Features

Selina Bishop was wary of scheme

The Associated Press
Friday September 29, 2000

MARTINEZ — The night before she was last seen alive, Selina Bishop thought she had resolved an argument with her boyfriend over his “big plan” and was under the impression they were going to go away somewhere together, her diary shows. 

“Hopefully, it’s really all taken care of now,” Bishop wrote in one of her last journal entries, referring to an argument she had with Glenn Helzer on the night of Aug. 1. “I told him I wanted to go to Great America and he said he had something better planned. I don’t know. I hope we have a nice time.” 

Bishop was last seen alive Aug. 2, at a Berkeley brewpub with Helzer. 

Helzer, 30, his brother Justin Helzer, 28, and their housemate Dawn Godman, 26, are charged with the killing five people; Bishop – the 22-year-old daughter of blues guitarist Elvin Bishop; Ivan and Annette Stineman, an elderly Concord couple; Selina Bishop’s mother, Jennifer Villarin, 45, and her friend James Gamble, 54. 

The Helzers and Godman have pleaded innocent to murder charges. They are due in court Jan. 22 for a preliminary hearing. 

The remains of Bishop and the Stinemans were recovered in nine duffel bags that surfaced the second week of August in the Mokelumne River in southern Sacramento County. The bullet-riddled bodies of Selina’s mother and Gamble were found Aug. 3 in Selina’s Marin County apartment. 

Police believe Bishop and the Stinemans were stabbed and beaten to death at the home the Helzers and Godman shared in Concord.  

There, investigators found three books on human anatomy, a bloodstained sword and several machetes, according to search warrant records released Wednesday at the request of The San Francisco Chronicle. 

Lengths of rope, duct tape, handcuffs, shackles, a hand saw, latex gloves, bloodstained clothes, human hairs also were found, the records show. And on a bedroom carpet there was an imprint of a human body. 

Prosecutors say the murders were carried out to cover up a botched plot to extort $100,000 from the Stinemans. 

In her diary, entries show Bishop was suspicious of her boyfriend and that she “did not want to be involved with his (Helzer’s) big plan,” search warrants show. 

But she also wrote affectionately about him. 

“I wish we could be together,” she wrote on Aug. 1. “Why is it so difficult?”