Parole granted after 41 years

Jack Rainsberger will leave the Nevada State Prison this fall for the first time in 41 years.

Rainsberger, 65, has been in prison since March 1959 for the murder of a Las Vegas secretary. Only one man has been there longer.

Parole Board Chairman Don Denison said the decision was made that Rainsberger is no longer a danger to society.

"He's been down 41 years," said Denison. "He's in a wheelchair. He's an old man and he can't hurt anybody anymore."

His health has reportedly deteriorated dramatically since a 1996 heart attack.

But Denison said if Rainsberger's halfway house program falls apart like it did six years ago, the prison system will probably get him back.

"If he is not accepted, he comes back before the board."

Rainsberger was originally sentenced to die but appeals held off the gas chamber until the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the death penalty nationwide in 1972. In 1976, his sentence was commuted and Rainsberger was granted the possibility of parole.

He applied almost annually after that but was rejected 17 times before the Parole Board finally granted a conditional release to a San Francisco halfway house in October 1993. That fell through when California parole officials refused to accept him because he had never been a resident there. He managed to find a halfway house in Ohio to accept him but the Parole board rejected that program because it was open-ended and he could have left the program at any time. The board took another vote and rescinded Rainsberger's parole until 1999.

Rainsberger, who remains at Northern Nevada Correctional Center in Carson City, will be formally released to the Ohio program Sept. 1.

Rainsberger pleaded guilty to murdering Erline Folker in a Las Vegas parking lot in 1958. The 24-year-old's body was found in the desert outside of Las Vegas. She had been stabbed six times and robbed of $10.

He was sentenced in March 1959.

Only one man has been in the Nevada prison system longer. Raymond Shuman is also serving life for murder but his sentence mandates no parole because he killed fellow inmate Ruben Bejarano while already in prison. He has been in prison since June 1958.

The two have been in prison so long, in fact, they are among the few who have four-digit identification numbers.

After Shuman and Rainsberger, the longest serving inmates are Bobby Erwin, who has been on parole three times but revoked for violations, originally jailed in September 1960, and Thomas Bean, who went to prison in July 1963 for the brutal murder of Olympic skater Sonya McKaskie. Bean is serving life without possible parole.