Sam Stanton

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- The communications major was on the dean's honor list at the University of California, Davis, a student in good health who liked working out at the gym and playing the guitar.

He also was a non-Jewish pledge of the Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi, and that is where his troubles began in the fall of 2008, he claims in a newly filed federal lawsuit against the university.

PLACERVILLE, Calif. -- Phillip and Nancy Garrido pleaded guilty Thursday morning in the Jaycee Lee Dugard case in El Dorado County Superior Court.

Phillip Garrido will spend the rest of his life in prison.

He agreed to a sentence of 431 years to life in prison.

He pleaded guilty to multiple counts, including kidnap, forcible rape and forcible lewd acts on a child.

Nancy Garrido pleaded guilty to kidnap, aiding and abetting, and forcible rape.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Dorothea Puente, a Sacramento woman convicted of killing her tenants and burying them in her backyard, died Sunday at age 82 at a women's prison in California. 450.

Puente died of natural causes at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla, state corrections officials said.

She was a sweet-looking, grandmotherly woman who ran a boardinghouse out of a rented two-story Victorian. She began the business in 1980, renting out the top floor, but was sent to prison for three years for drugging her elderly tenants and stealing checks from them.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- By the time Fred Nelson Jr. walked up to Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson Wednesday morning, his once-promising life had largely unraveled.

His career as a drummer for a successful post-grunge band and other groups had hit the skids, his marriage had crumbled, and he had been in and out of jail several times.

But the perceived threat he allegedly uttered to the mayor -- that Johnson would be out of office within four hours -- may have been the result of mental illness rather than a desire to harm anyone, his friends said Wednesday.

"I've known him for 11 years and he's not a criminal," said one friend and bandmate, Kally Turner. "He's ill."

Nelson, 43, said in a jailhouse interview with The Sacramento Bee that he meant the mayor no harm and does not consider himself to be mentally ill. He said he believed Johnson has not done enough to promote new business in Sacramento's Oak Park section and that he simply wanted to warn the mayor that his political career would not last if he did not do better.