Twenty-eight-year-old Joseph A. Maine, who was sentenced in Janu-ary to life in prison without the possibility of parole in connection with the 1997 killing of a local woman whose body was found in-side a Parrottsville-area cistern, was sentenced to a concurrent 25-year prison term on Monday in Cocke County criminal court.

Circuit Judge Rex Henry Ogle handed down the 25-year term for conspiracy to commit first-degree murder after a hearing on Monday during which the judge also denied a defense motion for a new trial in the case.

Judge Ogle also sentenced a Cosby man on Monday in connec-tion with a 2007 stabbing death.

In handing down his ruling in the first case, Judge Ogle compared the 1997 killing of Amy King to another well-known crime in the fourth judicial district: The Rocky Top Village Inn killings in Septem-ber 1986. In that case, a Grassy Fork man and a Sevier County woman were shot and stabbed to death in a room at the Gatlinburg motel where they both worked.

“This, for the shear brutality of it and the shear meanness of it, only what’s called the Rocky Top mur-der case is worse than this case,” Judge Ogle said. “What you-all did to her, the shear brutality of what was done to her after she was dead, over the promise of a motorcycle, a car, and a house trailer.

“Then to dump her body in a cis-tern…dear Lord, what a way to die,” he added.

Maine, who was 17 years old at the time of King’s death in 1997, was convicted last January by a five-man, seven-woman criminal court jury which took just half an hour to return a guilty verdict. Judge Ogle sentenced Maine to life in prison without the possibility of parole, the maximum sentence available in the case, on the murder charge, and scheduled a sentencing hearing on Monday to decide the defendant’s sentence on the con-spiracy charge.

In the meantime, District Attor-ney General Jimmy Dunn and de-fense attorney Joanne Sheldon agreed to recommend that the 25-year term on the conspiracy convic-tion be served concurrently with the life sentence for first-degree mur-der.

“We agreed that the sentence [for] the conspiracy charge should be served concurrently with the life sentence because the actual murder was so close in time” to the alleged conspiracy, attorney Sheldon told the court.

Before Judge Ogle made his de-cision, prosecutor Dunn asked the judge to consider the victim’s fam-ily in making his ruling. He said King’s mother is ill and unable to attend the hearing.

“The family wanted to attend, but they asked me to relate to the court that whatever the defendant gets, it cannot bring their daughter back, but neither do they want him to just walk away from this situa-tion,” Dunn told Judge Ogle.

Maine is alleged to have been involved with two co-defendants in killing King by striking at least one blow to the victim’s head with the blunt end of a hatchet in August of 1997. Dunn told the jury during the trial that Maine was promised a mobile home, a motorcycle, and a car for his part in killing King.

King was killed on her twenty-first birthday in 1997, and her body was wrapped in a tarp, placed in the cistern on the Sinking Creek Road property, weighted with cinder blocks, and covered with baking soda and carpet freshener to mask the odor.

Both co-defendants earlier pled guilty in the case. Shelly Breeden, who was then 22, and her alleged boyfriend, George Pate II, who was then 24, pled guilty in 1998 to kill-ing the 21-year-old victim.

Pate pled guilty to first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder and was sen-tenced to life in prison. Breeden pled guilty to second-degree mur-der and conspiracy to commit sec-ond-degree murder and accepted a 25-year sentence.

Like Pate, Maine also pled guilty in 1998, but his case was sent back on appeal to local criminal court for further proceedings in 2001 and again in 2005, when Maine’s conviction was overturned by the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals based on erroneous sen-tencing information given to the defendant. Maine since opted to stand on a not guilty plea and take his case to a jury.

According to the testimony in the two-day trial last January, B.J. Kessler, of 282 Watts Road, rented the property at 2230 Sinking Creek Road and lived there in 1997 with Breeden, Pate, and King. Maine and his then-girlfriend, Becky Pe-ters, were frequent visitors. Maine is accused of conspiring with Pate and Breeden to kill King and, per-haps, Kessler so that the two could continue a relationship.

Maine told investigators later that Pate and Breeden wanted to be together, despite the fact that Pate was engaged to King and Kessler was engaged to Breeden, and said they “could never live in peace” if Kessler and King were alive.

Jurors heard testimony that Kessler, who said that around the time of the killing he became seri-ously ill with “flu-like symptoms,” had been poisoned, but no charges have ever been filed in connection with that aspect of the case.

Kessler described coming home from work in Gatlinburg one day in August and finding the house “ran-sacked” and some of his property stolen. Between three days and a week later, he returned to the prop-erty and discovered the body, he told the jury.

Kessler also found a large, ser-rated kitchen knife and a small hand ax near the cistern. Both weapons are alleged to have been the murder weapons.

Jurors were told that Pate and Breeden had approached Maine several times about killing King, and he had initially refused. But around 10 p.m. on August 1, 1997, when the pair asked Maine to par-ticipate, he agreed.

According to the defendant’s statement to authorities, Pate told King “there was something he wanted to show her in the chicken house.” Outside the residence, Pate used the kitchen knife to cut King’s throat and stab her, and Maine told investigators he struck the victim once in the head with the blunt side of the hatchet, although University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropolo-gist Dr. Murray Marks told the jury there were at least five strong blows from a blunt object to King’s head.

Jurors convicted Maine of both offenses after less than a half hour of deliberation. After conviction, there were only two possible sen-tences on the first-degree murder charge: life in prison without the possibility of parole or with the possibility of parole. Because the defendant was a juvenile at the time of the crime, prosecutors could not seek the death penalty.

 

Argue for new trial

Before Judge Ogle sentenced Maine on the conspiracy charge on Monday, he overruled a defense motion for a new trial. Defense attorney Sheldon cited four grounds in support of her motion.

Sheldon objected to Judge Ogle’s decision to allow prosecu-tors to introduce the victim’s skull into evidence, saying “the positive impact for the state of that on the jury is outweighed by the negative effect that had on the defendant,” Sheldon told the court, “Our posi-tion is that a diagram of the skull would have been just as effective.”

During the trial, Judge Ogle had ruled that some of the more graphic photographs taken by investigators at the scene should not have been seen by the jury.

But at one point early in the trial, at least one of those photos was accidentally shown to the jury as part of the state’s computerized PowerPoint presentation of its evi-dence.

Sheldon argued that the error was serious enough to warrant throwing out the jury’s verdict and granting a new trial.

But Judge Ogle agreed with prosecutor Dunn’s contention that the error had no effect on the jury’s verdict.

“We caught it on time and there’s no indication that it had any  influence on the verdict or that many of the jurors actually saw it or actually knew what had happened,” Dunn said. “And in any event, there were none of them that were so gruesome as to have an impact on the outcome of the trial.”

And Sheldon also argued that there was insufficient evidence dur-ing the trial to support a guilty ver-dict.

Judge Ogle disagreed with the defendant’s argument and overruled the motion for a new trial.

“The court is satisfied that the evidence was more than sufficient,” the judge said. “The verdict is very consistent with the facts in this case, and the state has more than met its burden of proof.

“And there’s no doubt that some of the pictures were bad and the court was, quite frankly, perturbed about what happened,” Judge Ogle added. “But it was not enough to support the defendant’s motion for a new trial.”

The defendant may now appeal his conviction and judge’s decision to the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals.

 

Cosby man faces 5 years

In a decision in another case in-volving the death of a Cocke County resident, Judge Ogle or-dered a Cosby man to serve a five-year sentence for voluntary man-slaughter in the custody of the Ten-nessee Department of Correction (TDOC).

The judge’s decision came after two of the victim’s sisters asked the court to hand down the maximum sentence possible.

Jonathan Robert Strange was sentenced to five years in jail after pleading guilty in May to voluntary manslaughter in connection with the fatal stabbing of Verbon Lee Moore in November 2007.

Strange, 21, of 513 Little Hol-low Road, Cosby, was initially in-dicted by the Cocke County Grand Jury for second-degree murder. But, in a plea-bargain approved by Judge Ogle on May 27, Strange pled guilty to the reduced charge of voluntary manslaughter and was given a five-year sentence. A hear-ing was held on Monday to deter-mine the details of the sentence.

Judge Ogle’s options were to re-lease the defendant, who has been in custody since the stabbing oc-curred, on time served; to require Strange to serve a portion of the sentence followed by probation or another form of supervised release; or to order that the entire sentence be served in TDOC custody.

The victim’s family asked the court for the most severe sentence possible.

“I just want the judge to know how much Verbon was loved,” the victim’s sister, Jamie Manning, testified on Monday. “He has  a son and a daughter and those babies are [now] not going to have a daddy; and all because of Jonathan Strange.

“I just can’t understand how Jonathan did what he did,” she told Judge Ogle. “He knew what he was doing and I want to just ask that you make him serve some prison time.”

Terry Moore, another of the vic-tim’s sisters, had the same request for Judge Ogle.

“I’m asking that he be sentenced to the maximum possible sentence allowed by the law,” Moore told the court. “Now at our family gath-erings there’s an empty space. And I’ll never understand how this hap-pened as quickly as it did.”

Strange pled guilty in connection with the November 28, 2007, stab-bing death of Verbon Moore out-side the mobile home the two men shared with Moore’s girlfriend at 513 Little Hollow Road in Cosby. The defendant was identified by investigators at the time of the inci-dent as Moore’s girlfriend’s son.

Moore was reportedly living with his girlfriend and her two sons in a trailer park in Cosby. Chief Cocke County Sheriff’s Detective Robert Caldwell reported that the stabbing occurred shortly after midnight on November 28.

The attack reportedly occurred in the yard between the trailer the four people shared and another trailer, Caldwell said, and investi-gators recovered a large kitchen knife which is believed to have been used in the stabbing.

Citing the defendant’s relative youth, his lack of a previous crimi-nal record except for a $50 fine for failing to appear in general sessions court, and the defense’s contentions that the stabbing came as the result of “strong provocation” and that it “is unlikely that anything like this will ever happen again,” Assistant District Public Defender Keith Haas asked for leniency for his cli-ent.

And Strange apologized to the court and to the victim’s family for the incident.

“I’d like to tell the family that I’m sorry it happened,” he said.

“He’s always been remorseful,” Haas said. “It’s always been his position that this is something that should never have happened,”

But Assistant District Attorney General Amanda Inman said a sen-tence other than the maximum would not be appropriate.

“The court needs to avoid de-preciating the seriousness of this offense,” Inman said.

After hearing the testimony and the arguments of counsel, Judge Ogle said that “justice would not be served unless this sentence is or-dered executed.

“The court, in all candor, did not see a great outpouring of remorse from this defendant,” Judge Ogle said. “This was a very brutal crime.

“I don’t even see strong provo-cation,” the judge added. “For someone to ram a butcher knife into somebody and then get proba-tion…it would send a message that this type of crime is not something that is important; and that is cer-tainly not the case.”