Corcoran >> The California Board of Parole Hearings (BPH) denied parole for convicted murderer Kevin Coy Iloff on Wednesday.
Alan Upton, deputy district attorney for the Lake County District Attorney’s Office, attended the lifer hearing at California State Prison in Corcoran to argue against Iloff’s release.
Iloff, 50, pled guilty in December 1990 to the second-degree murder of Thomas Conatser and was sentenced by Judge Robert L. Crone Jr. to 16 years to life on Dec. 21, 1990. He was originally prosecuted by Andrew S. Blum and was represented by Mitchell Hauptman. Iloff’s minimum eligible parole date was March 14, 2004. Iloff has had four previous parole consideration hearings.
According to investigation reports, Iloff had been involved in a relationship with the mother of his two children, but they had been separated for a few days, in part because of Iloff’s chronic drug abuse. On Sept. 22, 1990, the woman was spending the night with victim Thomas Conatser, 28, at a home on Fourth Street in Clearlake Park. At the time of the murder, one of Conatser’s children was sleeping in the same bed as Conatser and the woman. Conatser’s other child and the woman’s two children were asleep in another room.
At 4 a.m., Iloff jimmied the lock to the door, entered the house and the bedroom, and stabbed Conatser under the left arm pit while everyone was asleep.
After Iloff stabbed Conatser, he told the woman “I stuck him, don’t call the cops”, and threatened to kill her too. He then fled the scene and caught a ride back to Vallejo. While an investigator from the Clearlake Police Department was at the murder scene with the woman, Iloff called the woman and told her that “if you give me up I’ll do you like I did him.”
A friend of Iloff told investigators that Iloff boasted that if the victim wasn’t dead that he would come back and finish him off. Iloff told another person that Iloff had grabbed the victim by the hair and said “Wake up. I want you to see who is going to kill you.” Iloff then fled to Reno, Nevada where he was arrested five days later.
During Iloff’s time in prison he has had 22 disciplinary actions, including fighting, possession of alcohol, refusal to follow orders, assaulting other inmates, threatening a corrections officer and participating in a riot.
In 1999, he was convicted of attempted murder of another inmate while Iloff was incarcerated at Pelican Bay State Prison. As a result of that conviction he wassentenced to an additional and consecutive five-year prison term that he will have to serve if he is granted parole for the murder of Conatser.
At his initial parole hearing in 2003 Iloff got into a heated exchange with the parole commissioners and refused to attend the hearing. He has since had three other parole hearings scheduled.
At the parole hearing Wednesday, Conatser’s brother and Conatser’s two sons who were asleep in the house at the time of the murder, were present to ask that Conatser’s parole be denied.
Upton asked the BPH commissioners to deny Iloff’s parole on the grounds that he still presented an unreasonable risk of danger to the public if released, and that although Illoff had begun to participate in prison rehabilitation programs, such participation was too recent to demonstrate a sincere reformation of character. The BPH commissioners agreed and issued a three-year denial of parole.
Iloff’s next parole hearing will be in 2019.
