Opinion ID: 2639434
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Petitioner's Incriminating Statements

Text: Evidence of petitioner's incriminating statements was admitted at trial. Several teenage girls testified that before Denise's murder, petitioner had contemptuously referred to Denise, Darlene, and Lynda as sluts. Darlene's mother testified that in September 1984 (after Denise's and Debbie's murders), petitioner volunteered that Denise and Debbie were whores and tramps and they should have been killed. Also, about that same time after the murders, Patricia Kelly confided in petitioner that she suspected her husband was seeing another woman. Petitioner replied, Whores like that should be eliminated the very same term he had used in referring to the victims. In November 1984, during a conversation about the murders of the three victims, petitioner said to Joe and Linda Crespin, If I had stabbed the three girls would I be sitting here talking to you now? Significantly, petitioner referred to the cause of death as stabbing, even though none of the media accounts at the time had identified stabbing as the cause of death.