Editor's note: The New York State Legislature is expected to vote next week to try to override Gov. Mario Cuomo's seventh consective death-penalty veto. Are some criminals so evil that death is their only just punishment? Some say the case of a professional gambler from Central New York makes that point obvious. Herbert Coddington, one of the smartest graduates of Central Square's Paul V. Moore High School on 1976, is on death row in California.

As an insecure prodigy in Brewerton, he used to have this dream. He's in his bedroom, making out with a girl from his high school in Central Square. In walks his mother, making him feel angry and ashamed.

He is 30 now and has another recurring dream. He walks into a crowded room, and everyone turns to look at him.

Again, he feels ashamed. They know he is Herbert Coddington.

They know he strangled two women and wrapped their bodies in trash bags. They know he molested two girls and is sentenced to die in California's gas chamber.

"Probably the most normal thing about me,'' he says, "are my dreams.''

He is remembered as one of the smartest graduates of the 1976 class at Paul V. Moore High School. Smart, but odd. When he hung out with anyone, he hung out with the kids who didn't fit in anywhere else in Brewerton and Central Square. His was a clique of nerds and loners.

He embraced the image. While other students wore faded jeans and T-shirts, Coddington wore crisp shirts and pants with precise creases. In the third grade, he carried his briefcase to school, unsnapped it and began selling Creepy Crawler toys he had made. He grew up in a neat home at 9449 Woodlawn Drive in Brewerton.

His father is an electrical engineer at General Electric. G. Herbert Coddington works on a secret defense contract there. He used to be on the school board.

His mother, Genevieve, worked part time as a dental technician. She's a frequent volunteer at St. Agnes Church. For a while, they lived in two other states. Now they live in Baldwinsville.

Above all, Coddington was smart. A psychologist who examined him measured his IQ at more than 140. He has a keen ability to remember numbers. He recalls the first time he slept with a woman -- June 23, 1975. He remembers his SAT scores -- 640 verbal, 670 math.

No one suspected what would happen.

On May 18, 1987, during his interrogation by police in South Lake Tahoe, Calif., Coddington admitted killing the two elderly women. He said he was trying to make a statement, that too many people smoke cigarettes and laws against drunken driving are too lax. The jury voted for the death penalty partly because Coddington showed no remorse.

He is in San Quentin Prison on death row. His home is a solitary cell. He has grown a beard and let his hair grow a few inches longer than it was in high school.

Two hundred miles away in Reno, Nev., Jim Whiting has moved into the house where his mother lived before Coddington strangled her with an electrician's tool.

When Coddington awoke on the morning of Saturday, May 16, 1987, he was ready to get to work. The fake business cards were in his wallet; the soundproof chamber was in his trailer's guest room. He had the Hefty Cinch Sack garbage bags and the Flex-cuffs, plastic ties that electricians use to bind bunches of wire.

For years, the idea of imprisoning a young girl had drifted in and out of his mind. He really liked "Sweet Hostage,'' the 1975 television movie. Martin Sheen plays a smart mental patient who kidnaps Linda Blair. They fall in love.

Would it work out like that for Coddington?

He'd tried the Marines and drifted between dead-end jobs for years before moving to the gambling cities of Nevada.

At the blackjack tables, Coddington used a memory system to account for every card that had been played. He won $200,000 in five years. More than once he flew to Europe to gamble.

By 1986, he was beginning to lose his mind. He began to interpret insignificant motions by the dealer as messages. A succession of face cards, or just the sight of certain cards, provided other signs. That year, his parents lent him $300.

Coddington looked for other signals when making decisions about shopping, women, friendships, whatever. Traffic signals, he said, became signs from God.

For Mabs Martin, May 16 was a busy day. Once the two girls from her modeling agency arrived at her home in Reno, Nev., she had to go pick up her friend Dorothy ``Dotty'' Walsh, 67. Then they had to drive to South Lake Tahoe, about an hour away. Martin, 69, was hoping to leave by 7:45 a.m. and be back by about 12:30 p.m.

She was excited about this trip to Tahoe. She was taking the girls to meet a producer from Georgia, who was making a commercial against drug use. Two days earlier he had come to her studio and selected the girls he wanted to use: Alecia, 14, and Monica, 12.

Martin was eager to help. It was a good opportunity for her models. She hated drug abuse and was a member of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

On Friday, the day before she left for Tahoe, Mabs Martin worked in her flower garden with her son, Jim Whiting. As she raked and Jim weeded, she admonished him to always beware of other people and their motives. He remembers the message well:

Whiting had heard her say this many times.

The producer told Martin he would meet her and the girls at the Nugget, the first casino she would see as Highway 50 brought them into South Lake Tahoe.

The trip took longer than expected. The curves of Highway 50 as it climbs through the Sierras made Monica carsick. Martin stopped her Chrysler Fifth Avenue so Monica could hang her head out the window.

At the Nugget, the girls waited in the casino's restaurant with Walsh while Martin went to look for ``Marc,'' the producer. She found him in the parking lot, and all five herded into Martin's car.

First, they would freshen up at a mobile home across the state line in California, the producer said. Then they would shoot the commercial in a nearby park.

The producer got into the back seat with Alecia and Monica. At the audition, Marc had been neatly dressed in a suit and tie. In the car he wore a shirt and sweatpants. A sheen of sweat covered his face. Alecia thought he smelled bad.

Martin parked the car under a carport in the Tahoe Verde trailer park. Then they all went through a side entrance.

The producer motioned his visitors into what he said was a room in which the girls could change their clothes. The producer followed.

For weeks Herb Cottington had been hauling plywood and sheets of carpet to the guest room, where he built his sound-proof sex chamber.

Martin, Walsh, Alecia and Monica had never seen a dressing room quite like it. They looked at him, expecting an explanation.

Herb Coddington punched Alecia in the jaw.

Then he started punching Martin and Walsh. He pummeled them around their torsos and pushed them down. He'd been working out on a punching bag.

Coddington tied up the girls and threw their jackets over their heads so they couldn't see.

But Alecia could see part of what was happening. Martin was on her knees as Coddington tied her arms and legs behind her. Then he cinched something around her neck.

Alecia heard her gag and cough as she fell onto her side. Those were the last sounds heard from Mabs Martin.

Walsh clutched her purse as the man approached again.

Coddington grabbed the purse, but she wouldn't let go. He hit her again and again on her head. Blood fell, staining the shag rug and soaking the plywood wall of the makeshift room. He left the room for a few moments, and she vomited.

He returned with an electrician's flexcuff. He tightened it around her neck until it was as narrow as a wrist.

As a kid, one of Coddington's closest friends was Joanne Garner, who works now at Deluxe Checkprinters in Liverpool. They spent summers at Oneida Lake, where Garner lived near Herb's grandparents.

As children, they swam, played cards, croquet and board games and talked about important things, like the Vietnam War and how comical the hippies in the anti-war movement seemed. In high school, they went steady. It lasted only a few weeks. Herb wanted something more from the relationship than Garner wanted, she said.

Garner has thought back to her childhood, trying to think of something that might have revealed the violent streak that runs deep in Herb Coddington. Each time, she comes up with nothing.

Coddington did have a few girlfriends. In Las Vegas, he lived with a girl named Kelly Cluff. She told a police investigator that Herb was rather peculiar in their relationship. She used the word pervert. She told Las Veagas Detective Robert Leonard that Coddington liked to shave off her pubic hair and tell her she looked like a 10-year-old. Sometimes he called her a bad little girl, spanked her, and then consoled her.

The detective asked Kelly about the time in August 1981 when she told Herb they couldn't have sex anymore. Days later, a 12-year-old girl named Sheila Keister was raped and strangled in Las Vegas. In 1987, a medical examiner concluded the bite marks on one of her nipples were made by Herb Coddington.

Hawkins examined a number of notes Coddington jotted down to himself.

Coddington charted the number of times he masturbated -- as many as 36 times a day, said Hawkins.

Since he moved to Las Vegas at the age of 21, Coddington has returned to Central New York to visit relatives during several summers.

Late Saturday morning, Coddington wrapped the old ladies' bodies in garbage bags and dragged them into the master bedroom.

Her left the house to move Martin's car to a shopping plaza. When he returned to the soundproof room he asked the girls if they were OK.

When he returned, he brought a .45-caliber handgun that had a 12-inch silencer and a laser scope that projected a beam to indicate where a bullet would hit.

At dinner time, he brought in grapefruits, raisins and a jug of water. Eventually, the girls fell asleep.

When they awoke, they thought it was morning because they could hear cars rolling by outside. They also heard grunts and groans coming from the living room. Coddington was working out. They called out to him, and he came to the door of the room. It had two eyeholes cut in it. He told them they could work out soon, too.

When he came back in their room he wore a red ski cap and a turtleneck shirt pulled up over his nose and mouth to conceal his face. A few strands of hair peeked out from under the hat. They were orange. Coddington was coloring his hair to change his looks. 

He let the girls come out, and they worked out to the Jane Fonda exercise tape. Then he put them back in the chamber and tied pillow cases over their heads. He told them they were going to act in a sex video he was making for European distribution. He said he had abducted a little boy who would act with them.

Coddington went out into the living room again and talked in a deep voice. He was pretending there was a director out there cautioning a young boy. Coddington ran a tape recorder.

The girls said they felt hands massaging them. Then they were molested. At one point, Alecia started crying. ``Please don't kill me,'' she sobbed.

Coddington answered in the voice of a little boy.

Detective Steve O'Brien's phone rang on Sunday morning. Get in to work, his boss told him. Four people are missing. The FBI is already involved.

They had one good clue: Another model had seen Coddington walk to his car the day of the audition. She thought his license plate said "TV TEEN.'' The police worked that plate, but it turned up nothing. Then someone theorized that maybe the plate had said TVETEN, the name of a used car dealer in South Lake Tahoe who put those promotional plates on cars he sold. Joe Tveten, it turned out, had loaned Coddington a plate to use on his BMW.

At 11:30 a.m. Monday, the FBI and police showed Tveten a composite drawing of the man they were looking for. Yes, that's my friend, he said. He told them where Coddington lived.

The FBI, unsure of what was happening inside, decided to send two agents to the door, to interview Coddington. As they approached, dozens of officers surrounded the house. O'Brien was among them.

As the agents neared the door, the lights in the house went out. The agents nervously retreated.

Baker called Coddington on the phone at 9:19 p.m. As they talked, agents and police stormed in. Coddington was in the hallway near the kitchen. He got down on the ground as ordered. In the house, police found three handguns and two rifles.

The agents tried to calm the girls, who were scared and frantic. The police peeled back part of the plastic bags in the master bedroom. They had found the chaperones.

Just after the siege, Coddington was scared and crying, O'Brien said.

Coddington himself had wanted to join the FBI. After the semester at Oswego State, he joined the Marines, hoping to serve a hitch and then move to the FBI or the CIA -- some kind of intelligence work. After he finished boot camp at Parris Island, they gave him a menial job at a typewriter. He was so angry he returned home, AWOL. The Marines decided he was mentally unfit and gave him an honorable discharge.

During the ride to the police station, he seemed excited at being the center of attention, O'Brien said. He was eager to tell the police all the details.

He said he killed the women because they were making too much noise and were too hard to control. He said he planned the crime as a protest of problems like too many people smoking cigarettes and laws against drunken driving being too lenient.

One day last week, O'Brien returned to Coddington's trailer. It hasn't been rented since the raid, and several of Coddington's belongings were inside. On a dresser in the bedroom was a Boy Scout pin given for two years of membership. A few inches away was a gambling chip.

After his arrest, Coddington wrote a letter to his family.

Coddington's case attracted so much attention that Judge Terrence Finney agreed to hold the trial about 60 miles away, in Placerville, where potential jurors weren't as familiar with the crime.

Placerville is a town that sprang up during the gold rush of 1849. The logging industry helped it survive beyond the gold rush years, but the people of Placerville still cling to the town's colorful past, which included a tradition of vigilante justice. A number of businesses in town still bear the town's 19th century name -- "Hangtown.''

There were three phases to the trial. One was held to determine Coddington's guilt or innocence. The jury found he had committed the crime. The second was to determine his sanity. The jurors agreed Coddington had known what he was doing and knew it was wrong. And partly because of the fact he had planned out every last detail, they voted for the death penalty on Sept. 21, 1988.

In San Quentin, Coddington's days are tedious and frightening. He told the woman who wrote up his probation report that he would rather be put to death soon than to wait years.

No date has been set for his execution. Every capital case requires an appeal. "It's very lonely, very frustrating, a lot of boredom. I spend a lot of time thinking,'' he said. "It's not any country club, that's a myth. You always have to watch your back. I'm in a yard where everybody in there will kill you for a dollar. There was somebody stabbed in front of me the first hour I was here.''

As a matter of morality, he is against the death penalty. There was a time when he was for it.

A few months after the death verdict was announced, Judge Finney was required to confirm whether he thought the death penalty was appropriate for Coddington's crime.

Coddington's parents wrote to the judge, pleading for leniency. His mother's letter was the most emotional.

Finney said the letters from Coddington's parents caused him "great emotional turmoil.''

"I have to think that Mr. Coddington's conduct in this case is probably the most evil . . . that I have ever been involved in.''

*****

MURDER'S CONVICTED HERE SINCE 1987

Seven men and a woman have been convicted of murder in Onondaga County since 1987. Thirteen other killers have been convicted of first-degree manslaughter. Four have been convicted of second-degree manslaughter; six of criminally negligent homicide. Two pleaded to burglary charges to dispose of murder cases. Six were acquitted. Another had a murder case dismissed for lack of evidence. One defendant entered a plea of not responsible because of mental disease or defect. Charges from another homicide were disposed of in Family Court. Here are the convicted murderers:

WILLIAM R. "BILLY'' BLAKE JR. Born: Oct. 16, 1963.

Former address: 211 Holland St.

Crime: Convicted June 29, 1987, of first-degree murder and other charges.

Victim: Onondaga County Sheriff's Department jail deputy David R. Clark, 33, of Lyncourt. He was shot once in the chest with his partner's service revolver during an escape attempt outside DeWitt Town Court the evening of Feb. 10, 1987. Clark died the next day.

Punishment: Sentenced July 10, 1987, by County Court Judge J. Kevin Mulroy to serve 57 1/2 years to life in prison. An additional 20 to 40 years was later added on by visiting County Court Judge Wallace Van C. Auser for drug and robbery convictions.

Prison: Shawangunk Correctional Facility, Ulster County.

Parole: Eligible Aug. 4, 2064.

*****

QUENTION BROWN JR. Born: June 16, 1965.

Former address: 4025 Onondaga Blvd.

Crime: Convicted Oct. 15, 1987, of second-degree murder.

Victim: Tammy McCaffrey, 21, of 109 Onondaga Ave. She was beaten with a tire iron and left to die in a wooded area off Holmes Road in the town of Onondaga on Jan. 19, 1987.

Punishment: Sentenced Nov. 20, 1987, by visiting state Supreme Court Justice Lee Clary to 25 years to life.

Prison: Auburn Correctional Facility.

Parole: Eligible Feb. 22, 2012.

*****

DONALD W. HOGLEN Born: Dec. 13, 1966.

Former address: 509 Ash St.

Crime: Convicted Dec. 3, 1987, of second-degree murder and other charges.

Victim: Dorothy Day Golly, 71, of 200 Spring St., Fayetteville. She was choked from behind and left bound and gagged during a robbery in her apartment on May 15, 1987.

Punishment: Sentenced Jan. 6, 1988, by County Court Judge William J. Burke to 25 years to life.

Prison: Auburn Correctional Facility.

Parole: Eligible May 10, 2012.

*****

LOUISE A. PITCHER Born: Feb. 23, 1957.

Address: 155 Fitch St.

Crime: Pleaded guilty Sept. 28, 1987, to second-degree murder.

Victim: Dorothy Day Golly, 71, of 200 Spring St., Fayetteville.

Punishment: Sentenced Oct. 26, 1987, by County Court Judge William J. Burke to 15 years to life.

Prison: Bedford Hills Correctional Facility.

Parole: Eligible May 7, 2002.   (rehearing March 2008)

*****

JAMES A. MATTESON JR. Born: July 7, 1963.

Former address: 308 W. Second St., Oswego.

Crime: Convicted Sept. 15, 1988, of second-degree murder.

Victim: Onondaga Community College student John L. Fortino, 19, of 149 Lilac St. He was stabbed four times on Feb. 28, 1988, during a burglary at his girlfriend's home at 3108 Cold Springs Road in Lysander.

Punishment: Sentenced Nov. 4, 1988, by County Court Judge Patrick J. Cunningham to 25 years to life.

Prison: Committed suicide in Attica Correctional Facility on June 13, 1989.

*****

RONNIE A. MITCHELL Born: June 3, 1966.

Former address: 709 E. Fayette St.

Crime: Convicted Feb. 26, 1987, of second-degree murder.

Victim: Bryant & Stratton Business Institute student Christopher Millhouse, 19, of 118 McAllister Ave. He was stabbed once in the heart May 11, 1986.

Punishment: Sentenced April 23, 1987, by County Court Judge William J. Burke to 18 years to life.

Prison: Elmira Correctional Facility.

Parole: Eligible May 9, 2004. (rehearing Feb. 2010)

*****

JAMIE BRUCE MORTON Born: May 25, 1958.

Former address: 3215 James St.

Crime: Convicted April 8, 1988, of second-degree murder.

Victim: Syracuse University graduate student Linda Ruth Akers, 24, of 3215 James St. She was stabbed in the chest with a butcher knife on Aug. 31, 1987.

Punishment: Sentenced May 25, 1988, by County Court Judge J. Kevin Mulroy to serve 25 years to life.

Prison: Clinton Correctional Facility.

Parole: Eligible Aug. 25, 2012.

*****

WILLIAM ST. GERMAIN Born: Dec. 5, 1963.

Former address: 418 Shonnard St.

Crime: Pleaded guilty Sept. 13, 1988, to second-degree murder and first-degree rape.

Victim: Kara Schoff, 3, of 514 Kirkpatrick St. She was raped and her throat was slashed before she was left floating in a bathtub of water in her home on March 18, 1988.

Punishment: Sentenced Oct. 12, 1988, by County Court Judge J. Kevin Mulroy to serve 23 years to life.

Prison: Clinton Correctional Facility.

Parole: Eligible March 13, 2011.

Herbert James Coddington