GREENEVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - Twenty years after the triple killing that left a mother, father and daughter dead in a roadside ditch and their son maimed for life, Karen Howell wants a chance at freedom.
“I’ve grown up so much in prison,” she wrote in a recent letter. “I never thought or ever intended or wanted that someone would die. That’s never been who I was, then or now. In my own heart I have never stopped hoping or believing that maybe one day I’ll have the chance of walking out of prison.”
Howell has lived behind bars since she and five other Kentucky youths admitted to kidnapping a family of four from the rest area off Interstate 81 South in Baileyton, Tennessee, on April 6, 1997, and gunning them down for their van. Vidar Lillelid, 34; Delfina Lillelid, 28; Tabitha Lillelid, 6; and Peter Lillelid, 2, were headed home to Powell in Knox County from a Jehovah’s Witness retreat in Johnson City.
Howell, then 17, and the others - Natasha Wallen Cornett, 18; Joseph Lance Risner, 20; Jason Blake Bryant, 14; Joseph Dean Mullins, 19; and Crystal Rena Sturgill, 18 - were headed across the country, to either New Orleans or Mexico, on the run from life in small-town southeast Kentucky. The two groups crossed paths at the rest area, where Vidar Lillelid apparently drew the attention of the six, who dressed in black and wore “Goth”-style clothes, by trying to witness to them about his faith.
The group forced the family into the van, lined them up along a ditch beside nearby Payne Hollow Lane and shot them. Accounts vary as to who pulled the trigger. Only Peter survived. Federal agents arrested the killers two days later when the van pulled up to a border crossing in Arizona.
Cornett claimed at times to worship Satan, and authorities suggested at the time the killings could have been part of a satanic ritual. The six have since denied that.
All six pleaded guilty in exchange for six sentences of life in prison without parole. Howell and Bryant have moved to challenge their sentences, citing recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions that limit the imposition of life sentences on juveniles.
“Based on the Supreme Court’s holding(s) … a sentence of life without the possibility of parole is presumptively unconstitutional for juvenile offenders,” their attorneys argue in similarly worded motions.
The motions ask that Bryant and Howell be granted parole hearings, that their sentences be shortened or that they be granted new hearings to show why they deserve a chance to go free.
Greene County prosecutors say the Supreme Court decisions, issued in 2012 and 2016, don’t apply to plea deals like Howell’s or Bryant’s, but only to state laws - unlike Tennessee’s - that mandated life without parole for crimes like murder.
“There may come a day when either the Tennessee Supreme Court or the U.S. Supreme Court determines that under no circumstances may a juvenile receive a sentence of life without parole, regardless of the crime,” assistant prosecutor Ritchie Collins wrote in a response. “But that day has yet to come.”
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Information from: Knoxville News Sentinel, https://www.knoxnews.com
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