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Nathan Nicholas TRUPP

 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 

   
 
 
Classification: Homicide
Characteristics: Mental patient - "Mission from God" - Stalking actor Michael Landon
Number of victims: 5
Date of murders: November 29/December 1, 1988
Date of birth: 1947
Victims profile: Two men and a woman / Armando Torres, 18, and Jeren Beeks, 27 (unarmed security guards)
Method of murder: Shooting
Location: New Mexico/California, USA
Status: Found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed him to an unspecified state mental hospital pn May 25, 1990
 
 
 
 
 
 

On Nov. 29, 1988, Nathan Trupp walked into a Northeast Heights bagel shop and fatally shot two men and a woman. He later eluded police and killed two security guards in Southern California. He was found by a California court to be psychotic.

 
 

While "Highway to Heaven" was in final production in December 1988, Michael Landon had a close encounter with death.  A man named Nathan Trupp, a mental patient wanted in connection with several murders in New Mexico, shot and killed two security guards at Universal Studios, before being felled by a sea of police bullets. 

He had claimed to be on a "mission from God" and, as he toured the sprawling 420-acre studio lot on his general admission ticket, had asked several employees where he could find Michael Landon.

Unable to locate Michael, Trupp walked off the tour tram and went to the guardhouse at the entrance to the compound, where he demanded to use a studio phone to speak to Landon.  When the guards refused, the forty-two-year-old man walked away, only to return a moment later.  He pulled a gun and shot both men through the head, killing one of them instantly.  The other died a short while later at the hospital.

 
 

Mentally Ill Man Admits 2 Killings

Nathan Trupp, who shot the Universal Studios guards in 1988, is sentenced to a mental hospital

By Michael Connelly - Los Angeles Times

May 26, 1990

As members of his victims' families wept, a longtime mental patient admitted in court Friday that he killed two Universal Studios guards while stalking actor Michael Landon. The man was then found not guilty by reason of insanity as part of a plea bargain that prosecutors say will likely keep him confined for life.

Nathan Nicholas Trupp, 43, was committed to a state hospital for the mentally disabled for the Dec. 1, 1988, slayings of Armando Torres, 18, of Los Angeles, and Jeren Beeks, 27, of La Crescenta. The unarmed security guards were shot to death at Universal's main gate, moments after Trupp had been turned away after asking to see Landon, who he believed to be a Nazi

Under terms of the agreement, Trupp pleaded guilty to two counts of murder in Los Angeles Superior Court because prosecutors wanted him to admit that he killed the two guards. But Judge Clarence A. Stromwall, at the request of prosecutors, accepted Trupp's original plea of not guilty by reason of insanity and committed him to an unspecified state mental hospital.

Trupp, who also is accused of killing three people in an Albuquerque, N.M., bagel shop two days before the slayings at Universal Studios, sat attentively in the courtroom, answering "guilty" twice when asked by Deputy Dist. Atty. Sterling E. Norris how he pleaded to the murder charges.

Norris said after the hearing he was satisfied with the agreement and added that it was unlikely Trupp would ever be released from custody. The plea bargain was necessary, Norris said, because convicting Trupp of the two murders would be unlikely. He has a long history of mental illness, and court-appointed psychiatrists who examined him after the shootings concluded he was insane.

"In practical terms, we think he will never be released," Norris said. "It is the result we had to accept. We had three top psychiatrists who found he was insane."

Several friends and members of the families of the two victims attended the hearing. Some burst into tears when the names of the two victims were announced during the reading of the charges. Afterward, the families said they were basically pleased with the plea agreement--as long as Trupp remains in custody.

"I just hope they keep their side of the bargain and keep him in there for life," said Jaime Torres, Armando Torres' older brother. He said that whether Trupp was in a prison or a mental hospital did not matter, "as long as he is not allowed to hurt anyone else."

 

 

 
 
 
 
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