Woman given 55-to-life for ‘evil’ East Bay murders wins parole after 31 years inside at hearing prosecutors fail to attend
A Martinez woman sentenced to 55 years to life after slaying two seniors for money has won parole after 31 years, at a hearing scheduled thanks to California’s elderly parole rules.
Christine Loyd was convicted of the 1991 murder of her mother, Myrtle Loyd, and the 1994 murder of Virginia Bailey.
An Alameda judge described her as “one of the most evil and most cold-blooded murderers” he had ever seen and said she was lucky not to have received the death penalty.
Loyd, 81, won parole last month at a hearing notable for the absence of a representative of Alameda County district attorney Ursula Jones Dickson. Her office did send a letter opposing Loyd’s release.
After Loyd beat her mother to death in July 1991 she staged the Oakland crime scene by putting her victim’s body in a bathtub to suggest she had suffered a fall. The coroner listed the death as accidental.
Three years later Loyd murdered 59-year-old Bailey at her Berkeley home and stored the body for weeks in a freezer. She then placed the corpse on the living room floor and set fire to the house – in the expectation this would destroy evidence and again pull the wool over the eyes of the coroner.
The murderer’s motive was financial gain. She had been robbing both women blind and feared she was on the cusp of discovery.
Loyd was arrested and charged with Bailey’s murder. In what was at the time a hugely controversial move, investigators taped her phone conversations while she was housed at Santa Rita Jail in the hope that she would incriminate herself in the death of her mother. She went on to do just that.
An Alameda jury found her guilty of both murders in 1997 and she was sentenced to 55 years to life.
“She’s lucky she’s not getting the death penalty,” observed trial judge Philip Sarkisian.
In People v. Loyd the California Supreme Court settled that recording inmate phone calls and jailhouse conversations with non-attorney visitors is allowed when done to gather evidence.
According to a newly-released transcript of her February 12 2026 parole hearing, Loyd refused to talk about the murders themselves, sought to maintain her innocence, but obliquely apologized for some of her crimes.
“I just wanted to address the issue that this panel will likely focus on as well, and that is her continued claim of innocence and her decision not to discuss the offense facts today,” her attorney Arthur Richmond told commissioners.
“That concern is understandable, and I do understand that some denials can signal minimization or lack of insight, but denial matters only insofar as it predicts current risk. So even if you thought that her denial was some sort of minimization or lack of insight, which certainly I don’t believe [it] is, we still have to look at whether or not that would be predictive of current risk.”
“I would like to apologize for the harm and dispair I caused through my selfish actions and criminal behavior,” Loyd told the panel.
“I think of my friend Ginny and my mom every single day.”
“I still have a touch of pride and anger every now and then,” she said in response to a question about her character traits.
“I have to watch for that. In my relapse prevention, the main thing I have to watch for is ‘am I about to lose my temper?’, ‘am I about to say something harsh or mean?’ – I can feel it coming, I can stop it immediately and I can make sure I don’t have those issues. But I still feel it’s there, buried so deep.”
After a two-and-a-half-hour hearing presiding commissioner Troy Taira and deputy commissioner James Andres determined Loyd would be paroled.
“The murders themselves [were] very calculated, exceptionally callous crimes,” said Taira. “The victims were vulnerable and unsuspecting.”
He noted that Loyd was assessed as presenting a “low risk” of future violence, had taken prison programs on domestic violence, codependency and substance abuse, had a positive prison disciplinary record and a thorough release plan. This was evidence of “pro social offender change.”
Had Alameda district attorney Ursula Jones Dickson sent a representative to the hearing, that prosecutor might have had the opportunity to explore the tension between Loyd’s denial of involvement in the crimes, her refusal to speak to commissioners about the women’s deaths, and her quasi-confession in her remarks.
Loyd became eligible for parole in 2021 under California’s elderly parole program that lets killers 50 or older who have served 20 years go before the board of parole hearings, no matter how heinous their crimes or how long their original sentence.
The rule was set in a bill signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in September 2020 – significantly relaxing the previous parameters set three years earlier in response to federal judges’ complaint that prisons were overcrowded.
Unless Newsom intervenes Loyd is likely to leave the Central California Women’s Facility by mid-July.
In 2024 Newsom reversed grants of parole in murder cases on 11 occasions.
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