Bonin’s execution, the first in California in nearly 13 years, was delayed eight minutes past midnight as technicians worked to put an intravenous drip in his arm.Bonin, who had been on death row for 14 years, wept as he waited to die. He was the first Californian to die by lethal injection since the state began providing it as an alternative to the gas chamber, a method of killing denounced by death penalty opponents as barbaric and challenged in a recent law suit. A nightclub disc jockey who was raped by Bonin in 1975 at the age of 14, Mr McVicker was one of the last of the victims to be left alive.Bonin’s victims often were teenagers thumbing a lift, and his preferred method of killing, after sexually abusing and torturing them, was choking with a tourniquet. Bonin is gone,” said David McVicker, as he passed round paper cups in the prison car park.

TIM CORNWELL

A serial killer convicted of murdering and raping 14 boys was executed by lethal injection in San Quentin prison early yesterday. William Bonin, a truck driver, was known as the “Freeway Killer” who terrorised southern California in the late 1970s.
One surviving victim of 49-year-old Bonin joined relatives of others in toasting his death with champagne “It is justice. The local party chairman has opted for Mr Forbes’s flat-tax message, but fields angry messages from Buchanan supporters.”Pat is telling the American people what they want to hear,” he said, “but taxes is the root of all evil in Big Government.”. The incident has spurred on a longstanding gripe in Western states, where conservatives now demand the “return” of huge tracts of federal land.Kingman’s Mr Republican is Roy Dunton, who moved to the city in 1939 to work on his uncle’s gold mine and graduated to own a car dealership and Mr D’s. Tourists pass through on their way to the Grand Canyon, which like about 90 per cent of Arizona’s land is owned and run by the US government.When the federal treasury ran out of money in the budget crisis this winter, the park was closed, and President Bill Clinton is roundly blamed for it locally. His anti-immigrant call for walling off the Mexican border has alarmed Arizona’s corporate chiefs, who have moved to the free-trader, Steve Forbes.But Kingman, sitting on a crossroads between Las Vegas and Phoenix, is fertile Buchanan territory.

Its southern neighbour, Mexico, has become the number one export market for a growing high technology sector.Mr Buchanan was booed on Thursday at a civic parade in Tucson, the state’s most liberal big city, with a large minority of Mexican immigrants. The old West and the new meet in Arizona, the only state that has gone Republican in every presidential election since 1948, and the primary, with 37 delegates up for grabs in a winner-take-all vote, is touted as a bellwether for the region.It is one of America’s fastest-growing states, a favoured destination for Californian exiles. The state moved its primary forward to be first in the West, and had hoped to catapult Mr Gramm into contention. His withdrawal has left a vacuum which Mr Buchanan is well poised to exploit, party leaders believe.”Phil Gramm was my guy and when he quit, he left me alone,” said Bernice Roberts, party chairman in Maricopa County, which includes the burgeoning city of Phoenix and half of Arizona’s 4 million people.She is unsure which way to jump, along with most of the state’s Republicans, according to polls.

If Mr McCarty can be bothered to leave his desert shack on Tuesday, he will vote for Pat Buchanan.”He’s the closest to the way I feel,” he said, “though he don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of being elected”.Senator Phil Gramm, with his stalwart conservatism and his unimpeachable anti-abortion record, pulled out of the presidential race after he failed to generate any enthusiasm in Iowa or New Hampshire But in Arizona the Republican establishment embraced him. Restaurants have taken to hanging “no guns allowed” signs, much to the disgust of Walt “Mac” McCarty.The ex-Marine gave shooting classes to Tim McVeigh, the accused Oklahoma City bomber who hung out in Kingman for months with his army buddy, Michael Fortier, before heading east. Then FBI agents and the journalists pursuing them flooded the cheap motels on Andy Devine Road, named for the local hero who played plump cowboys in B westerns opposite Roy Rogers. TIM CORNWELL

Kingman, Arizona
Guns and taxes are on the menu at Mr D’s, a diner deep in the heart of conservative back country.