Denise Notinelli remembers the perfectly pressed clothing, the manicured nails, the hands she looked at and imagined around her mother’s throat.
It was April 26, 2006.
Daryl Mack, 47, the man who killed her mother nearly two decades earlier, was lying on a gurney in the execution chamber at Nevada State Prison in Carson City, prepared for the state to kill him.
He had eaten his last meal: a fish sandwich, fries and a soda. He had rejected offers of Valium tablets.
A prison staffer hidden behind one-way glass sent a cocktail of drugs into his body via an IV: sodium thiopental to knock him out, pancuronium bromide to paralyze his lungs and stop his breathing, potassium chloride to end the beating of his heart, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported at the time.
By 9:06 p.m., he was dead.
Like 10 of the other 12 inmates executed since Nevada reinstated capital punishment in 1977, Mack was a “volunteer,” meaning he gave up his appeals and agreed to be put to death. No one has been executed by the state since Mack, but the death penalty is still on the books in Nevada, still sought by prosecutors and still hotly contested.
Notinelli, now 64, watched the execution with her siblings.
“We’re all crying and trying to console each other,” she said.
Afterward, she said, “I think we were all shocked. I don’t know if I can use the word ‘relieved,’ because, like I said, he can’t hurt anybody anymore, but we still have to live with the fact that we don’t have our mom.”
The murder
A neighbor found Betty May, 55, dead in her Reno boarding house room in October 1988, according to court records. Medical experts at trial said she had been strangled to death. A prosecution witness indicated that she had also been raped.
In 1999, Mack was serving a life without parole sentence for murdering a woman named Kim Parks when authorities matched his DNA to evidence at the crime scene, including semen, blood stains on May’s blouse, and blood and tissue found under her fingernails, according to court records.
Her son, Charles May, said his mother did not know Mack.
“She fought for her life,” said Notinelli. “She was just a little thing.”
Prosecutors sought the death penalty based on aggravating factors, including that the murder was committed during a sexual assault or attempted sexual assault, according to records.
I think we were all shocked. I don’t know if I can use the word ‘relieved,’ because, like I said, he can’t hurt anybody anymore, but we still have to live with the fact that we don’t have our mom.
They also showed that Mack had an extensive criminal history, including his conviction for strangling a second woman to death in 1994 at a Reno motel.
Mack requested a bench trial, was found guilty and was then sentenced to death by a three-judge panel, a sentencing method since deemed unconstitutional.
“It was his decision,” said Jeremy Bosler, who represented Mack at trial as a public defender. “Maybe he thought that a three-judge panel, people who’ve heard other cases, would realize this was not such an atypical murder that it deserved the death penalty.”
He said that during the trial, he and another defense attorney challenged the facts of the underlying murder.
“There was no confession,” Bosler said. “There was no eyewitness to the crime itself. It was built on the blood evidence and circumstances surrounding the discovery of the body, and so one could argue that that’s not sufficient to establish murder.”
Then-Washoe County District Judge James Hardesty, who presided over Mack’s trial and sat on the panel that sentenced him, said he found the DNA evidence persuasive.
The death sentence
A Supreme Court ruling indicates that Mack addressed the panel during the sentencing process.
“He offered condolences to May’s family and apologized to his own family,” the ruling said. “He said that he could not find words to express his shame. Mack asked the panel for the opportunity to continue his rehabilitation in prison.”
Attorney Marc Picker, who represented Mack post-conviction, said Mack never admitted guilt in May’s killing.
Court records note that Mack had suffered from anxiety and psychotic disorders since being incarcerated and had a history of abusing controlled substances, though there was no evidence he had been on drugs at the time of the murder. He had also witnessed domestic violence as a child.
Hardesty described the sentencing as stressful and emotional, but said he believed the sentencing panel identified appropriate mitigating and aggravating factors. The main factor on which they relied was that the murder occurred during a sexual assault, court records show.
“This was a terrible crime committed on a very nice lady who didn’t deserve to have happen to her what happened to her,” he said. “She was strangled to death, she was sexually assaulted, she suffered a brutal death. And I’m not saying that the death penalty should be an eye for an eye. That’s not the case at all. But I do believe that the statute at the time provided a balancing test and we performed that balancing test.”
The system makes capital punishment arbitary and rife with opportunities for error, said Mack’s former attorney.
That Mack was a volunteer for the death penalty “shows that the death penalty in Nevada really is the most inefficient, brutal and expensive assisted suicide program in the world,” said Bosler. “It’s not operating as designed, and even its design should raise questions.”
This was a terrible crime committed on a very nice lady who didn’t deserve to have happen to her what happened to her. She was strangled to death, she was sexually assaulted, she suffered a brutal death. And I’m not saying that the death penalty should be an eye for an eye. That’s not the case at all. But I do believe that the statute at the time provided a balancing test and we performed that balancing test.
The execution
The Nevada Supreme Court affirmed Mack’s death sentence in 2003. Mack gave up his appeals and said he wanted to be executed by lethal injection, according to prior Review-Journal coverage.
“It doesn’t matter so much because I base my decision elsewhere,” he told a psychiatrist in 2005. “I don’t want to grow old in prison. I don’t have a choice but to be in here and wait. My decision is based on limited options. Stay in here or not; 25 to 30 years I wait, or (I) die and I don’t have to wait anymore.”
His mother tried to stop the execution and questioned his competency in a petition to the state Supreme Court, but the high court rejected her attempt.
Picker said he had Mack examined to see if he was competent to give up his appeals. Two doctors said he was and one said he wasn’t, according to the attorney.
He said Mack didn’t exactly want to be executed.
“He was fairly certain he would never get out of prison,” said Picker. The attorney said Mack — after a conversion to Islam — also accepted that he had been found guilty and felt the judgment needed to be carried out.
“I think you can say he was accepting of his fate,” he said.
Retired Nevada Supreme Court Justice Bill Maupin said he spent most of the evening Mack was executed on the phone with then-Gov. Kenny Guinn, who died in 2010.
Guinn did not have authority under clemency rules to stay the execution by himself and was not trying to stop it, Maupin recalled. But Maupin had the power to delay the execution and was willing to do so.
“He might have had a chance to get relief, but he did not want any relief,” said the retired justice.
After a long discussion, he said, he and Guinn decided not to interfere.
“To paraphrase, (Guinn) thought they were just torturing this man, being in prison like that” with mental problems, said Maupin.
Maupin was in Carson City that night but had no interest in witnessing the execution. To do so would have been “ghoulish,” he said.
Notinelli said she doesn’t recall having an opinion on capital punishment until the issue became personal. She thought the death penalty was appropriate for Mack.
“I believe if you do something like that and you take someone’s life, you need to die, too,” she said.
The day of the execution, she waited for hours. It “was like you had a pound of books on you and you’re walking with all this heaviness,” she said.
She remembered that Mack smiled a “cheshire cat grin” before he died and said, “Allah is great,” details a Review-Journal account of the execution noted, too.
Charles May also recalled Mack grinning at the prosecutor who had worked on his case “like he was getting away with something.”
“I thought that was just a disrespectful thing to do,” he said. “There’s no remorse there.”
After the execution, he told reporters the execution was a great Mother’s Day present.
“I think justice was served,” he said recently. “They talk about closure, and that’s just a freaking word. Closure’s just a term. In reality, I don’t think we ever get real closure because we’ve lost someone we love.”
He would like executions to resume.
The victim and her children
Notinelli described her mother as a “hippie girl” who loved music, especially Jim Morrison, Motown, Carly Simon and the Carpenters.
She’d play tapes on a reel-to-reel player while her family ate dinner. She taught her children how to dance. And she was such an animal lover that at one time, the family had about 33 cats and a dog, according to her daughter.
“She was the kind of mom that let her kids go out in the yard and play and knew we were safe,” said Notinelli. “She was the kind of mom that (when) she’d wash the dishes at night, we’d come up behind her and say, ‘I love you,’ and she’d turn around and she’d say, ‘I love you’ back.”
But Notinelli said her mother could also be abusive.
She remembers her mom sometimes locking her and her sister in a room with a bucket to use as a bathroom, trying in her own way to protect them while she left the house. She thinks her mother didn’t know how to discipline because she herself had suffered abuse.
“Sometimes, I think that she didn’t want all the kids that she had in her life,” said her daughter. “It just happened that way.”
Charles May, the victim’s son, now 68, said his mother was not abusive, but essentially had to raise him and his siblings on her own while his father was in the Navy. He thought of her as his best friend.
“She was somebody that just liked having fun and enjoying life,” he said. “And she showed us so many things like art and music and appreciation for nature.”
When Notinelli was 12, her parents divorced, she said. She and her sister lived with her father after that, she said, and her brother stayed with their mother.
Though they stayed in touch by phone, she was 16 when she last saw her mother. “She kept saying, ‘You’re so big,’” said Notinelli.
Charles May said his mother worked as a motel maid in Reno after her divorce. She got along better with cats than people, he said, but they saw each other weekly and would get dinner together. For a while, mother and son were neighbors in the same rooming house.
When Notinelli got married at Lake Tahoe, she wanted her mother to attend. “She couldn’t go,” she said. “She had to go to work.”
She feels like she was robbed of the opportunity to know her mother. She still thinks about her almost every day.
“I wish I could change things,” she said. “I wish I could reverse things. I wish I could bring her back. I’d take care of her.”
Contact Noble Brigham at nbrigham@reviewjournal.com.
