Tiffany Cole is no longer on Florida Death Row as at her resentencing hearing the jury voted 10 -2 that her crimes did not warrant the death penalty
Tiffany Cole was convicted of the murders of her neighbors James and Carol Sumner. According to court documents Tiffany Cole would go to her former neighbors home asking to use the telephone. When she was granted access to the house Alan Wade, Bruce Nixon and Michael Jackson would push their way into the home.
James and Carol Sumner would be bound with duct taped and brought to a remote location where they would be buried alive
Bruce Nixon would cooperate with police and received a 45 year prison sentence. Alan Wade, Michael Jackson and Tiffany Cole would be sentenced to death. Alan Wade had his death sentence overturned and was sentenced to life without parole. Michael Jackson remains on death row in Florida
Tiffany Cole More News
A jury voted 10-2 to spare the life of a woman convicted in Jacksonville’s notorious “buried-alive” case in 2005, according to Times-Union news partner First Coast News.
The jury found co-defendant Tiffany Ann Cole did not deserve the ultimate punishment for her role in the crime. She is now sentenced to life in prison.
Cole, 41, was previously convicted of murdering Reggie and Carol Sumner in July 2005. The 61-year-olds were kidnapped from their Jacksonville home, bound in duct tape and driven to some remote woods in South Georgia where they were buried alive.
Cole knew the couple, who were friends with her father and once lived in her neighborhood
Her original 2007 death sentence was thrown out in 2017 after Florida began requiring unanimous jury verdicts in death cases. Cole’s first jury was split 9-3. While her resentencing was in process, however, the law changed again. Florida juries can now sentence someone to death with a vote of just 8-4.
During closing arguments, attorney Jay Plotkin, the original case prosecutor, told jurors they should hold Cole accountable for the carefully premeditated “horrible acts.” He noted Cole held the flashlight as her three co-defendants dug the “death pit” two days before the murders.
“While she may not have turned a shovel of dirt from the hole where the Summers were left to die, she was certainly an instrument — and I would submit the catalyst — of why Reggie and Carol Sumner died. Simply stated, these murders would not have happened but for her.
Plotkin said she deserved death even though her boyfriend and co-defendant Michael James Jackson was the mastermind. “What evidence is there that she was dragged kicking and screaming into the dark night of crime by Michael Jackson?” he asked. “The only people dragged into the night of the crime were the people killed in that hole.”
Cole’s attorney Julie Schlax argued she has changed since her arrest and has been an inspiration to other inmates.
“Tiffany Cole is not ‘the worst of the worst,’” she said. “I submit how she has lived her life and truly found an ability to overcome those shortcomings that led her to Georgia in the middle of the night.”She reminded jurors about extensive witness testimony that Cole suffered from low self-esteem, early drug abuse and had been molested by her father.
“Does it excuse it? Of course not, Schlax said. “None of us will ever forget what happened to the Sumners in 2005. And nor should we. Tiffany Cole won’t forget either. There will not be a day of her life that she spends behind bars [not] thinking about what occurred in 2005, and what led her to be a part of that. But Tiffany Cole is so much more than that. And she actually has the ability to contribute. We ask you not to judge her solely for her actions of 2005.”
Schlax noted Cole would die in prison regardless, and that a life sentence is a sufficient punishment.
Cole’s co-defendants Jackson and Alan Lyndell Wade were already resentenced. Wade was given a life sentence last year; Jackson was resentenced to death in May. A fourth co-defendant, Bruce Nixon, was sentenced to 45 years in prison for cooperating with investigators.
Alton Coleman and Debra Brown were two serial killers who would go on a crime spree through six states that included the murder of eight people. Eventually Alton Coleman and Debra Brown would be sentenced to death in three separate States. Alton Coleman would be executed in Ohio and Debra Brown will spend the rest of her life in prison. In this article on My Crime Library we will take a closer look at Alton Coleman and Debra Brown.
Alton Coleman And Debra Brown Early Years
Alton Coleman was born in Illinois on November 6, 1955. Alton Coleman mother worked multiple jobs and Coleman was raised by his grandmother. During his middle school years he would drop out and would be arrested six times for sex related crimes between 1973 and 1983. Ultimately two of the cases would be dropped. Two of the cases he was acquitted. Alton was scheduled to go on trial in Illinois for the sexual assault of a fourteen year old girl when the multi state crime spree began
Debra Brown was born in Illinois on November 11, 1962. She has a borderline intellect and suffered a severe head injury as a child. At the time she met Alton Coleman in 1983 she was engaged to another man however she would leave him to go with Alton. Debra Brown before the crime spree had no criminal record.
Alton Coleman And Debra Brown Murders
The multi state crime spree began in Wisconsin. Alton Coleman had befriended a single mother and soon after her nine year old daughter, Vernita Wheat, went missing on May 29, 1984. A few weeks later the little girls body would be found she had been sexually assaulted, tortured and strangled with a ligature.
Soon after in Gary Indiana Alton Coleman and Debra Brown would abduct two little girls, nine year old Annie and her seven year old niece Tamika Turks, who would be sexually assaulted. Annie would survive the brutal assault however seven year old Tamika would not.
Donna Williams was reported missing the same time as the little girls were abducted. Her body would be found in a river in Detroit Michigan a month later. The woman had been sexually assaulted and strangled with a ligature.
In Michigan Alton Coleman and Debra Brown would break into the home of an elderly couple who were badly beaten and robbed.
In early July 1984 a woman in Ohio family became concerned as she stopped communicating with them. When the family went to her home they would find her body along with her nine year old son hidden in a crawlspace of the home. Both had been strangled with ligatures.
Later that same day Alton Coleman and Debra Brown would force their way into the home of a couple who were brutally beaten and robbed. Oddly Alton and Debra would stay at a local Revered home and attended church services.
The next week Alton and Debra would abduct a fifteen year old girl, Tonnie Storey, whose body would be found eight days later. Police would discover an item stolen earlier in the crime spree under the teenagers body which would lead the FBI to place Alton Coleman on their Top Ten Most Wanted List
A day after the abduction of Tonnie Storey Alton Coleman and Debra Brown would break into another home where the woman was sexually assaulted and beaten to death. The woman’s husband would survive a brutal beating and would contact police. The man would tell police that Alton and Debra came over regarding a camper for sale and soon after the attack began
The vehicle stolen from the couple was found in Kentucky days later where Alton Coleman and Debra Brown kidnapped a college professor and stole his car plus drove back to Ohio with him locked in the trunk. The college professor was later rescued.
Alton Coleman and Debra Brown would head back to Illinois. Along the way way they would steal yet another vehicle and kill its owner.
Soon after arriving in Illinois Alton Coleman and Debra Brown would be arrested.
Alton Coleman and Debra Brown Trials
Due to the fact that the crimes committed by Alton Coleman and Debra Brown covered such a large area it took awhile to plan out the course of action in terms of prosecution. Michigan was ruled out pretty quickly as it did not have the death penalty.
In Ohio Alton Coleman and Debra Brown were convicted of the sexual assaults and murders of Tonnie Storey and Marlene Walters however they were not convicted of the murders of Virginia and Rachelle Temple. The two however were sentenced to death for the murders of Tonnie and Marlene. The pair would later be sentenced to twenty years in Federal Prison for transporting the college professors across state lines.
Alton Coleman Execution
Alton Coleman would be executed in Ohio on April 26, 2002 by lethal injection. For his last meal Alton had filet mignon, fried chicken breasts, salad, sweet potatoes, french fries, collard greens, onion rings, cornbread, broccoli, biscuits and gravy plus a cherry Coke.
Debra Brown Prison
Debra Brown borderline mental intellect has kept her from being executed and Ohio and Indiana no longer include her on their list of death row inmates. As of 2020 Debra Brown is in prison in Ohio
n the words of prosecutors here, Alton Coleman is a “poster child” for capital punishment, a cold-blooded killer whose murder spree in the summer of 1984 terrorized the Midwest, leaving eight people slain and Coleman with death sentences in three states.
But to his defenders, Coleman is exactly the kind of killer who should be spared: a man whose mother left him in a garbage can as an infant and whose grandmother subjected him to physical and sexual abuse–a history that coupled with brain damage prompted one doctor to describe Coleman’s mind as a “damaged container with damaged contents.”
Sitting in one of the low-slung buildings that house Death Row here, his hands and legs shackled with steel chains, Coleman looks back on both sides of his life and views it as something of a waste. His gaze is firm, his words are measured.
“I think I was doomed,” Coleman, now 46, said in an interview at Mansfield Correctional Institution. “Perhaps I should have died at birth.”
Instead, Coleman is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection Friday morning. On Wednesday, Gov. Bob Taft denied clemency, saying no court has questioned Coleman’s responsibility for the slaying of the suburban Cincinnati woman–the case leading to Friday’s execution.
But as the execution nears, nagging questions about Coleman’s cases are unresolved, especially in Ohio, suggesting that even death penalty cases where guilt and innocence are clear–and where the crimes are truly horrible–can leave troubling legacies.
Last year, a panel of judges from the federal appeals court in Cincinnati reversed the death sentence in one of Coleman’s cases in Ohio–the murder of teenager Tonnie Storey–because his defense attorneys did no investigation of his upbringing.
That investigation, the appeals court said, would have uncovered a background so horrific that there was a strong likelihood that at least one juror would have been swayed to spare Coleman from a death sentence.
But in his other case–the murder of 44-year-old Marlene Walters, for which he is being executed, and the attempted murder of her husband, Harry–a different panel of judges from the same federal appeals court let the sentence stand, though the attorneys in that case also did no investigation of Coleman’s childhood.
The federal appeals court as a whole has refused to resolve the inconsistency, and the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to deal with it as well.
“Two different panels coming to contrary conclusions–that has to be resolved one way or the other,” said Dale Baich, a federal public defender in Arizona who has represented Coleman for more than a decade. “It comes down to basic fairness.”
`I wasn’t used to normal’
By virtually all accounts, Coleman’s upbringing was terrible. He never knew his father, and his mother–a drug user and prostitute who was institutionalized several times–abandoned Coleman in a trash can as an infant, court records show.
He was rescued by his grandmother, but under her care he was often neglected and subjected to physical and sexual abuse while living in Waukegan’s depressed and crime-ridden Market Street section of town, court records show. She practiced voodoo and often enlisted Coleman’s help, having him collect dirt from cemeteries and kill small animals for her potions, records show.
“I wasn’t used to normal,” Coleman said. “I didn’t know what normal was.”
Coleman also suffered brain damage–believed to be linked to his mother’s drug and alcohol abuse during pregnancy and his childhood head injuries–making it difficult for him to make rational decisions, a condition worsened by his own drug abuse. Thomas Thompson, a New Mexico neuropsychologist hired by Coleman’s attorneys, described Coleman’s brain as a “damaged container with damaged contents.”
Prosecutors dispute Coleman’s claim of brain damage.
In a plea for mercy, Coleman also pointed to prison records that show he has been a model inmate, with no violations in 17 years. Two guards offered sworn affidavits of Coleman’s good behavior behind bars–a prison record that the prosecutors ridiculed as meaningless.
Coleman’s explanation for his murder spree is simple–drugs.
“All I know, I had to get narcotics to keep going,” Coleman said. “My main goal was to use drugs. I had no other destination whatsoever.”
Coleman’s case also has been dogged by charges that Cincinnati prosecutors improperly rejected nine of 12 blacks from the jury pool. The issue has not been addressed by appeals courts because Coleman’s original appeals lawyers did not raise it, and so it was forfeited for future appeals.
Those issues are set against one of the nation’s worst crime sprees, which Coleman undertook with a girlfriend, Debra Brown. She faces a death sentence in Indiana, and long prison terms in Ohio and Illinois.
“If there is ever a case that cries out for justice, it is this case,” said Ohio’s Hamilton County prosecuting attorney, Mike Allen. “This case cries out for Alton Coleman to pay the ultimate penalty for crimes he committed.”
Said Harry Walters, who was permanently disabled by Coleman’s attack: “It’s time to do it. I sincerely mean it. Execution is the solution.”
Strangled girl was first
The spree began in May 1984 in Kenosha, where Coleman, using the name Robert Knight, befriended Juanita Wheat and earned her trust. Coleman then kidnapped and murdered her 9-year-old daughter, Vernita. Vernita’s body, strangled and bound with wire, was found in an abandoned building in Waukegan.
At the time, he had already served time for rape and deviate sexual assault, had been arrested on other occasions for sex charges, and was facing a current rape charge, records show.
“I want to see something happen to him. I want to see it happen and feel it all,” said Juanita Wheat, now 55 and a nurse’s assistant in Kenosha who plans to travel to Ohio to witness Coleman’s execution.
“Justice is for all,” she added, “and you get what you deserve.”
As police pursued Coleman, he and Brown traveled the Midwest, stealing cars to get from Illinois to Indiana and through Michigan, Ohio and Kentucky, leaving dead bodies almost everywhere they stopped.
In Gary, he was convicted of killing Tamika Turks, 7, and in Detroit, Toledo and Indianapolis, he and Brown are believed to have murdered others, though Coleman was not prosecuted.
In Norwood, a working-class suburb of Cincinnati, Coleman and Brown stopped at the Walterses’ home to try to buy a camper that the Ohio couple were selling. Inside, they beat both, tied them up and left them for dead. Marlene Walters suffered some two dozen wounds to her head. Coleman and Brown were arrested a week later as they sat in the bleachers at an Evanston park.
“His alleged tough childhood does not excuse him from suffering the ultimate punishment,” said Allen, the Ohio prosecutor. “Alton Coleman is pure evil.”
Days before his execution, Coleman, bowed his head, said that he was remorseful and that he was preparing himself to die.
“I take responsibility for what I did,” he said. “I’ve messed up terribly in this life.”
Jessica Marie Hann who use to be known as Jason Hann was sentenced to death by the State of California for the murders of his infant daughter and son plus the attempted murder of another child. According to court documents Jessica Marie Hann (Jason Hann) would beat to death his two month old son. Two years later she would beat to death another child, this time a ten month old daughter. The body of the second child would be found in a storage container after Hann failed to pay the rent. When authorities went to arrest Jessica Marie Hann (Jason Hann) and his common law wife Krissy Lynn Werntz who was the mother of the two children they would discover a third infant was showing signs of abuse. The pair would be arrested. Krissy Lynn Werntz would be found guilty to the murder of her daughter and sentenced to a fifteen year prison sentence. Jessica Marie Hann would be sentenced to death.
Jason Michael Hann (Jessica Marie Hann) admits he killed two of his children just weeks after they were born, his attorney said. Their bodies were found in separate storage lockers 1,500 miles apart in 2002.
Already serving up to 30 years in the Vermont prison system for the 1999 death of his son, Hann’s murder trial began Monday in the 2001 killing of his daughter, Montana, who prosecutors say died in Desert Hot Springs, Calif. She was 2½ months old.
Riverside County prosecutors are pursuing the death penalty for Hann by invoking the “special circumstance” of a previous murder conviction. If the jury finds him guilty of first-degree murder with the special circumstance, it will then decide if the death sentence should be imposed. The other option would be life without possibility of parole.
Jason Hann (Jessica Marie Hann), who has pleaded not guilty to the first-degree murder charge, has had severe bipolar disorder since early childhood, his lawyer Brenda Miller said. She asked the jury of nine women and three men at Larson Justice Center in California to consider a second-degree murder charge in light of that information.
Miller compared Hann’s cycles of rage to a swing on a children’s playground — going up and down — and said 10-week-old Montana took the brunt of it one day almost 13 years ago.
“Just as his anxiety and his rage was reaching its peak, Montana began to cry, and her cries got louder and louder, and his rage just exploded,” Miller said, at which point Hann punched the baby with a closed fist.
Jason Hann (Jessica Marie Hann) had been treated several times for bipolar disorder, but he checked himself out of facilities against medical advice and refused to take medication
“Mental illness is no excuse” for what Hann did, Miller said, but she asked the jury to consider the lesser conviction, which carries a sentence of 15 years to life.
Investigators in Arkansas, where Montana’s remains were found, determined she died while her parents lived in Desert Hot Springs, and her body was wrapped inside garbage bags and placed in a “blue Tupperware-type container,” deputy Riverside County district attorney Lisa DiMaria said. Then the couple, who DiMaria said lived a “transient, gypsy-style life” beginning in 1998, left for Arkansas. They rented a storage locker, where they kept a trailer containing Montana’s body. A year after Montana died, her parents had stopped paying for the locker and the contents were auctioned off. The buyer called police after finding the body.
An all-points-bulletin found Jason Hann (Jessica Marie Hann) and the children’s mother, Krissy Lynn Werntz, in a Motel 6 in Portland, Maine, with a 1-month old son, named Jason, who was found to have numerous broken ribs, bleeding under his skull and other internal injuries, according to the prosecution. The state placed this child with foster parents, who eventually adopted him.
Witness Jennifer Bloom, an employee of Maine’s Department of Human Services, testified she and a colleague were sent to check on the new baby’s welfare, and Hann admitted to being involved with the deaths of his two other children.
“He said he was responsible for both deaths. He didn’t provide a lot of detail. He said, ‘I fell and blacked out with the baby,'” Bloom said. She added Hann said he felt guilty about the deaths, and felt he had to keep moving to evade police
The body of the couple’s first child, who also was named Jason, was found similarly wrapped in trash bags inside a rubber container, in a storage locker in Lake Havasu City, Ariz. He was 6 weeks old when he died.
Jason Hann (Jessica Marie Hann) was extradited to California in 2009 to be tried for Montana’s death, and it took four years for the death-penalty case to make its way through the system and into opening arguments.
DiMaria explained to the jury the two boys would be referred to as “Jason One” and “Jason Two” during the course of the trial to differentiate between them, though the surviving boy also may be called by his adoptive name, Michael.
Almost all witnesses are being flown in from out of state, due to the couple’s frequent relocations.
Testimony is expected to end next week.
Werntz, Montana’s mother, is facing a murder charge and was originally scheduled to be tried at the same time as Hann, but family medical problems have postponed her trial, DiMaria said.
Documents just filed in Marin County, California show Jason Michael Hann is now known as Jessica Marie Hann, and is now a female “to match my gender identity.”
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Health Care Communications Chief Liz Gransee said as of February 2019, “10 patients statewide have been approved for gender-affirming surgery.” Due to HIPPA guidelines, she could not comment on specific inmates.
Hann’s changing mugshots reflect his transition from male to female, the gender now indicated on her birth certificate.
“Senate Bill 310 allows a state prisoner or county jail inmate the right to petition a court to obtain a name or gender change,” said CDCR Deputy Press Secretary Terry Thornton. “SB 310 requires CDCR to use the new name of the person who obtains a name change and to list the prior name only as an alias. CDCR updated Hann’s records and made notification to the victim on file on Feb. 14.”
On Feb. 21, 2014, an Indio judge sentenced then 40 year old Jason Hann to death for killing his 10 month old daughter, named Montana, in 2001. At the time, Hann and Montana’s mother, Krissy Lynn Werntz, now 39, were living in Desert Hot Springs.
Montana’s body was found in a Tupperware container wrapped in a plastic trash bag in an abandoned storage trailer the couple had left in Arkansas. The couple was arrested in Portland, Maine, where they were living with another son, who was suffering from life threatening injuries. That son was taken into foster care and later adopted.
The couple’s arrest led authorities to find the body of a second infant in a trailer in Arizona. Authorities determined that 2 month old boy had been killed before their daughter Montana, at some point when the couple was living in Vermont.
Hann was convicted 1st in Vermont, and extradited to Indio, where a jury recommended the death penalty.
“These kids never had a chance at life so it was more than deserved, and I think he tried to cover up the crime as well,” said alternate juror Bob Price.
“The Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution requires that prisons provide medically necessary treatment for inmates’ medical needs, ” said Thornton. California was the 1st state to pay for prisoner’s sex reassignment surgery.
Hann in still in custody at San Quentin, which is a male-only facility, and she is allowed personal property items in accordance with her gender identity, such as a bra, hair rollers, or makeup.
Werntz was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison for her role in Montana’s death. She is housed at Chowchilla, but some part of her case is being heard Friday in Indio.
Hann’s attorney did not return a call for comment.
Lorraine Hunter is currently on California Death Row for the murder of her husband in order to collect the insurance money. According to court documents Lorraine Hunter took out two additional insurance policies worth over three quarters of a million dollars in the weeks preceding the murder.
On the night of the murder Lorraine Hunter and her daughter Briuana Hunter, who was fifteen at the time, went with the victim to his semi truck where he would be shot twice in the head and twice in the back. Initially police believed the murder was related to a robbery however they would soon figure out the awful truth.
A death sentence was handed down Friday, Dec. 8, for a Moreno Valley woman who fatally shot her 56-year-old husband to collect more than $1 million in life insurance proceeds.
A Riverside jury in August convicted 62-year-old Lorraine Alison Hunter of murder in the slaying of Albert Thomas in 2009 and ultimately recommended that she be put to death.
Riverside County Superior Court Judge Mac Fisher agreed with the jury’s recommendation, rejecting a defense plea for Hunter’s sentence to be reduced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Along with first-degree murder, jurors in her two-month trial found true special circumstance allegations of lying in wait and killing for financial gain.
The prosecution’s key witness was Hunter’s now-23-year-old daughter, Briuana Lashanae Hunter, who confessed to plotting with her mother to kill Thomas.
Briuana Hunter pleaded guilty last year to three counts of attempted murder and one count of voluntary manslaughter. She’s slated to be sentenced Wednesday to 18 years, nine months in state prison.
The young woman, who’s being held without bail at the Indio Jail, testified that her stepfather was a “calm, quiet person,” who was “never overly aggressive” in the seven years that she and her mother lived with him in Moreno Valley.
The witness stated that he held down two jobs — one as a short-haul trucker and another as a clerk at a Moreno Valley Auto Zone.
According to Hunter, her mother frequently argued with Thomas about not having enough money to spend. Deputy District Attorney Will Robinson described the elder Hunter as “money hungry” and not interested in holding down a job to contribute to the household
Briuana Hunter said she aided her mother in filling out at least three life insurance applications, naming her stepfather as the insured party and Lorraine Hunter as the principal beneficiary. The woman forged Thomas’ name on each application.
Hunter took out a $750,000 policy, as well as a $10,000 policy, Robinson said. A third policy apparently lapsed before Thomas was killed.
Thomas additionally had a $450,000 policy through the trucking company for which he worked, according to court papers.
In the two months before he was killed, Lorraine Hunter planned to shoot Thomas three other times — twice on walks through their neighborhood in the area of Day Street and Eucalyptus Avenue, and another time outside the victim’s workplace — but each time, the presence of too many witnesses foiled the plots.
Briuana Hunter admitted being there on each occasion, knowing beforehand what her mother had planned.
On the evening of Nov. 3, 2009, Thomas and the defendants left their apartment and strolled to his big rig, where he wanted to grab a sweatshirt that he had bought for Briuana Hunter, who was 15 at the time, according to trial testimony.
The three of them climbed into his truck, and Thomas ducked into the rear sleeper compartment to find the shirt, while Lorraine Hunter and her daughter sat in the front seat. Robinson said Lorraine Hunter pulled a small-caliber handgun she’d stolen from a member of her church and shot the victim point-blank in the back of the head twice, then shot him twice in the upper back as he knelt in the compartment. Sheriff’s deputies found him dead in a kneeling position.
Hunter and her daughter fled the scene with the help of a relative, and the case went cold for two years, until the same relative confessed everything she knew to investigators after being arrested herself for an unrelated offense.
Robinson theorized during Hunter’s penalty trial that she was a sociopath with blood on her hands when she married Thomas.
The prosecutor argued to jurors that she had masterminded, and probably carried out, the slaying of her previous husband, Allen Brown, who was gunned down in what appeared to be a random act of violence in Inglewood in 1996. The circumstances were eerily similar to Thomas’ death, with Brown shot in the back, and like Thomas, the victim was a truck driver.
No charges were ever filed in the case, which remains unsolved.
This is the second death sentence in Riverside in one week. On Dec. 1, San Jacinto gang member Raymond Alex Barrera received a death sentence for three slayings in 2013.
Michelle Sue Tharp is on Pennsylvania Death Row for the murder of her seven year old daughter. According to court documents Michelle Sue Tharp daughter Tausha Lee Lanham who was under twenty pounds when she died in 1998. Michelle Sue Tharp would be convicted and sentenced to death.
Michelle Sue Tharp 2022 Information
Name
Name Type
MICHELLE S THARP
Also Known As
MICHELLE SUE THARP
Commit Name
MICHELLE SUE THARP
True Name
Parole Number: 983CU Age: 53 Date of Birth: 01/20/1969 Race/Ethnicity: WHITE Height: 5′ 02″ Gender: FEMALE Citizenship: USA Complexion: LIGHT Current Location: MUNCY
Permanent Location: MUNCY Committing County: WASHINGTON
Michelle Sue Tharp More News
From the beginning, Washington County District Attorney John C. Pettit asserted that Michelle Sue Tharp’s starvation murder trial was just as much about her dead daughter as it was about her.
It was Tausha Lee Lanham’s story, he told jurors.
Now, that story has an ending.
Jurors yesterday found Tharp guilty of first-degree murder in the death of the tiny 7-year-old girl, ending a weeklong trial filled with the sordid details of Tausha’s hungry life and the bizarre moments surrounding her premature death.
“God rest her soul. Tausha, we love you,” her father’s sister, Rhonda Lanham, tearfully told reporters outside the Washington County courtroom moments after the verdict. “I just want everybody to know, please, when you go home, hug and love your children. No child deserves to be treated bad.”
The jury of seven men and five women, most of whom have children, delivered their verdict about 3:30 p.m. after deliberating for less than three hours. They also convicted Tharp, 31, of Burgettstown, of endangering the welfare of a child and abuse of a corpse.
On the third and final verdict on the murder charge, Rhonda Lanham punched the air, cried out and doubled over in tears.
Police arrested Tharp on April 19, 1998, a day after she reported Tausha missing from a mall in Steubenville, Ohio.
Investigators quickly learned that Tharp and her live-in boyfriend, Douglas Bittinger Sr., had invented a story that the girl had gotten lost in the mall to hide the fact that they left Tausha’s corpse atop a large bush in the West Virginia woods.
Tharp had found Tausha dead in her bed the previous morning after what Pettit said was a long period in which she had been starved deliberately. Tharp testified that she did not call for help because she was panic-stricken that social workers would take her other children away. Instead, she and Bittinger took Tausha’s body on a long, strange series of errands in his car before leaving the body, wrapped in a sheet and stuffed into garbage bags, in the woods.
Bittinger also faces a homicide charge in the case, but no trial has been scheduled. He testified against Tharp.
Tharp’s attorney, Glenn Alterio, said he was disappointed by the outcome. He is now setting his sights on today’s sentencing, when jurors will choose between the death penalty or a life sentence without parole.
Alterio, who is the county’s public defender, said his client had prepared for a possible guilty verdict and was handling the situation well. Tharp left the courtroom red-eyed and appeared to be on the verge of breaking down as deputies handcuffed her. She wore the same green jacket and skirt she wore during the first day of the trial.
Pettit said the case had been more emotional than most for him, saying that when he thinks of Tausha, he feels guilty after eating.
Using the same sets of facts, the attorneys presented vastly different portraits of Tharp. Was she a conniving, wicked mother who deliberately starved her middle daughter to death? Or was she simply a bad parent who loved her children but was overwhelmed by their health problems and her own dysfunctional relationships?
Jurors ultimately chose to believe the former.
With his client facing the possibility of the death penalty, Alterio reiterated his argument that Tausha’s death from malnutrition occurred because of long-standing health problems — specifically a “failure to thrive” — that prevented her from growing and developing properly.
“She ate. She just didn’t grow,” Alterio said in his his closing.
Tausha was born prematurely and had numerous ailments, including genetic abnormalities and problems with her breathing, blood, glands, nervous system and gastrointestinal tract.
She weighed 2 pounds, 5 ounces at birth, and died nearly eight years later at less than 12 pounds. An autopsy revealed that she had not eaten for days before her death.
Witnesses testified that Tharp starved Tausha, keeping food from her for a day or more at a time. They said she confined her daughter to her room at night to prevent her from searching for any available morsel in the kitchen, where she ate from the garbage can and retrieved scraps from pet bowls. They also said she treated her son and two other daughters better than she did Tausha.
Tharp’s possible motives were never discussed in court, but Pettit said in an interview that Tharp might have been acting out of spite against Tausha’s father or anger that that her child needed extra attention.
Other witnesses told of a mother who cared for all her children, who neither denied Tausha food nor abused her.
Alterio pointed out that Tausha was so sickly that the federal government opted to provide her with monthly welfare checks of $539 for the rest of her life after merely reviewing her medical records.
In a pitch for sympathy, Alterio asked jurors to consider that Tharp endured a difficult childhood and a series of abusive romances. She had no transportation and no telephone and lacked support from the four fathers of her five children. Alterio noted that one of Tharp’s children, Benjamin, was put up for adoption instead of being aborted.
“What does that indicate to you about her feelings toward children?” Alterio asked.
With little help from anyone, Tharp had limited resources with which to care for her daughter. It was no wonder, he told jurors, that she did not show up for all her appointments with various social service agencies.
Nevertheless, Alterio said, she tried. When told in 1998 that she could stay on welfare a little while longer because she was caring for an infant, she chose to receive job training and go to work instead. And no social service agency ever considered Tausha in such a precarious situation that they needed to strip Tharp of her child, Alterio said.
Despite Alterio’s best efforts, the last impression left with the jury was by Pettit, who delivered an impassioned hour-long closing argument using photographs as props.
Pettit told the jurors that Tharp systematically defeated the attempts of agencies, such as Washington County Children and Youth Services, to aid Tausha, thereby engineering a “pattern of deception.” She missed appointments, refused to answer the door when they called and hid Tausha from them, Pettit said.
Tharp defeated even the efforts of doctors to help Tausha because she stopped taking her daughter for check-ups after October 1993, he said.
Pettit referred to damaging testimony from several witnesses, including a high school classmate, who recalled Tharp telling her that Tausha belonged “six foot under in a body bag,” and Tharp’s father’s estranged wife, who testified that Tharp once told her, “I hate [Tausha] so bad that I could just kill her.”
And once again, he outlined the shocking series of events that led Tharp, upon discovering her daughter’s dead body, to put Tausha in a car seat, hop into Bittinger’s car, visit her grandmother’s to call off work and drop off laundry, swing by a nearby lake, and buy garbage bags before leaving the corpse in a remote area.
Standing before the jury, case pictures and his legal pads resting on the wooden rail separating prosecutor and jury, Pettit called Tausha a “fighter” who overcame abuse, neglect and a lack of love.
But, he told the jury, in the end, the plucky little girl could not survive a mother who tried to kill her.
“Tausha was indeed a fighter, and she overcame all of these things. But she could not overcome the act of all food, all nourishment being withheld from her for several days,” Pettit said.
During his last words to the jury, Pettit showed a photograph of the refrigerator in the Tharp home on which hung a saying: “Home is where the heart is.”
“There was no heart in that home when it came to Tausha Lanham,” Pettit said.
A woman convicted of fatally starving her child has appealed a Washington County judge’s order that a jury should re-hear the death penalty phase of her case.
Michelle Sue Tharp, who will turn 50 later this month, last had a local address in Burgettstown.
She has been on death row since being convicted in 2000 for the first-degree murder of Tausha Lanham, 7.
In December, Tharp took her criminal case to the state Supreme Court for the second time hoping that a decision by Washington County President Judge Katherine B. Emery can be overturned.
The state Supreme Court in 2014 upheld Tharp’s conviction but decided instead to grant her a new proceeding in which a Washington County jury would decide if her penalty should be life imprisonment or death.
Washington County President Judge Katherine B. Emery heard testimony and argument on Tharp’s behalf, but was not swayed by her attorneys’ arguments that the passage of time and deaths or unavailability of witnesses made it impossible to present an adequate case.
The judge said prior testimony or depositions could be read into the record for the new jury to consider.
Lacking from the trial in 2000 before then-judge Paul Pozonsky was testimony on Tharp’s mental state that might have resulted in a punishment other than the death penalty, her attorneys contended.
In Pennsylvania, only a jury, not a judge acting alone, can impose a death sentence.
The information about Tharp’s latest appeal came to light Friday in a teleconference convened before Judge John DiSalle while Emery is on medical leave.
DiSalle noted Tharp’s filing with the state Supreme Court does not stop the case from proceeding on the county level.
However, attorneys James McHugh and Elizabeth Hadayia won’t be representing Tharp if her case eventually goes before a jury.
‘”I think we need to get Ms. Tharp counsel,” McHugh said via speakerphone. “We’re not going to go forward with the matter.”
McHugh recommended that a Philadelphia lawyer who is qualified to try a death penalty case be appointed by the court.
DiSalle said another telephone conference, not yet scheduled, would include the attorney that McHugh mentioned.
Assistant District Attorney John Friedmann said his office is answering Tharp’s petition filed with the Supreme Court, but when the Supreme Court might decide Tharp’s latest appeal is unknown.
“Trial counsel needs to be appointed,” Friedmann said. “I don’t think we can ever be too early on that.”
In ordering the new penalty phase in 2014, Justice Max Baer called the evidence of Tharp’s guilt “overwhelming,” writing she not only denied Tausha meals but physically restrained the child so she could not feed herself and asked others to perpetuate the same abuse.
Emery noted in her six-page opinion that Tausha, who weighed only 11.77 pounds at age 7, lacked fat in parts of the body where it normally accumulates, and had extreme wear on her teeth from grinding.
Tausha was falsely reported to have been abducted from a mall in Steubenville, Ohio, on April 18, 1998, when she actually died in bed at home.
According to trial testimony, Tharp feared Washington County Children and Youth Services would take away her other children, so the death was concealed.
Tausha’s body, in trash bags, was found dumped along a road in Follansbee, W.Va.
Tharp is serving her sentence in the State Correctional Institution at Muncy in central Pennsylvania
Michelle Sue Tharp is currently incarcerated at the Muncy facility the home of Pennsylvania Death Row for Women
Why Is Michelle Sue Tharp On Death Row
Michelle Sue Tharp was convicted of the starving death of her seven year old daughter
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