Billy Mayfield — Double Prisoner

Say you're in love with your wife. Say you knew your wife was in bed with another man. Say you got drunk and busted in and shot the guy to death. Say you got 17-to-life. Say you have a literally perfect prison record and should have been out in 2002, but it's 2011 and you're still inside.

Your name is Billy Mayfield, and you're 54 years old, a person so different from the passionate young man who shot Mark Snyder to death in 1985 that the middle aged Billy Mayfield looks back and says to himself, “That was me?”

On March 6th of 2012 Mayfield will appear for the eleventh time before the California Parole Board. The Parole Board ran out of reasons to keep him in prison a long time ago, and a long time ago Judge David Nelson of the Mendocino Superior Court had ordered the Parole Board to find Mayfield “suitable for parole.”

But the Board said, “Well, OK, you can go home, Mr. Mayfield,” but then Governor Schwarzenegger refused to sign the release order, so Mayfield took his parole case to the State Appellate Court's plush suites in San Francisco as then-State Attorney General Jerry Brown, that great liberal, appealed Mayfield's release, and the Appellate Court, in a decision that defies all logic, nevermind justice, reversed Judge Nelson's order to release Mayfield.

All this gets complicated real fast, but it can be boiled down to the determination of the family of the victim to keep Billy Mayfield in prison forever, a Parole Board heavily dominated by the families of crime victims, craven politicians like Schwarzenegger and Brown not wanting to appear “soft on crime,” and an Appellate Court that pays no attention to the facts of the case.

Most significantly, the Mayfield case means that sentencing authority has been removed from dispassionate, vested authority and relocated in biased private persons.

The Appellate Court simply ignored Judge Nelson's irrefutable arguments for Mayfield's release. Maybe they didn't even read the arguments, maybe they were thinking about that evening's dinner reservations — the state appellate judges have that vacuous, permanently distracted I-want-it-all-now northside Frisco look about them — as Mayfield's lawyers, in person, made the case directly to their uncomprehending faces in their big, empty, cathedral-like, leather-chaired courtroom.

And the prisoner continues to be held nine years past his release date.

You judge.

Billy Mayfield met Bridgett Lincoln in 1978 when Bridgett walked into the Mayfield family's Willits Tire Center to pick up some tires for a boyfriend. Along with the tires, Bridgett picked up Billy, and Billy and Bridgett were, Billy says, “off and on for several years before we got married at Lake Tahoe on October 23rd, 1983. We both thought it was time to settle down and start a family.”

The marriage lasted, or at least endured, for a turbulent year until October of 1984 when Bridgett began seeing a 29-year-old Willits man named Mark Snyder more than she was seeing her husband.

Willits is a small town, a very small town. Billy soon heard that his wife and Mark Snyder were being seen together a little too often, and that Bridgett seemed a little too publicly affectionate towards Snyder, seeing as how she was a married woman.

All the while Bridgett was seeing Mark Snyder, she kept on telling Billy that she loved him, that she and Mark Snyder were “just friends.” And Billy went on loving Bridgett and going off to work every day until the horizontal nature of Bridgett's friendship with Snyder became so obvious that even Bridgett's love-numbed husband could no longer pretend that he was the only man in Bridgett's life.

Billy Mayfield said later that he knew Snyder casually “from the local party scene.” The “local party scene” is not likely to be confused with a debutante's ball. The Snyders and the Mayfields couldn't help knowing each other. Like the Mayfields, the Snyders were Mendocino County people. The Mayfields owned and operated the Willits Tire Center, the Snyders lived in Willits. Mark Snyder and his father were members of the Brotherhood of Operating Engineers. Mark was working mostly out of Santa Rosa but lived with his parents in Willits, not far from the Mayfield family's business.

Bridgett's adventure with Mark Snyder began to make both families very nervous, not that Billy's parents had ever cared much for Bridgett to begin with, pegging her early on as unstable and mercenary. It seems likely that the Snyders felt the same way about their son's new love interest.

When Billy could no longer ignore the reality of his wife's infatuation with Mark Snyder, Billy called the Snyder home. He asked Mark to clarify Mark's relationship with Bridgett, who was also known as Mrs. Billy Mayfield.

“I wanted to know what he was doing with my wife. I called his house and left a message that if Mark had anything to speak with me about, to please get hold of me at the shop or at my house east of Willits out toward Pine Mountain. But I never did hear from him directly.”

It was Billy's father, not Billy, who heard back from Mark Snyder. Mark returned Billy's call by telephoning the Mayfield's tire shop. Thinking that he was talking to Billy when he was actually talking to Billy's dad, a belligerent Snyder threatened to harm Billy if Billy didn't leave him alone. Snyder seemed to think he was the injured party. He seemed to think he could sleep with another man's wife without that man complaining about it.

One night in February of 1985, Billy discovered one of his cars parked in Snyder's garage. It was the car Bridgett drove. It was one thing for his wife to be flagrantly in the arms of another man, but it was doubly brazen of Bridgett to expect her husband to subsidize the relationship with free transportation.

That was it for Billy.

Kind of.

The couple filed for divorce in February of 1985, but Billy still had a bad case for Bridgett and wanted her back. And Bridgett told Billy she wanted to be back. In fact, she did return to Billy from time to time, often spending the night with him in their old house east of Willits, loving him while she was with him, and promising they “could work things out.”

Then she'd run straight back to Mark Snyder and tell him that he was the true love of her life. And in between her estranged husband and Mark Snyder, Bridgett managed to fit in at least two other men in hot sheet encounters. She loved them, too, when she was with them.

“We discussed our marriage constantly,” Billy recalls. “Bridgett slept with me when she was at our house every week during our separation, and we talked on the phone almost every day. We even went on a weekend to San Francisco two weeks before the shooting, and right after that she told me she was pregnant, and that it was my baby because she hadn't slept with anyone else. She wasn't pregnant, and she'd had more sexual partners than just Mark and me, as it turned out.”

All day on March 11th of 1985 Bridgett called Billy to tell him she loved him. Bridgett made these calls from Billy's brother's house in Redwood Valley where she was in bed with Mark Snyder in Billy's brother's master bedroom. Billy couldn't stop thinking about Bridgett. She was his wife, she'd said she loved him eight times that day. But, Billy thought, I'll bet right now she's in bed with Mark Snyder. Which she was. Three days before, Billy had driven over to his brother Brent's house where he'd found Bridgett in bed with a man named Ted Davis.

“I fought Davis and ran him off. Bridgett came out of the bathroom, picked up a dinner fork and stabbed me in the hand. I pulled the fork out of my knuckle and out of her hand, slapped her and left. Bridgett filed a complaint with the police then dropped it.”

Three days later, with Bridgett in bed with Snyder at Billy's brother's place in Redwood Valley calling Billy throughout the day to tell him she loved him, Billy got drunk, smoked some pot, and then got drunker with his friend Dave Telemchuck. It was after midnight when Billy asked Telemchuck if he wanted to go for a ride.

“Sure,” a wary Telemchuck said. “I'll go so long as we don't go to your brother's house in Redwood Valley.”

Billy drove straight there, Telemchuck protesting the whole way. “Mark always carries a gun, Billy. Please don't go to your brother's house.” Telemchuck knew something bad was about to happen. Two men with guns, one of the men in bed with the other man's wife.

How could something bad not happen?

Sure enough there was Mark Snyder's truck parked right in front of Billy's brother's house, and there was Bridgett's Plymouth Reliant, the car that Billy funded, both vehicles sitting out front of Billy's brother's house like they belonged there.

The people who did belong there, Billy's brother Brent and his wife, were in Ukiah. Bridgett and Mark were in the master bedroom, asleep in the marital bed of Mrs. and Mrs. Brent Mayfield.

When Billy and Telemchuck got to Redwood Valley and saw that Bridgett and Mark were in the house it was two in the morning. Telemchuck again pleaded with Billy not to do anything.

“Snyder's got a gun, Billy,” Telemchuck reminded Billy. “He always carries a gun.”

Billy, by way of an answer, backed into Snyder's truck, the first time accidentally as he turned around to leave, the second time on purpose, and Billy and Telemchuck drove home to Willits.

“When I got back to Willits,” Billy remembers, “I called the house, my brother Brent's house, because I knew Bridgett and Snyder were there. Nobody answered. I got my gun and went back to Redwood Valley. I climbed through a window and there they were in one of the bedrooms. Snyder had a pistol on the bedstand. He went for it and I shot him.”

Billy, not quite believing what he'd done, yelled, “Oh, my god!” and ran down the hall and right on through a glass door to his truck, “which I wrecked at the turn into my driveway in Willits. I turned myself in about an hour later.”

Bail was set at $125,000. Billy's folks raised the money by putting up their property, and Billy was released to their custody on the condition that he live with them in Ukiah while he awaited trial.

“Bridgett would come and stay with me in Ukiah while I was out on bail; not every week but a few times. Then one day after I'd left the house to run an errand or something, Bridgett took several items, one was a dress belonging to my mother. My sister-in-law drove to where Bridgett stayed in Santa Rosa and got all the things back from Bridgett the same day. Bridgett never came back after that, and I didn't see her again, but she would call off and on, and she'd drive by our house in Ukiah without stopping. She mailed me a couple of cards telling me that she still loved me. But it was over.”

Billy pleaded self-defense.

The Ukiah jury found Billy guilty of second-degree murder, although Billy's attorney, Richard Petersen, made a strong case for lawful self-defense. Snyder would have shot Billy if Billy hadn't shot him first.

Billy got 17-years-to-life. He's been locked up for going on 26 years now. 17-to-life was supposed to mean if Billy got with the prison program he'd be free after 17 years, maybe sooner, maybe the minimum of 10-and-a-half years that would ordinarily apply in his case like his, a crime of passion. Billy got with the program better than any prisoner in the history of California State Prison system. The late Mendocino County District Attorney, Norm Vroman, described Billy “as a Department of Corrections poster child for what a prisoner can do.”

Billy has completed his college degree through UC Davis, and he's compiled the nearly miraculous prison record of not a single disciplinary write-up in all the years he's been confined. Billy is the lead man of the prison's optical lab, a prison-run business generating upwards of $3 million a year. “Lead man” in this booming enterprise is a crucial responsibility rooted in solid technical skills and, of course, trustworthiness.

Mendocino County, to avoid being in the middle of bad feelings between the Mayfield and Snyder families, had pleaded conflict of interest, and had asked the state to step in to prosecute Mayfield.

When Mendocino County stepped aside, the State Attorney General stepped in. They're still prosecuting Mayfield, sending out inflammatory press releases designed to stir up public feeling against the guy just before he goes before the Parole Board, and showing up at every parole hearing to argue against Billy's release.

Michael D. O'Reilley has appeared at Mayfield's last two parole hearings. He told The Willits News just days before Mayfield's annual parole hearing in July of 2007, “On the face of it, I'll admit his prison record these last many years [sic] has been impressive, but there are many inmates who perform well within the structured prison setting.”

O'Reilley also commented that he thought Billy Mayfield's presentation to the parole board was “polished, but I noticed he reverted back [sic] to blaming the victim, blaming the ex-wife. It was clear to me he hasn't learned a thing, he has no remorse,” adding an entirely irrelevant mention of two low intensity domestic violence episodes prior to Billy's incarceration 21 years ago, neither of which were sustained, but which, to O'Reilley anyway, indicated that Billy “continues to be a threat to women.”

Most gratuitously of all, however, was O'Reilley's remark to The Willits News that the state prosecutor thought the letters to the parole board on Billy's behalf were insincere. “I will assume,” O'Reilley said, “some of the letters have been sent in good faith by people who honestly believe what they were writing, but I think a number are sent at the behest of the Mayfield family, and I think those meaningless.”

Billy has lamented every day of his life since the single shot that killed Mark Snyder. He knows in his bones that he should have listened to his friend Telemchuck and stayed home instead of driving to Redwood Valley where his wife was in bed with Snyder in his brother's house.

Twenty-six years later, Billy Mayfield, 54, is not the impulsive, love-crazed man he was at age 28. He readily concedes that he's benefited from the many hours of counseling he's completed in prison. Mayfield has sued the state to get out. Mendocino County Superior Court judge David Nelson agreed the state was holding Billy Mayfield illegally.

Bridgett?

Last anybody heard, she'd been married and divorced two more times.

As for Billy, he appears before the Parole Board for the 11th time on March 6th 2012. In the mean time which, in his case, is a very mean time indeed, “I live,” Billy writes from Vacaville, “in Building 13, a typical Level II security, dormitory-style housing unit. The dorms hold 10-14 men in double bunks for a 260-man capacity. These numbers are down from a high of over 300 — many in triple bunks. Level II security is as low as I'm allowed due to my 'life top' sentence. Level IV are prisons such as Pelican Bay. Level I are support facilities for prisons and camps such as Parlin Forks. I reached Level II status in 1993, having started out at Folsom Level IV and working my way down through various Level IV and Level III prisons, and my record remains unblemished.

“My daily routine centers around my work assignment. I've worked for the Prison Industry Authority in the Solano Optical Laboratory for 13 years. I work 6:45 to 2:45 Monday-Friday, plus overtime when needed. I was trained as an optician and was certified by the American Board of Opticianry in 2001 after passing the ABO exam with a 96%, I've worked in various capacities over the years and I was promoted to leadman about five years ago. The lab employs 75 prisoners at present, down from a high of 125. We produce approximately 500 pairs of eyeglasses daily, over 100,000 pairs last year. These are Medi-Cal glasses, plus glasses for state employees like CHP and Caltrans and prisoner eyewear. I find my work both productive and rewarding, plus I'm top paid at 95 cents an hour. Who said four years of college wouldn't pay off!

“8,000 hours of self-help since coming to prison in 1985, not including four completed vocational trades. These include AA, a youth diversion program, Step Closer, facilitated by the Bay Area Women Against Rape,

“I exercise regularly, enjoy Nascar, the Niners, and a good pinochle game. Charlie Rose and Deadliest Catch.”

Letters on Mayfield's behalf should be addressed to CSP Solano. Attention Lifer Unit. Re: Mayfield, CDC D20090, Box 4000, Vacaville, CA 95696.