A serial killer who has been on death row for nearly 40 years was implicated in a cold case killing yesterday by California authorities as a parole board in Idaho considered whether he should still be executed.
Convicted murderer Thomas Creech was charged Wednesday as a suspect in the 1974 fatal shooting of Daniel Walker in his van along Interstate-40 in California.
The passenger with Walker, 21, was able to escape and flag down a passing car but Walker did not survive his injuries.
The crack in the cold case by the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office came after investigators struggled to “develop any viable leads” for several years when they would review the case, authorities said.
The sheriff’s cold case unit resumed its investigation last November, getting more information about the killing that led them to Creech, who is sitting in an Idaho prison after he was convicted of five other murders, the agency said.
California detectives are working with Idaho prosecutors to confirm “intimate” details from Creech’s statements about Daniel’s murder, the sheriff’s office said.
Thomas Creech has been on death row for almost 50 years. Idaho Federal Defense Services
He has been convicted of three murders in Idaho, one in California and one in Oregon.
Creech has been in prison for nearly 50 years and has avoided 11 scheduled executions in that time, the Idaho Statesman reported. He is Idaho’s longest serving death row inmate.
Prosecutors initially moved to execute Creech in 1981 after he beat a fellow inmate, 23-year-old David Dale Jensen, in an Idaho prison. Creech was already serving four life sentences when he was hit.
A serial killer has been convicted of five murders. Idaho Department of Corrections
The state parole board held a meeting last week to discuss whether Creech’s sentence should be reduced from death to life in prison as the 73-year-old man sought clemency.
“I regret everything I’ve ever done,” Creech told the parole board, the Statesman reported. “The person I am now is not the person I was before. Maybe the person I used to be doesn’t deserve pity at all. But I think I have a lot to offer people.”
But the Ada County Prosecutor’s Office reportedly argued that he was a “sociopath” and in a press release emphasized that Creech had confessed to nearly 40 murders.
“If his sentence is commuted, he will return to a general prison where he will have more access to inmates, putting them at risk,” the prosecutor’s office said in a news release.
“Obtaining the death penalty in a capital case is not a decision that any prosecutor’s office takes lightly,” the office said.
One of Creech’s attorneys with the nonprofit Federal Defender Service of Idaho, Deborah Czuba, said the Statesman’s announcement Wednesday did not provide “any real evidence.”
“This detail somehow now makes Mr. Creech a new suspect in a crime that has never been linked to him,” Czuba reportedly said, “despite several efforts to link him to him since 1975, when a team of federal and local law enforcement officials were determined to prove the fantasy that he committed 50 murders.”
Categories: Trending
Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
