The Region - News from March 5, 1986

A man who claimed he was acting under the delusion that he was the “illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth II” when he murdered his parents, a sister and a niece last year was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Barry Wayne McNamara, an electronics technician, told psychiatrists he was obeying mysterious messages from television when he fatally shot his father, sister and niece with a hunting rifle and bashed in his mother’s head with a flagstone at the family’s mountainside ranch in Santa Barbara County. He also said that he suspected his parents of spying for the Soviet Union. A jury convicted McNamara in December and later determined that he was sane at the time of the slayings.