Death
On July 29, hikers found the nude, ravaged body of 11-year-old Michelle Steele, beaten and strangled to death on a bank of the Missouri River near St. Joseph. Hatcher was arrested the following day, as he tried to check in at the St. Joseph State Hospital. While awaiting trial, he confessed to fifteen other child-murders dating from 1969. The first victim, 12-year-old William Freeman, had disappeared from Antioch, California, in August of that year, one day before Hatcher was charged with child molestation in nearby San Francisco. In another case, Hatcher penned a crude map that led searchers to the remains of James Churchill, buried on the grounds of the Rock Island Army Arsenal, near Davenport, Iowa. It was then that he also confessed to the murder of Eric Christgen. He was convicted of the Christgen homicide in October 1983, and drew a term of life imprisonment with no parole for at least 50 years. Facing his second Missouri conviction a year later for the murder of Michelle Steele, Hatcher requested a death sentence but the jury refused, recommending life on December 3, 1984. Four days later, Hatcher hanged himself in his cell, at the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City.
Read more about this topic: Charles Ray Hatcher
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“Almost everybody in the neighborhood had “troubles,” frankly localized and specified; but only the chosen had “complications.” To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death warrant. People struggled on for years with “troubles,” but they almost always succumbed to “complications.””
—Edith Wharton (1862–1937)