WAITING FOR A KILLER'S LETTER\Mother seeks Death Row apology.

Byline: Keith Stone Daily News Staff Writer

She exchanged at least 13 letters with her son's rapist and murderer, but Lavada Gifford never got what she so desperately needed - William Bonin's remorse.

Now as Bonin awaits execution Friday, Gifford is still waiting for his reply to her last letter, hoping he will say what even she has been unable to ask for directly.

"I think all along that I'd hoped he would really say what I wanted to hear - that he is sorry," Gifford said in an interview last week.

"It wasn't said during the trials. It wasn't even discussed in any of these letters," she said, pointing to 13 envelopes bearing Bonin's return address at San Quentin.

Some of Bonin's letters are signed: "Your loving friend and brother in Christ."

The words curdled on Gifford's tongue as she re-read them for the first time in years.

"He is a monster. He is wacko. I don't even know why I even keep the letters," she said. "Now that I think about it, maybe I was a little bit sick."

Gifford won't travel from her home in Long Beach to San Quentin to watch Bonin be put to death, because she said there would be no gain for her. But she added that Bonin deserves nothing less than death for killing her 14-year-old son, Sean King.

"He didn't just murder them; he raped them. He hurt these kids bad. He stabbed them. He strangled them with their own T-shirts, some of them," she said.

"People need to be reminded just how bad this is, and parents need to know: Watch your kids," Gifford said.

In his confession to police before he hanged himself, Bonin's accomplice, Vernon Butts, said that Bonin had boasted to him of Sean's murder "and told me how much fun he had."

Said Gifford: "Son of a b----."

Despite her anger, the 60-year-old retired switchboard operator has had an unusual relationship with her son's killer, one that even she had difficulty explaining.

Some of their letters read like chatty correspondence between friends.

"He wanted me to think that after all, he was a nice guy. I don't think so," she said, shaking her head. "I don't think so."

Her son, a green-eyed boy who loved to surf and swim and go to church, was never mentioned in any of the letters, either by Bonin or Gifford.

"Not at all. And I didn't ask. It is kind of strange that I continued, and when I stopped, I stopped," she said. "I didn't have anything else to say."

Gifford's correspondence with Bonin began in 1980 at the suggestion of police detectives, who felt that as a mother she could convince him to lead them to Sean's body.

The fair-haired junior high school student had been missing about six months, since May 19, 1980, after leaving his South Gate home for a date with his girlfriend.

By that point, Bonin was well into his killing spree, and Southern California parents were in a panic over the man who came to be known as the "Freeway Killer."

Gifford clearly remembers warning Sean, "Call us if you missed the bus or spent your money. Call us!"

She never saw her son alive again.

Bonin took detectives to the boy's skeletal remains in a remote canyon in San Bernardino County. On Christmas Eve 1980, investigators told Gifford the remains were indeed those of her son.

Gifford could bury her son, but in exchange it cost prosecutors their case. Bonin had agreed to cooperate and confess on condition that none of it could be used during his trial.

In January 1982, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury found Bonin not guilty of murdering Sean King and Thomas Lungren but convicted him of 10 other murders. An Orange County jury later convicted him of four more.

"It was tough," Gifford said, recalling the acquittal. "But how many times can you convict him? How many times can you put him to death?"

Seven years after his first trial, in 1989, Gifford wrote her second letter to Bonin, to ask whether he "had a relationship with the Lord."

He told her he had.

Then, for reasons that Gifford does not entirely understand, she continued writing. Now, looking back, she said Bonin's letters were wholly unsatisfying, if not infuriating.

"I haven't really gotten any satisfaction that I wanted except that he said he had a relationship with the Lord," Gifford said.

Bonin's rambling letters focus on his rather sedate life on Death Row, what he watched on his color TV and how he found religion. His short stories revolve largely around the adventures of boys and their spiritual experiences.

In one story unlike the others, Bonin wrote about a 13-year-old boy who was abandoned by his parents, sold into slavery and then rescued. He told Gifford that "Youth's Encounter with Terror" is meant to show parents "what could happen to their son or daughter if they indeed threw them out into the world at such a young age."

Gifford tried to engage Bonin on his death sentence in some letters, but the killer's replies were brief. He told Gifford, "I leave everything in the hands of the lawyers and the Lord."

The chance that Bonin could be granted clemency or win an appeal pending in federal court made Gifford teary-eyed with anger last week. She nervously drummed her fingers. On one she wore a gold ring inscribed with the scales of justice, a birthday gift from her husband during the trial.

"It does signify my birthday, but at that time it was for another reason: I was hoping and praying that justice would be served, and I feel that it was," Gifford said.

"I will probably feel more so when this is all over with. It has got to end. It is just not fair," she said.

"There are people who are still grieving and depending on it happening, and it is the law. He was sentenced to death so let's go," she said. "Let's get it over with."

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PHOTO

Photo (1--color) Lavada Gifford shows a portrait of her son, Sean King, who was 14 when he was murdered by "Freeway Killer" William Bonin in May 1980. (2) Lavada Gifford has exchanged letters with her son's killer, William Bonin, but says she's still waiting for him to express remorse. Michael Owen Baker/Daily News (3) William Bonin Shown after 1983 verdict