Infamous 'Zebra killer’ found dead in San Quentin cell 
 
 One of the four “Zebra killers,” whose string of racially motivated slayings terrorized San Francisco in the 1970s, was found dead in his cell at San Quentin State Prison, corrections officials said Friday. 
 
 The body of J.C.X. Simon, who was accused nearly 40 years ago of killing 14 random victims and wounding seven others on San Francisco streets, died alone in his cell of unknown causes Thursday night, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. He was pronounced dead at 11:59 p.m. inside the prison. 
 
 “The cause of death is pending an autopsy,” said Krissi Khokhobashvili, a spokeswoman for the corrections department. “All that can be released at this point is that he was unresponsive in his cell.” 
 
 The 69-year-old Simon was convicted in San Francisco of two counts of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder and assault with a deadly weapon in 1976 after the killing spree, which prompted what authorities said was the biggest manhunt in the city’s history. He was serving a life sentence with the possibility of parole when he died. 
 
 Simon and three other black men — Larry Green, Manuel Moore and Jessie Lee Cooks — went on a six-month rampage from October 1973 to April 1974. They targeted white people, mostly at night along the Divisadero Street corridor. 
 
 The 14 victims were mostly shot in the back or the back of the head execution-style. The slayings were called the “Zebra” murders because of the special radio band, the Z channel, that investigators used. 
 
 The seven victims who survived the attacks were crucial in finding the culprits, detectives said. 
 
 One of the survivors was future Mayor Art Agnos, who was then a 35-year-old social worker. He had left a meeting in Potrero Hill on Dec. 13, 1973, and was walking to his car when he said he heard a loud popping noise at Wisconsin and 23rd streets. Agnos at first tried to calm the people fleeing the gunshots when he realized he had been shot twice in the back. 
 
 The intensive manhunt, overseen by Mayor Joseph Alioto, lasted several months and included a $30,000 reward for information about the killers. At one point the mayor authorized police to stop and question any black man who resembled witnesses’ descriptions. The practice, which resulted in the questioning of hundreds of innocent men, was eventually halted by a federal judge. 
 
 Police, acting on a tip by an informant, eventually raided an apartment complex at 844 Grove St., in the old Fillmore district. Seven men were arrested, but only Cooks, Green, Moore and Simons were charged. 
 
 The killings were among several horrific and bloody events in the late 1960s and 1970s by San Francisco radicals, including the Zodiac serial killer, the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Rev. Jim Jones, who forced his followers to drink cyanide-laced punch. Dan White also murdered Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk that decade. 
 
 The four Zebra killers were convicted and sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole, which has been denied repeatedly. 
 
 Green, 63, is serving his sentence at California State Prison-Solano in Vacaville; Moore, 70, is at Ironwood State Prison (Riverside County); and Cooks, 70, is at Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego. 
 
 The men have never been allowed to be in the same institution, corrections officials said. ||||| One of San Francisco's infamous "Zebra Killers," a gang of four convicted of a slew of racially motivated murders in the 1970s, has been found dead in his cell at San Quentin prison, officials said Friday. 
 
 J.C.X. Simon, 69, was found unresponsive in his single cell and pronounced dead late on Thursday at the prison where he was serving a life sentence. 
 
 "The cause of death is unknown pending the results of an autopsy," according to the prison statement. 
 
 Simon and his accomplices were convicted of a string of racially motivated killings that took place in San Francisco. The four black men were convicted of targeting white victims during a six-month spree between October 1973 to April 1974 that left 14 people dead and wounded seven more. 
 
 Simon was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit first-degree murder and assault with a deadly weapon. The three other men convicted in the killings — Larry Green, Manuel Moore and Jessie Lee Cooks — are serving life sentences at separate California prisons. 
 
 SOCIAL 
 
 JUST IN: J.C.X. Simon, convicted of ‘Zebra Murders,’ in Bay Area during the early 70's dies in prison. pic.twitter.com/5NZMeOeM3t — John Zuchelli (@tvzuke) March 13, 2015 
 
 — Jillian Sederholm ||||| A serial killer and former Camp Pendleton Marine convicted of slaying eight women in two states in the 1980s and ‘90s, including a San Diego woman in 1988, was found dead over the weekend in his cell on death row at San Quentin State Prison in a suspected suicide, officials said Monday. 
 
 Andrew Urdiales, 54, was sentenced to death on Oct. 5 and had been on death row at the prison on the San Francisco Bay for less than a month. Correctional officers found him unresponsive in his cell about 11:15 p.m. Friday during a security check. 
 
 Correctional officers unsuccessfully performed CPR on Urdiales, who was alone in his cell in the prison’s Adjustment Center, a housing unit for problem prisoners. 
 
 He was pronounced dead at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday. 
 
 “His cause of death is pending the results of an autopsy; however, his death is being investigated as a suicide,” Lt. Samuel Robinson with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in a statement. 
 
 Prison officials offered no other details about his death. 
 
 Urdiales was sentenced to death last month by Orange County Judge Gregg Prickett, who affirmed an earlier death penalty decision by an Orange County jury. That same jury had convicted Urdiales in May of five counts of murder in San Diego, Riverside and Orange counties. 
 
 He’d previously been convicted of three slayings in the Chicago area and sentenced to death, but the death penalty was later abolished in Illinois, so he was re-sentenced to life without parole. He was moved to Orange County in 2011 to be tried for the five Southern California murders. 
 
 Urdiales’ nine-year killing spree began in 1986, and he carried out four of the killings while enlisted in the Marine Corps and stationed at Camp Pendleton in San Diego’s North County and Twentynine Palms in San Bernardino County, according to prosecutors. 
 
 After he was discharged from the Marines and returned to his hometown in Chicago, he killed a fifth woman while visiting Southern California, and he killed three women in Illinois. 
 
 Among his victims was 31-year-old San Diego resident Maryann Wells, who was killed with a gunshot to the head and dumped in a downtown San Diego alley on Sept. 25, 1988. Urdiales was stationed at Twentynine Palms at the time. 
 
 According to news reports from the time of Urdiales’ 1997 arrest in Illinois, Wells’ murder was not initially linked to a series of other unsolved murders because it did not fit the pattern of the other victims being strangled and dumped in a remote, rural area, the Los Angeles Times reported. 
 
 Dom Najolia / AP In this April 25, 1997 file photo, Andrew Urdiales walks in police custody at police headquarters in Chicago. Urdiales was convicted of murdering five women in Southern California and three in Illinois. He died of suspected suicide in his death row prison cell early Saturday. In this April 25, 1997 file photo, Andrew Urdiales walks in police custody at police headquarters in Chicago. Urdiales was convicted of murdering five women in Southern California and three in Illinois. He died of suspected suicide in his death row prison cell early Saturday. (Dom Najolia / AP) 
 
 Urdiales was stationed at Camp Pendleton when he took the life of his first victim, 23-year-old Robbin Brandley, who was attacked as she walked to her car in a dimly lit parking lot following a piano concert on Jan. 18, 1986, at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo. 
 
 Before he was sentenced to death last month, Urdiales said he wanted to express his “sincere apologies” to jurors, the judge, prosecutors, victims' families and his own family for having to hear the “gory” details of his crimes. 
 
 Urdiales even praised the Orange County prosecutors who tried him, and to the jurors, he said, “I understand how they voted. If I were a juror on my case I would probably have done the same thing. There's no hard feelings.” 
 
 He also apologized to a woman who escaped from his car after he terrorized her in 1992 in Riverside County. 
 
 Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas said in a statement Monday that “Urdiales was a monster who did not deserve to breathe the same air we all enjoy.'' 
 
 Rackauckas said Urdiales ``remained a callous coward until the end as he robbed the victims' families of the right to be present when the state put him to death.'' 
 
 California has 740 prisoners on death row but has not executed an inmate since January 2006. 
 
 About 23 hours after Urdiales was discovered in the Adjustment Center, a second death row prisoner died of suspected suicide in a different area of the prison. 
 
 Virendra Govin, 51, was found unresponsive in his cell in the North Segregation housing unit around 10:15 p.m. on Saturday and pronounced dead 15 minutes later. He and his brother, Pravin Govin, were each sentenced to death for the 2004 murders of a business rival, two of her teen children and her mother-in-law. 
 
 The suspected suicides of Govin and Urdiales were not believed to be related, according to prison officials. 
 
 Since 1978, when California reinstated the death penalty, 25 death row prisoners have committed suicide and 79 have died of natural causes, prison officials said. 
 
 City News Service contributed to this report. 
 
 Twitter: @Alex_Riggins 
 
 (619) 293-1710 
 
 alex.riggins@sduniontribune.com 
 
 UPDATES: 
 
 8:05 p.m.: This article was updated with background information about Urdiales’ crimes. 
 
 5:10 p.m.: This article was updated with additional details about the suicide of death row inmate Virendra Govin. 
 
 This article was originally published at 4:35 p.m.
– A man who went on a murder rampage against white people in San Francisco 40 years ago has died at San Quentin. NBC News reports that JCX Simon, 69, one of four notorious "Zebra killers," was found unresponsive in his cell. An autopsy is pending. Simon and three others were convicted of killing 14 random white victims and wounding seven others from October 1973 to April 1974. Most were shot in the back or execution-style while walking down a street, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. They were dubbed the "Zebra" killings because investigators used the Z channel radio band to communicate, explains the newspaper. At one point, the manhunt was so intense that police stopped and questioned any black men who remotely resembled the suspects—until a federal judge ruled that the stops were unconstitutional. The LA Times reports that the men hoped to "run all the whites out of San Francisco" and make the city headquarters for a group known as the Death Angels, an offshoot of the Fruit of Islam, which provided security for the Nation of Islam. The other three killers are still serving life sentences without parole at separate prisons.