The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation reported that Darryl T. Kemp, a death row inmate, died at the age of 88 last Saturday within the confines of the California Medical Facility's hospice unit. Kemp, sentenced to death for a first-degree murder that occurred in 1978, succumbed to what has been deemed natural causes at 9:45 p.m., as pronounced by a registered nurse.
His life, marred by violent crime, came to a close in the same institutional embrace that had defined much of Kemp's existence. His criminal record dates back to a 1960 conviction for first-degree murder, at which time he was sentenced to death. However, following a seismic shift in legislation, when the death penalty was declared unconstitutional in 1972, his sentence was commuted. Kemp's life then entered a cycle of incarceration, tentative freedom, and retribution. Paroled in 1978, only to return to the system following another murder.
The details of his death were relayed through an announcement by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. His final days were spent under medical care, a far cry from the steep embankments of the Lafayette reservoir, where his life and that of his 1978 victim intersected fatally.
His 2009 sentencing by Contra Costa County marked the end of a long search, putting to rest a cold case that lingered dormant until DNA linked Kemp to the grisly past. Released on parole in 1978 after his initial death sentence's commutation, Kemp lived as a nominally free man until his capture for subsequent crimes. He would ultimately see his parole discharged at the statutory maximum in 1981, only to be found later as the missing piece to a puzzle of unsolved violence.
