MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) - The sister of a Vermont woman abducted and killed after arriving for work at a Rutland supermarket almost 15 years ago says she and her relatives still want to see the man convicted in the killing put to death even though it means they will have to endure a second trial.
Barbara Tuttle said this week she and other relatives of Terry King let their feelings be known after federal prosecutors said they would consider a deal that would let Donald Fell - who had been the only person on federal death row for a crime that began in Vermont - plead guilty in exchange for a sentence of life without parole.
“We preferred really for him to get the death sentence. That’s what he got in the beginning and that’s what he deserves to have,” Tuttle said. “My sister doesn’t get to breathe and eat and sleep or see her grandchildren or do any of that.”
Investigators say Fell executed King, a 53-year-old grandmother, in Dover, New York, while she prayed for her life several hours after she was abducted from the parking lot of a Rutland supermarket in November 2000.
Fell, now 34, and co-defendant Robert Lee, who died in prison in 2001, were charged with carjacking and killing King. Prosecutors say Fell and Lee were trying to escape Vermont after fatally stabbing Fell’s mother and a friend of hers in her Rutland apartment. No state charges have been filed in those cases.
For years Fell had been held at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, the location of the federal death row. Now the Bureau of Prisons inmate locator says he’s being held at a prison in New York City.
Vermont does not have a state death penalty, but federal prosecutors brought charges under a U.S. law that allows the death penalty for carjacking with death resulting.
U.S. District Court Judge William Sessions III ordered a new trial last summer after it was revealed a juror in the 2005 trial had investigated the case on his own during the trial by visiting some of the locations where the crime took place.
In December Vermont’s former United States Attorney Tristram Coffin told the Burlington Free Press a plea deal had been proposed that would have allowed Fell to plead guilty in exchange for a sentence of life without parole, avoiding the need for a second trial. In February Coffin’s successor, acting U.S. Attorney Eugenia Cowles said the plea deal was no longer an option.
Cowles and Fell’s new defense attorney, John Philipsborn, both declined comment on the case, so exactly what caused such a deal to fall through has not been released.
“You can only guess at what the reasons are,” said Robert Dunham, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, who is familiar with the Fell case.
But Tuttle said she and her family, who over the years have been in court in Burlington for every hearing on the case and were regularly updated about the proposal, let it be known they still wanted Fell executed. She believes the feelings of the family were taken into account.
No matter what happens, the anguish brought about by King’s killing will never go away.
“We miss her every day,” Tuttle said. “She’s the first thing I think about in the morning and the last thing I think about when I go to bed.”
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