Elderly Woman Was Helped by Stranger — Then He Killed and Dismembered Her at Childhood Home By Christine Pelisek

Pamela May spent many years of her life living at a home on Field Street in North Highlands, Calif. The 77-year-old grew up in the Sacramento suburb, and when her parents died, she returned with her husband Tom.

After her husband was placed in a memory care facility, May lived by herself.

Prosecutors say she died there in June of 2022 not long after meeting Darnell Erby.

“She was out walking one day, and Mr. Erby saw her, and he basically asked her, ‘Do you need a ride? Can I help you with something? And she took him up on that and he drove her home to her house,” Sacramento Deputy District Attorney James Wax tells PEOPLE.

Over a period of a few weeks, Erby, a convicted burglar who lived on and off the streets, began helping May with her groceries or move heavy objects, Wax says.

“She was reliant on walking with her walker,” he says. “So, she did need help.”

May had a “hoarding disorder to a pretty extreme extent, especially as she became older,” he adds. “She just wasn’t able to keep her property clean.”

The morning of June 15, 2022, seemed to start off normally for May. She spoke to her husband at the memory care facility and read a story on the Internet about the best uses for banana peels.

“Just normal activity, and then it abruptly ceases, and she never has any activity again,” says Wax.

Prosecutors allege that same morning, Erby parked in the back of May’s property. While a female acquaintance stayed in his Jeep, he crawled through a gap in May’s back fence and entered her home.

Prosecutors claim he found May inside and used her clothing to bind her face and hands before killing her.

He allegedly stole property before leaving the residence, then returned at least twice to dismember her body, prosecutors say.

“He took his knife, and he went through the process of trying to decapitate her into a number of different pieces,” says Wax. “He put her body into 11 separate black garbage bags.”

Before he could dispose of her remains, Erby’s female acquaintance alerted authorities, according to Wax.

“He actually told the detectives, ‘I went back again, and I saw police, so I did a U-turn,’” he says. “He was in the middle of it. It was taking him some time. He described it to some people at a homeless campsite as being more difficult than he thought, this process of dismembering her.”

“One of the sad things to me was that she talked to [her husband] just about every day,’ says Wax. “We were going through the phone records to help determine the time of death, but we also saw that after her death, you could just see the missed calls from that memory facility.”

Erby’s defense attorney Reid Kingsbury says his client didn’t kill May.

“It was essentially a burglary of the home that he committed,” he tells PEOPLE. “And then in the course of the burglary of the home, according to him, he found the lady as he was making his way through this piled up landfill of a house. He insisted on that always from day one.”

Kingsbury says the coroner could never determine May’s cause of death because her body was dismembered.

Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Sign up for PEOPLE’s free True Crime newsletter for breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases.

May had “fairly severe arterial sclerosis,” he says. “She had advanced heart disease. And so my client always maintained that I found her dead in the house and then dreamed up this cockamamie plan to dismember her body and take over the house.”

Kingsbury claims Erby didn’t know May before the murder, but lied to police that he had because his fingerprints were inside the home.

“[Authorities] obviously picked him up and he gave a statement, and he was thinking, according to Mr. Erby, that I need to account for the fact that my fingerprints are on the inside of this home. And so he lied and said that I knew this lady beforehand, and she invited me into her house.”

On June 17, Erby was found guilty of first-degree murder with the special circumstance that the murder was committed during a burglary. Erby was also convicted of mutilation and five counts of burglary with the allegation he was armed with a deadly weapon.

Erby was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole on Nov. 7.