Pages past — Jan. 16

On this date ...

1976: Stanley Deon Melton gave a jailhouse interview the day he was scheduled to leave Clovis for death row in the state penitentiary at Santa Fe.

“The death penalty is the second-best solution as far as I’m concerned,” he told Bill Southard of the Clovis News-Journal.

“ The best solution would have been in 1973, if they’d have given me the help when I asked for it.”

Melton said he’d been involved in an automobile accident and had requested psychiatric help he never received.

Melton killed Sarah Vineyard, 30, a Clovis convenience store clerk and single mother of two from Melrose, in 1975. Prosecutors said she was raped and savagely beaten.

“This one would be in the top three of the most horrific murder cases that I worked,” said Caleb Chandler, who worked 24 years as a Clovis policeman, in a 2006 interview.

Melton’s death penalty was commuted to life. He died of cancer in a prison facility in Los Lunas in 2006.

Pages Past is compiled by Editor David Stevens. For more regional history, check out his weblog at:

http://www.highplainsyesterdays.com