In Swap for Photo Album, Inmate Tells of Killing Girl, 17

STOCKTON — A prison inmate agreed to confess to killing a 17-year-old girl nearly 13 years ago if authorities returned his photo album with pictures of his mother and other relatives.

In exchange for the album stored in an evidence room, Charles Alarid described how he murdered Terri Deschamp, San Joaquin County sheriff’s investigators said.

“I asked him if there was anything I could do for him, no strings attached, and he wanted his photo album,” said Sgt. John Drummond. “He told us if we brought him his photo album, he would tell us what happened.”

Alarid had been serving a life sentence at Folsom Prison since 1990 for murdering his wife, who was eight months pregnant.

On Tuesday, he pleaded guilty in San Joaquin County Superior Court to the July 24, 1984, murder of Deschamp. As part of a plea bargain he is expected to be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

It will not lengthen Alarid’s prison term, because he already is serving a life sentence, attorneys said. However, the 34-year-old inmate could be transferred to Pelican Bay State Prison, California’s top-security prison.

With little evidence, investigators had shelved the case of the murdered girl. At one point, her relatives hired a psychic in a desperate attempt to find her.

But Drummond periodically went to the prison to visit Alarid, one of the last people to see the teenager alive.

“It always ate on me,” the sergeant said. “She was not a tramp, not a drug dealer, not somebody who, by her own volition, put herself in harm’s way. She really was a nice girl.”

Deschamp, a former Lodi High School student, was living in Southern California when she returned to the area several days before she was killed. She met an old boyfriend, Nathan Richards, and moved in with him at a motel.

Alarid was living next door and gave Deschamp a ride to her boyfriend’s workplace, where she got into an argument with Richards.

In his confession, Alarid said he took Deschamp for a ride that night and tried to persuade her to dump her boyfriend for him. He said that he tried to take her to a reservoir but that she refused and told him she wanted to go home.

“Then we get into an argument,” Alarid told deputies, according to a transcript of the interview. “A gun came out. . . . I hit her once; I panicked, split. . . .”

Alarid told them he left her body at the exact spot where dogs found her remains more than a year later.