Chris Smith: Convicted Windsor killer fails to find the truth

Imprisoned killer Roger Lee Hill, who’s 59 now and wasn’t yet 24 when he slipped into a Santa Rosa home and took a knife to a total stranger, looked two parole commissioners in the eyes in Vacaville on Wednesday and declared he is done lying.

“I just need to come clean here,” the bald, trim Hill told the parole panel charged with ruling if the Windsor-born former car thief is ready for a nonviolent return to society.

Seated between a court-?appointed lawyer and a correctional officer at a table in a small room at California State Prison Solano, his home for the past 33½ years, Hill stated, “In order to move forward, I need for the truth to be out there.

“I don’t want to lie anymore.”

Before the nearly three-hour parole hearing was over, commissioners Ali Zarrinnam and Nina Starr were looking at Hill with deeply furrowed brows, sometimes shaking their heads, and telling him that he may be far more of a liar than even he knows.

Though just three years ago the inmate came within a pen stroke of being released on parole, the commissioners made clear to him he won’t be leaving prison any time soon.

At one point, lead Commissioner Zarrinnam, seated directly across the table from Hill, told the former Sonoma County street criminal, “You should write a book. Fiction, that is. But nonetheless a book.”

Deputy Commissioner Starr’s final remarks to Hill after she and Zarrinnam announced that they won’t recommend him for another parole hearing until 2021 included a suggestion to “scratch your soul” to discover why, truly, he did what he did hours before dawn the morning of Nov. 23, 1980. Carrying a knife, Hill sneaked into a mobile home off Santa Rosa’s Occidental Road and, upon being confronted in the living room by the couple living there, stabbed 47-year-old Ralph Currier 17 times, killing him in front of his wife, Gail.

“I don’t think you’ve addressed that issue at all,” Starr told Hill. She further suggested to him that he examine whether he is a pathological liar.

The parole hearing, attended and addressed by both Gail Currier, now 76, and Sonoma County Deputy District Attorney Chris Honigsberg, was remarkable for several reasons.

Hill, who spent most of his teens and early 20s making money as a thief in and around Santa Rosa, has by all accounts been a model prisoner. Several times Wednesday, commissioners and even prosecutor Honigsberg, who argued against parole, congratulated Hill for obeying prison rules, excelling in a prison industry - making eyeglasses - and taking part in programs intended to help him accept responsibility for his criminal behavior and to transcend it.

Hill would have been released from the Vacaville prison and might have returned to Santa Rosa in 2013, after a two-person panel voted 1-1 on the question of parole, then the full Board of Parole Hearings voted to release him. But Gov. Jerry Brown reversed that decision, finding in part that Hill had not “sufficiently explored and worked through” the root causes of his violence.

Perhaps most notable about Wednesday’s hearing was that when Hill declared he would come clean, he spoke not about his killing of Ralph Currier but about a roadside assault on a young Occidental woman that happened just two months before the murder.

At several previous parole hearings, commissioners told Hill they were troubled by his account of the incident at the “Terrible T” intersection of Guerneville Road and Highway 116, near Forestville, in September 1980.

More than once, Hill told commissioners under oath that he and the woman were involved in a minor traffic collision and that amid an ensuing argument she called him the “N” word, prompting him to punch her.

Prior to Wednesday’s hearing, other parole commissioners told Hill his account differed wildly from the printed reports in which the bloodied and terrified woman had told authorities his car hit hers, then he struck and strangled her, and threatened to kill her.

At previous hearings, commissioners told Hill that his blaming the woman caused them to doubt his overall credibility and made them wonder how he’d react were he called a racial epithet in the future.

Early on in Wednesday’s hearing, Hill straightened his back and, looking directly at Zarrinnam and Starr, told them he’d lied for 35 years about what happened alongside the road that night, but no longer.

“I assaulted her,” he said. “I took her keys.”

He said he intentionally bumped her car with his, expecting that she would stop and intending to rob her. He said the woman never called him the racist name he’d long alleged.

“I always lied about it in the past,” he said.

Zarrinnam asked why he’d decided to tell the truth. Hill responded that he realized he had to come clean about the assault following the parole hearing of August 2014, at which both commissioners told him directly that he was lying to them.

Zarrinnam flipped through a thick file in front of him. He reminded Hill that just weeks ago, in February, he’d spoken with a prison psychologist for a pre-?hearing evaluation of whether he has overcome violent tendencies, and in regard to the roadside incident he’d retold the same lies.

If Hill decided more than a year ago to stop lying about the assault, the commissioner said, “It doesn’t make sense why you weren’t honest with the clinician last month.”

Hill’s response, that he’d decided he wanted to wait until the parole hearing to come clean, had Zarrinnam flashing a look of incredulity. No, he told Hill, “you wanted to lie last month.”

Later on Wednesday, Hill’s account of why he stabbed Ralph Currier nine more times after having already stabbed him six times caused Gail Currier, who is partially disabled from a stroke, to shake her head and jot notes on a pad.

Hill said that after entering the Cur-?riers’ mobile home at about 2:30 a.m. that November morning in 1980, he removed his jacket and placed it on the living room floor, planning to wrap the room’s portable stereo and other valuables in it.

He said he heard someone step into the hallway and use the bathroom, then Gail Currier walked into the living room, saw him and screamed. Hill said Ralph Currier then came into the room and they fought and he, Hill, was losing so he pulled his knife and stabbed the man.

Hill said they then separated, and that both the Curriers stood between him and his coat. He said he had to have it to avoid being caught because his wallet and ID were in a pocket, so he told the Curriers to give him the coat.

Hill said they didn’t comply, and that’s when he and Ralph Currier fought again and he stabbed the man repeatedly until he fell. “I grabbed my coat and ran out the door,” Hill said.

When the commissioners invited Gail Currier to speak, she was succinct.

“Mr. Hill has been lying since the moment he sat down,” she said. “There was no fight. There was no request for the jacket until he had stabbed Ralph 17 times.”

After a brief deliberation by the commissioners, Zarrinnam told Hill, the model prisoner who three years earlier narrowly missed being paroled, that prior to his next hearing he’ll have another five years to work on himself and his credibility.

“In essence,” the commissioner said, “you’re a liar.”

Chris Smith is at 521-5211 and ?chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.