And, of course, on all the counts, they had the option to find him not guilty.
The jury deliberated for about an hour that day and about 3½ hours the next morning.
On Friday, October 8, 1999, William K. Sapp was found guilty as charged on all counts.
Sapp smiled slightly as Judge Richard O’Neill read the verdicts. And before he was escorted from the courtroom, he stopped and posed with a big grin on his face as Marshall Gorby, the Springfield News-Sun photographer, snapped his picture. His lawyers, Dennis Lieberman and Gary Hruska, shook their heads in dismay.
The penalty phase of the trial was scheduled to start on Tuesday, October 12, 1999. During this segment the defense may call witnesses to testify in front of the jury in an effort to convince the jurors to recommend to the judge a life sentence in prison instead of the death penalty.
But this stage of the trial had to be postponed after one of the female jurors became ill. Judge O’Neill stated, “It would be the best circumstance to have all of the original twelve. We’ll do all we can to keep the jury intact.”
The court was also informed that Sapp had broken open an ink pen in his cell and ingested nontoxic ink. Even though the ink was harmless, he was no longer allowed to have pens in his cell.
The next night, even though Sapp was on high-security watch requiring deputies to check on him every fifteen minutes, he managed to remove the metal band that held the eraser on a pencil and cut his wrist. The injury required three stitches.
As a result, Sapp was moved to a special isolation cell and was watched constantly. He had to wear a paper gown and was not allowed to have anything in his cell.
One of the paramedics, Tom Freeman, would later tell me, “I had to wrap his arm up and I was that close to him—he made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. He has no color in his eyes. They’re black. They’re black like a shark’s eyes.”
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Sapp has no idea how much pain he has caused our family. He’s killed every one of us inside.
—Richard Anderson, Belinda Anderson’s brother
Finally, on Monday, October 18, 1999, everyone was back in Judge Richard O’Neill’s courtroom for the penalty phase of the trial. William Sapp was present and, once again, was wearing the stun belt. It seemed that he was making an attempt to grow his mustache and beard back. Or perhaps it was just five o’clock shadow.
Courtroom observers were not allowed to sit in the first row of seats.
After listening to the testimony, the jury would have to decide whether to recommend the death penalty or life in prison for William K. Sapp. The three possible sentences were death, life with eligibility for parole in thirty years, or life with eligibility for parole in twenty years. The judge would then make the final decision.
Not only would the jurors need to consider the aggravating circumstances—the murders of two or more persons, whether or not Sapp was the principal offender, rape and kidnapping—they would also have to consider the mitigating circumstances: the character of the defendant, duress, provocation, and mental disease.
The testimony during this phase of the trial revealed the extremely dysfunctional relationships within Sapp’s family.
In his opening statement Dennis Lieberman told the jury that “so far you have been looking through a door with a peephole,” only seeing a small part of what Sapp had been through, but “we’re going to open this door wide open.”
He stressed that “it’s not going to be pretty. It’s not going to be fun. It’s so you can decide what to do with this man.”
Sapp was the oldest of five children. J.R. (Kessler Lilly Jr.) was the only sibling who testified. His brother Paul had been in a mental institution since he was a toddler. His half sister, Katrina, lived in Oklahoma. Charles, his half brother, died when he was seven years old.
J.R., whose physical resemblance to his older brother was uncanny, testified that he was thirty-four years old, unemployed, was being treated for mental illness, and still lived at home with his father on East Main Street.
He stated that when he and Bill were children, they were unsupervised most of the day because their mother stayed in bed until 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon. He also stated that his mother had hit both of them with her hand and with a belt. She had forced Bill to have sex with her. And she had burned Paul.
At some point his father put them in the Children’s Home “until he could do better for them.” He testified that his dad had never abused him or Bill, physically or sexually. “Dad would work two or three jobs at a time to keep food on the table.
“All I ask is . . . please don’t kill my brother.”
Kessler Lilly Sr. (Sapp’s father) testified that he was sixty-four years old, unemployed, disabled because of diabetes, heart trouble, and Parkinson’s disease. When asked if he knew Bill Sapp, he answered, “Yes. He’s my son.”
He stated that he himself was born in Blue Jay, West Virginia, and was one of twelve children, seven boys and five girls. His father was a minister, “strict, very religious.” When Kessler senior’s father died at the age of fifty-four, Kessler was only nine years old. “Mom went wacky. Completely changed.” He said that she suffered from untreated mental illness.
When asked by Lieberman if anyone else in the family was mentally ill, Lilly stated, “Me.” He added that his mother’s two sisters had killed themselves and that his brother, Benny, had threatened their mother with a gun. Benny “hated” their mother.
One morning “during squirrel season,” Benny came to the house and kicked the door in. Kessler shot him seven times with a .22 rifle. Kessler was seven years old at the time.
Several years later, Kessler was outside and heard a “muffled sound” from within the house. All the doors and windows were locked. When he finally got inside, he found his mother “against a wall.” She had “blown her brains out” with a twenty-gauge shotgun. Their dog started “licking the blood.” Kessler choked the dog to death.
Sometime later, Kessler “built a fire—set the house on fire.” (It’s not clear whether it was hours, days, or years.) He then moved to Springfield, Ohio. In 1961 he met Margaret (Sapp’s mother). Margaret was from San Francisco, California: “Her mother deserted her; she was adopted.”
Kessler and Margaret had three sons: Bill, J.R., and Paul. Kessler said that Bill was “my shadow.” Referring to Paul: “He’s a vegetable.”
Charles (Margaret’s son, fathered by Kessler’s older brother) died while they were living in Chillicothe, Ohio. The seven-year-old boy drowned in a pond while his mother was sleeping. The only reference to Margaret’s daughter, Katrina, was that she was “by a truck driver” and that she lived in Oklahoma.
According to Kessler, someone in the family “set Paul on fire” when he was three months old. He remembered him having a bandage on his head. Someone called Children’s Services. He then took the boys to West Virginia and “gave Paul” to one of his brothers “until he was one and a half years old.”
Kessler claimed that Margaret didn’t feed the kids or bathe them. She “slept all day.” On one occasion Bill tried to ride his tricycle to where his dad worked. When the police found him, he had been gone for four hours and his mother hadn’t even noticed.
Lieberman: What did she do to your kids?
Kessler: Just let your mind run wild. As I understand it—as little as they was—she even tried to have sex with them.
(The prosecution strenuously objected and the objection was sustained.)
Lieberman: Did you personally witness sex?
Kessler: No.
Lieberman: Did you see evidence of beating or burning children?
Kessler: Yes.
Lieberman: Did you see any of them hit with a frying pan?
Kessler: Yes.
Lieberman: Cutting?
Kessler: Never seen.
Lieberman: Burning?
Kessler: She burned Bill’s hands on the stove because he played with fire.
Kessler Lilly then told
the jury that when Paul was about 1½ years old, he took him to Mercy Hospital because he was screaming. Somehow he had taken an overdose of medicine. He was committed to an institution and was still there. He had to wear a helmet because he “breaks glass.” Kessler took Bill and J.R. to the Children’s Home “until I could get on my feet.”
It’s not clear when Bill and J.R. returned to live with their parents. Kessler and Margaret filed for a divorce and Kessler’s girlfriend, Patricia, lived in the same house with them until the divorce was final. He testified that Patricia beat both Bill and J.R. and even broke J.R.’s arm with a plastic bat.
When asked if he had a temper, Kessler Lilly responded: “Yes, I have an explosive temper, but I’ve learned how to control it.” Then, “I’ll fight in a minute.”
In further testimony about Margaret, Kessler said that she had given alcohol to Bill when he was only nine years old because she said it would “calm him down.” He also said that she had been committed to a mental hospital because she had thrown “a screwdriver, a knife, and a chair.” He claimed that the police told him to “beat her up.” She spent six weeks in Mercy Mental Health and then went to counseling for a while. Kessler Sr. felt that they were “wasting their time” because “Margaret was not going to change.”
Also, he caught her “stripping for some guy in front of the window.” At some point after that, the guy she had been stripping for (her boyfriend) stabbed Kessler. This was while they were still married.
Back to his girlfriend, Patricia: “She was a sexpot. She’d have sex with anybody.” He claimed that he saw Patricia having sex with Bill and threw her out. (But later he married her, making her Sapp’s stepmother.)
On his way out of the courtroom, Kessler Lilly patted his son on the back.
Karen Sapp, a petite woman with long sandy brown hair who wore glasses, testified that she met William Sapp in Jacksonville, Florida, and they were married in 1988. She said that on their first date he was “clean-cut, polite, friendly, and showed me respect.” According to her, he was like a “scared little boy.”
Karen went on to say that she was from a violent, alcoholic family. Her father sold her for $58.45 when she was only four years old. It took her mother six weeks to find her.
She claimed that hers and Bill’s marriage was “pretty good” for a while. They had three children—two boys and one girl—ages: ten, five, and four. They had been placed in foster care.
She told the jury that she had seen the scars on Sapp’s body and that he had nightmares about his childhood and would wake up screaming and in cold sweats. After these episodes he would go for up to two days without sleeping: “Most of the time he kept his distance from me. Other times he would grab me by the throat, slam me against a wall, or jump on top of me on the bed. I just told him to ‘calm down and get off of me.’” She said they were together for eight years and it didn’t happen very often. “He put his hands on me about six times.”
Lieberman: Did you tell the prosecutors that Sapp never beat on you?
Karen: Yes.
Lieberman: What do you call the choking?
Karen: Choking.
(She also informed the court that a homosexual named Al Sapp had adopted Bill in Florida. William Sapp was nineteen at the time.)
Karen: Just spare his life.
Steve Collins, the assistant prosecutor, had a few questions for Karen.
Collins: On July 7, 1998, you told Sergeant Barry Eggers that Sapp only slapped you once. You didn’t tell him about the choking incident.
Karen: He didn’t ask.
Collins: You don’t believe choking is abusive?
Karen: Not where I came from.
Collins: But you weren’t afraid of him, were you?
Karen: No, sir.
Periodically during Karen’s testimony—when the lawyers were at the sidebar—Sapp made faces at Karen and she giggled.
The next defense witness was Dr. Kathleen Burch, the same clinical psychologist who had testified for the defense at Sapp’s competency hearing. She was an expert witness—despite the fact that Steve Schumaker questioned her “expertise.”
She testified that she was appointed to the case in September or October of 1997 and had six direct contacts with the defendant. She also reviewed the confession tapes, Sapp’s medical records, Children’s Services records, etc. The results of her testing showed that Sapp had “very severe mental-health problems, mood disorder, severe personality disorder, neurological dysfunction, and an inability to control his impulses.”
She claimed that Sapp had bipolar mood disorder (manic-depressive), which caused his thoughts to “race one hundred miles per hour,” and caused him to have “lack of judgment and driven, inappropriate behavior.”
She went on to say that he also suffered from a chemical imbalance causing him to have suicidal thoughts: “This is a very serious personality disorder.”
It was her opinion that Sapp also had an antisocial personality disorder: “He has a disregard for the rules of society and a disregard for his own safety and the safety of others. He came from an antisocial family, where he learned to be hostile and abusive.”
In addition, she testified that he had borderline personality disorder, the new name for “psychotic.” This disorder caused him to be “very dependent, can be clingy,” and “very angry,” and to have difficulty having relationships.
“Hurt, wounded, angry; unstable mood; impulsive; unstable sense of self. He thinks he is the ‘the scum of the earth’ and refers to himself as ‘the maggot.’” She noted he can also be grandiose and “swings from idealizing to hating the person he’s attached to.
“These people think they have a special way of seeing things. He said he could communicate with dead people and spirits.”
There had been many arguments, fights, and suicide attempts in his life.
She explained that “bipolar” was a mental illness; the others were personality disorders, which cause an “inability to conform” and cause “emotion to overrun thought.”
She explained how “these are symptoms of an abused child and characteristics of an aggressor.”
She also related to the jury that all three components of the homicidal “triad” of symptoms were present in Sapp’s behavior: enuresis (bed-wetting beyond the appropriate age), fire starting, and cruelty to animals. She said that Bill was “filled with anger” and had a “high problem of acting out violently.” She quoted one of his teachers as saying that “this little boy hates women.”
Dr. Burch also claimed that at some point Sapp’s mother had “taken a knife and cut the seam of his pants.” This was a scene that he had reenacted later during the attacks on his victims.
During cross-examination Dr. Burch admitted that she was not a medical doctor and that neurological tests showed no abnormalities in William Sapp and that he was faking multiple personalities. Inkblot tests showed that he was preoccupied with sex and with killing women.
She went on to say that Sapp practiced self-mutilation and that his cuts and burns were possibly self-inflicted. He had been abused by his mother and his stepmother and “various other women that were in and out of the house”—and men. He was raped in prison in 1982, in Florida.
Even though Sapp claimed he never got any help, Dr. Burch told the court in detail about the counseling and declined opportunities for counseling that he had had over a period of almost twenty years. One of his teachers described him as “extremely intelligent,” but his IQ tests showed a range between 73 and 79. Dr. Burch estimated an actual score of 90, which is at the bottom of the average range.
When questioned further, Dr. Burch admitted: “Yes, I believe he was faking on the IQ test.”
Sapp told her during their interviews, “Something big is going to come down in Springfield when I go to trial.”
The next day, Tuesday, October 19, the defense called Richard Emmons to the witness stand. He had been a police officer for nineteen years and then went on to become a private
investigator. He testified that he had inspected Sapp’s body and found many scars. He found twenty-six cigarette burns and one knife wound. On Sapp’s testicles there were three larger scars, two on one side and one on the other. He claimed that these scars were consistent with “hot candle wax being dripped on them.”
The prosecution objected and the jury was told to disregard the remark about the hot candle wax.
According to Emmons, there were also scars on Sapp’s testicles that were irregular, slightly raised and discolored, and were consistent with burns.
During cross-examination Emmons admitted that he had no personal knowledge of when or how the scars got there. When the prosecution elicited the information that Sapp was a smoker, the defense emphatically objected, “No foundation!”
The prosecutor responded, “It’s on tape!”
Next, the exhibits were admitted into evidence: these included Sapp’s school records, Children’s Services records concerning Sapp, J.R., and Paul, and the convictions of David Marciszewski, John Balser, Alexander Boone, Jamie Turner, and Wanda Marciszewski.
Lieberman announced that William Sapp did not wish to make a statement and the defense rested.
The aggravating circumstances had already been established during the guilt phase of the trial and the prosecution’s evidence was complete at that point. Under Ohio law, during the penalty phase, the prosecution was restricted to rebuttal of the mitigating circumstances that the defense put forth.
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