[T]he top prosecutor in Rutland County says she won’t file state murder charges against Donald Fell in the slayings of his mother and her friend now that he has been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole on federal offenses in the killing of a North Clarendon woman.
Federal Judge Geoffrey Crawford handed down the sentence Friday that sends Fell to prison for the rest of his “natural” life, plus 204 months.
That sentence was part of a plea agreement that Fell’s attorneys reached with federal prosecutors in the carjacking and beating death of 53-year-old Teresca “Terry” King in November 2000.
In exchange for the life-without-parole prison term, prosecutors agreed to drop their pursuit of the death penalty for Fell, 38, and formerly of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
As part of the plea deal, prosecutors and Fell agreed to a “factual basis” of what led up to King’s death that included his role in the slayings of his mother Debra Fell, 46, and her friend, Charles Conway, 44, both of Rutland.
However, given the sentence already imposed by the federal judge, Rutland County State’s Attorney Rose Kennedy said she won’t be moving forward on trying to convict Fell on state murder charges in connection with the death of his mother and Conway.
Kennedy pointed to the life-without-parole prison sentence Fell received as a driving factor in that decision.
“Anything that the state would do would be concurrent to that,” the county prosecutor said. “The fact that he’s going to be in the prison the rest of his life certainly alleviates the need to prosecute the case on the state level.”
Vermont does not have the death penalty for state murder convictions. Instead, a person convicted of first-degree murder in Vermont faces a minimum sentence of 35 years in prison to a maximum of life behind bars without the possibility of parole.
Kennedy also said that prosecuting a case nearly 20 years old also wouldn’t be an easy undertaking.
“It would be incredibly difficult to try to recreate the case 18 years later,” Kennedy said.
Police say Fell and co-defendant, Robert Lee, had carjacked King as she arrived to work at the downtown Rutland Price Chopper supermarket early on the morning of Nov, 27, 2000, as they sought to flee the slayings of Debra Fell and Conway hours earlier after they all spent a night of drinking and playing cards together.
The plea agreement stated that it was Fell who attacked Conway with a knife and killed him and it was Lee, armed with another knife, who killed Debra Fell.
“In his plea today, Fell acknowledged that he murdered Mr. Conway while Fell’s deceased co-defendant, Robert Lee, was murdering Fell’s mother, Debra Fell,” federal prosecutors said in a statement issued after Fell’s sentencing Friday.
“By encompassing Fell’s role in these murders in the plea,” the statement added, “the loss of the lives of Mr. Conway and Mrs. Fell are recognized.”
Federal prosecutors took jurisdiction in King’s death because they say Fell and Lee took King hostage at shotgun point in Rutland and drove her to upstate New York state where they ordered her out of her vehicle and beat her to death, leaving her in the woods along the side of the road.
State murder charges were never brought in connection with any of the deaths as prosecutors awaited the culmination of the federal cases against Fell and Lee, who were both charged with capital offenses.
Lee’s case never made it to a federal trial. He died in prison in 2001.
However, Fell’s federal case involved a nearly 18-year legal odyssey. More than a decade ago, a jury convicted Fell and returned a verdict calling for the death sentence. That conviction and sentence were later tossed out by a judge over revelations of juror misconduct during that earlier trial.
The jury selection process had started last month for Fell’s retrial when the plea agreement with federal prosecutor was reached.
