RSS Feed
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Beech kidnapper pleads guilty A Chatom man pleaded guilty to his part in the 2005 kidnapping of a local banker's wife after jurors were seated in preparation for a trial in Washington County Circuit Court Tuesday. The jury was selected and seated late Monday and the trial was to start Tuesday morning. William Evan Deese pleaded guilty to conspiracy to kidnap. District Attorney Spencer Walker said an agreement was reached for him to be sentenced to a 15-year split sentence when he appears before Judge Thomas Baxter on Feb. 11. He is to serve three years and be on probation for five years. "The victim in the case, Mrs. Virginia Beech, agreed to the settlement. While I would have liked to have seen a stronger sentencing, I agreed to it so that she did not have to testify." The fact that Deese did not do the actual kidnapping and has had no prior problems with the law were factors in the decision to settle, the district attorney said. Deese was accused of being the local contact for a Louisiana accomplice who went to the Frankville home of Ted and Virginia Beech in May 2005 and forcibly took her from the home at gunpoint. Michael Duncanson strapped a device to her that he said was a remotecontrolled bomb. He put a baseball cap on her and dark sunglasses and had her crouch on the floorboard of his car as he drove around. He stopped at a pay phone in Chatom and had her call her husband, then a vice president at SouthWest Bank's Chatom office, and demanded that $400,000 in ransom money be delivered to a local car wash. When it was not delivered and a deputy's patrol car was seen at the bank, Duncanson drove to Deer Park where he released Virginia Beech unharmed. He was later arrested in Louisiana and returned to Alabama where he pleaded guilty to kidnapping charges and received a 22-year sentence.
Duncanson and Deese had worked together at one time and Deese reportedly provided details about the Beeches to Duncanson to enable the kidnapping.
|
for larger version       |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
