The Laura Black ESL Case: Shooting, Death Sentence, Stalking Law

The Laura Black ESL stalking case refers to the four-year harassment campaign that Richard Wade Farley waged against his coworker Laura Black at Electromagnetic Systems Laboratory in Sunnyvale, California, and the mass shooting he carried out at the company on February 16, 1988, that killed seven people and wounded Black and several others. The case prompted California to pass the first anti-stalking law in the United States, and Farley remains on death row after a Santa Clara County judge rejected a 2025 attempt to resentence him to life without parole.

Who Laura Black Was

Laura Black worked as an electrical engineer at ESL, a Silicon Valley defense electronics firm founded in 1964.¹ Richard Farley was a computer technician at the same company. They met in the spring of 1984. Farley became fixated on her almost immediately, and when she declined his repeated social invitations, the unwanted attention turned into a sustained harassment campaign that would last nearly four years.²

What the Stalking Looked Like

Between late 1984 and early 1988, Farley sent Black between 150 and 200 letters. Many were threatening. Many referenced his gun collection.² He followed her to and from work, joined her aerobics class, showed up at her softball games, and drove past her home at night. He went through confidential personnel files to find personal information about her, including her parents’ address in Virginia.³

Farley broke into Black’s office desk. He obtained a duplicate key to one of her homes and left it in plain view on his car dashboard so she would see it. Between July 1985 and February 1988, Black moved three times to get away from him. Each time, he located her new address.²³

How ESL Responded

Black brought the harassment to ESL’s human resources department. In October 1985, HR manager Jean Tuffley met with Farley, who agreed to stop the behavior and to stop using Black’s computer terminal. He did neither. ESL issued written warnings in December 1985 and January 1986 and required Farley to attend psychological counseling as a condition of keeping his job.²³

The harassment did not stop, and Farley began making escalating threats against Black and a manager. ESL fired him on May 2, 1986. Management warned Black at the time about how deep his obsession ran. After the firing, Farley kept writing and kept threatening. He warned her against seeking a restraining order and told her, “I do own guns and I’m good with them,” and that he had “a whole range of options, each getting worse and worse.”²

The Restraining Order and the Shooting

In early February 1988, Black obtained a temporary restraining order barring Farley from coming within 300 yards of her or contacting her. A hearing to make the order permanent was set for February 17, 1988. Farley was ordered to bring items he claimed proved a relationship with Black, including photographs, a garage door opener, and receipts. The TRO also included a request for $1,000 in attorney fees.²

In the two weeks between receiving the order and the scheduled hearing, Farley bought a Benelli semiautomatic shotgun and large quantities of ammunition. He practiced at shooting ranges using human-shaped targets. He changed the beneficiary on his life insurance policies and moved his belongings into a storage locker.²

On February 16, 1988, one day before the hearing, Farley drove a rented motor home to the ESL facility, arriving around 2:50 p.m. with a semiautomatic shotgun, rifles, and multiple bandoliers of ammunition. He shot and killed Lawrence Kane in the parking lot and blasted through the security doors to enter the building. Inside, he moved through the facility shooting people and firing at computer equipment, letting some people he encountered leave unharmed.⁴

Seven people were killed: Joseph Silva, Wayne Williams, Glenda Moritz, Ronald Reed, Helen Lamparter, Ronald Doney, and Lawrence Kane. Laura Black was shot and wounded but survived, along with Greg Scott, Richard Townsley, Randell Hemingway, and William Drake.⁴

During a series of phone calls that afternoon with ESL staff and later with Lieutenant Ruben Grijalva of the Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety, Farley confirmed he had shot people and said the restraining order was what pushed him over the edge. “I didn’t decide that I wanted to hurt her until I got that letter in the mail,” he told negotiators.² He surrendered at approximately 8:30 p.m.⁴

Trial and Death Sentence

A Santa Clara County jury convicted Farley of seven counts of first-degree murder, five counts of attempted murder, assault with a firearm on Laura Black, second-degree burglary, and felony vandalism. It found multiple special circumstances, including that six of the murders were committed during a burglary and that he was convicted of multiple murders. The jury also found the attempted murders were willful, deliberate, and premeditated.²

Farley admitted responsibility for the deaths at trial but argued the shootings were not premeditated and that he had gone to ESL only to intimidate Black and destroy equipment.⁴ The jury rejected that account. In 1992, he was sentenced to death.⁵ The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment in full in 2009 in People v. Farley, 46 Cal.4th 1053.²

The 2025 Resentencing Denial

In 2024, Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen included Farley in an initiative called “Bend the Arc,” which sought to convert death sentences in the county to life without the possibility of parole. Rosen called capital punishment “an antiquated, racially biased, error-prone system” and wrote in a court memorandum that Farley “may well deserve his punishment” but that the community “does not deserve an archaic, errors-strewn, and racist system of capital punishment.”⁶ Rosen had already resentenced twelve other death-row inmates from the county before he turned to Farley.⁷

Families of the victims and survivors organized against the petition, represented by San Jose attorney Jim McManis. Elizabeth Williams Allen, former wife of victim Wayne “Buddy” Williams, called Rosen’s push “an overreaching, unnecessary grab on his own whim.” Survivor Richard Townsley, who still carries bullet fragments in his body, wrote that “it’s not right that Farley should live the rest of his life without the death penalty hanging over his head.” McManis also raised a threshold legal argument that Penal Code Section 1172.1 authorizes recall of a “term of imprisonment” and does not apply to a death sentence at all.⁷

On March 21, 2025, Superior Court Judge Benjamin Williams denied the petition. He said there was “no reason for this court to believe that Mr. Farley is any less dangerous today or has rehabilitated himself,” noting that Farley had failed to undergo behavioral rehabilitation and showed no remorse, even though he had no serious prison disciplinary record.⁸ It was the only denial in Rosen’s countywide resentencing campaign.⁷

How the Case Shaped Anti-Stalking Law

When Farley was harassing Black, no law in the United States specifically criminalized stalking. Restraining orders were the main civil remedy, and in this case one arguably accelerated the violence. In 1990, following both the ESL shooting and the 1989 murder of actress Rebecca Schaeffer, California enacted the nation’s first anti-stalking statute, Penal Code Section 646.9, criminalizing repeated harassment or following combined with a threat.⁹

Within a few years, 30 other states passed similar laws. In October 1992, Congress directed the National Institute of Justice to draft a model stalking statute to guide state legislatures.⁹ The 1993 CBS television movie I Can Make You Love Me: The Stalking of Laura Black, with Brooke Shields as Black and Richard Thomas as Farley, brought further attention to the case and closed with a reference to California’s new law and a toll-free number for victims.¹⁰

Where Farley Is Now

Farley remains under a sentence of death and is held in a secured state health care facility.⁸ California has not carried out an execution since 2006 and has maintained a moratorium on the death penalty since 2019, so execution under current policy is unlikely. A federal habeas corpus petition filed in 2016 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California remains pending.¹¹

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ABC7 News. Death Penalty Convicted Murderer Richard Farley Could Be Resentenced
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NBC News. California DA Seeks Rare Change to Mass Shooter’s Death Sentence
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NBC Bay Area. Death Sentence for Mass Shooter Richard Farley
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Vanderbilt Law Review. Stalking Laws
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Variety. I Can Make You Love Me: The Stalking of Laura Black
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