Massachusetts triple murderer’s lawyer pleads for life

BOSTON: An attorney for a Massachusetts drifter who killed three men in a series of attacks in 2001, refining his murder methods as he went, asked a federal jury on Wednesday to spare his client’s life and sentence him to spend the rest of his years in prison.
The admitted triple murderer, Gary Lee Sampson, 57, could be the second person sentenced to death by a federal jury in Massachusetts in two years, a rarity in a state whose laws do not allow the death penalty.
Sampson pleaded guilty to killing two men, aged 69 and 19, in Massachusetts after hailing them as a hitchhiker and taking them to secluded wooded areas where he tied them up before stabbing them to death. He later strangled a third man, 58, in New Hampshire.
Defense attorney Michael Burt asked the jury to consider that killing Sampson would not undo his crimes.
“If we could take away all that harm by executing Mr. Sampson, I would be the first to do that by injecting that poison into his veins,” Burt said. A sentence of life in prison without possibility of release, the sole alternative, he said, would “punish him in a very severe way.”
In a police tape played to the jury, Sampson told his interrogator that he changed his murder method for his last victim, the caretaker of a home on Lake Winnipesaukee, because “I didn’t want no more blood on me.”
Assistant US Attorney Zachary Hafer showed the jury the pocketknife Sampson used in the killings, as well as photos of his victims before and after their slayings.
“Three kind, caring souls, seemingly unconnected to each other in any way but brought together in the most unimaginably tragic way, brought together by the pure heinousness and cruelty of that man,” Hafer said, pointing to Sampson.
Sampson was sentenced to death in 2004, but a judge in 2011 overturned that sentence after learning that one of the jurors had lied about her history as a victim of domestic violence.
During the two-month trial, Sampson’s lawyers argued that the jury should spare him due to his history as a victim of abuse as a child, mental illness and traumatic brain injuries.
Sampson’s victims were Philip McCloskey, 69, Jonathan Rizzo, 19, and Robert Whitney, 58.
After the last slaying, Sampson recounted on the police interrogation tape, “I cooked some breakfast while he was dead in the bathroom.”