystery and scandal when Ned Doheny Jr. and his secretary Hugh Plunkett were found dead in a murder suicide crime in 1928.

Hope's father was one of four owners of the Spring Valley Ranch.

In March, police ran down Walker in North Hollywood where he was using Ashlock's credit cards.

Initially both Walker and Hope were arrested, however she would go on to testify against him. At first Hope refused to identify the man who’d raped her and killed her fiancé, and to this day people can’t agree if it was because she was afraid of him or in love with him.

In 1974, Walker was found guilty of first degree murder, and sentenced to life in prison. He would also be convicted of the rape and brainwashing of Hope Masters. But it was a complicated relationship since Hope visited him twice in prison. However this was part of his M.O.

Walker already had a rap sheet that dated back over two decades. In 1954, he was convicted of armed robbery in Florida, in 1958 of armed robbery in Ohio and in 1969 of shooting an Illinois state trooper in the head. He was also a suspect in various violent crimes, including murder across the United States.

While serving time in Ohio for armed robbery he had seduced and married the prison warden's private secretary. He was paroled on that charge and even had a baby with the secretary.

During his incarceration in Illinois, he manipulated his radical Legal Aid attorney to help him escape from the hospital prison ward in Chicago by faking a medical condition. She even accompanied him when he robbed a gas station at gunpoint.

Three months after Hope Masters visited Walker in prison, he seduced and married Olivia the prison dietitian. He involved her in several escape plots, and frivolous lawsuits. She aided him in the 1980s to acquire brucine poison which he intended to used against the judges and prosecutors who convicted him.

Then he was involved in a mail order scam from his prison cell.

In 1991, FBI profiler Robert Ressler interviewed him in prison. Walker boasted of having committed many crimes that were still unsolved, and for which he never even came under suspicion for.

Now at the age of 93, he has spent the majority of his life incarcerated where hopefully he will remain.

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