Death
Gunnarsson's nearly naked body was found in a wooded area called Deep Gap about 86 miles from his apartment in Salisbury, North Carolina. He was shot twice in the head with a .22 caliber firearm. The time of death is placed between December 3 and December 4, 1993. Former policeman Lamont C. Underwood, the obsessive ex-fiance of a woman with whom Gunnarson was romantically involved, was convicted of Gunnarsson's murder in 1997 and sentenced to life imprisonment plus 40 years, however, in an opinion rendered Federal District Court for Wester North Carolina in January 2010, the justices ruled that Underwood had suffered from ineffective counsel, and ordered that he be granted a new trial or be released from jail in 180 days. That decision was overturned and the new trial denied by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in January 2011, which ruled that even if Underwood's lawyers had been ineffective as he claimed, the evidence against him was so overwhelming that his counsel's alleged relative lack of competence would have been immaterial in his conviction. Underwood continues to be incarcerated in Marion Correctional Institution in North Carolina.
Read more about this topic: Victor Gunnarsson
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