Man sentenced to death for OC killing in 1980 dies in prison

A man sentenced to death for the 1980 rape and murder of a Seal Beach woman died in prison on Monday, Dec. 22 at the age of 80, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced Wednesday.

Benjamin W. Watta, formerly of Long Beach, was found unresponsive in his cell at Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City around 11 a.m. on Monday during a count and pronounced dead by paramedics just after 11:30 a.m., the corrections agency said. The Del Norte County Coroner will determine his cause of death.

He was convicted of murder during the commission of rape and burglary in 2008 for the 1980 rape and killing of 70-year-old Simone Sharpe in Seal Beach. A jury recommended the death penalty for Watta and that sentence was imposed in 2009.

Sharpe was found dead by her son at her neighbor’s home on Christmas Eve 1980. She had been raped, strangled and suffocated the day before. Sharpe was feeding her neighbor’s cats and collecting their mail for them, going into the home through an unlocked garage door, as they were on a vacation.

Sharpe’s son realized she was missing and looked for her at the neighbor’s house, where he found her dead in a bedroom, between a bed and wall, prosecutors said.

Sharpe’s murder case went cold and was unsolved until 2001, when a district attorney’s office task force focused on killers, rapists and sexual offenders used DNA technology to link Watta to the murder, with DNA from a rape kit collected in 1980.

When the task force made the DNA connection, Watta was in custody for attempted murder of his ex-girlfriend in Florida and was extradited to Orange County.

Watta was moved to Pelican Bay State Prison from Orange County in 2009 and was serving a condemned sentence, the corrections department said.

Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2019 placed a moratorium on the death penalty in California. The last execution in the state was in 2006.