A convicted sex offender from Los Angeles has pleaded no contest in a Bakersfield courtroom to a brutal killing.
The Kern County District Attorney’s Office says Hannah Tubbs, born James Tubbs, pled no contest Tuesday to voluntary manslaughter for the 2019 killing of Michael Clark.
Investigators say in the time leading up to his killing and disappearance, Clark had been camping in Lake Isabella with Hannah Tubbs and a few others. The pair were friends who joined a ‘survivalist transient group’ together.
Clark’s body was found in the Kern River on August 25, 2019. He had been beaten to death with a rock.
Tubbs will be sentenced to 15 years in prison next month.
While in custody, Tubbs was treated as a woman in accordance with California law – despite only becoming ‘transgender’ after her arrest.
Tubbs had been previously convicted of two prior strike offenses. Tubbs was convicted in 2020 for an assault where the victim was stabbed multiple times. A DNA database hit led to Tubbs’ arrest in connection with a brutal sexual assault that occurred Los Angeles County in 2014.
Tubbs was 17 years old when she committed the sexual assault. The Los Angeles County District Attorney chose to try Tubbs as a juvenile.
Recordings later saw Tubbs joking about ‘gaming the system and LA County DA George Gascon. Gascon would later admit that if he could do it all over again, he would have tried Tubbs as an adult.
The treatment of transgender prisoners has become a divisive issue in recent years with activists insisting trans women are at risk in male jails, while others say their presence in female facilities puts women in danger of sexual assault and worse.
But the case of Tubbs is particularly egregious: a serial pedophile, she was sentenced to two years in the in 2022 after being convicted of sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl in the bathroom of a restaurant.
Prior to that, she had been convicted of carrying out a similar sex attack on a four-year-old girl in the bathroom of a Bakersfield library. Tubbs was also reportedly suspected of another attack a girl – this time at a toy store.
Tubbs’ father, Edward Tubbs, pled no contest and was convicted of misdemeanor charges of witness intimidation and of being an accessory after the fact to the killing of Clark. He was sentenced to 192 days in jail.
