SACRAMENTO -- The
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) announced today that
inmate Gregory U. Powell, whose murder of a Los Angeles police officer was
chronicled in the 1973 best-selling book "The Onion Field" and a
movie of the same name, died August 12, 2012, of natural causes in the
California Medical Facility in Vacaville.
Powell, 79, committed
to CDCR on November 14, 1963 from Los Angeles County, was serving a life
sentence for the 1963 kidnapping of two Los Angeles Police Department officers,
one of whom he murdered. Powell and his partner, Jimmy Lee Smith, had been pulled
over by the two plain-clothes officers on March 9, 1963, for making an illegal
U-turn. The two armed men disarmed the officers and drove them to an onion
field near Bakersfield.
