Man Sentenced to 30 Years to Life in 1991 Chilly-Case Homicide of Ohio Lady

AKRON, Ohio (AP) — A person has been sentenced to 30 years to life within the homicide of an Ohio girl greater than three a long time in the past.

Daniel Rees, 60, of Barberton, pleaded responsible Friday in Summit County to aggravated homicide within the 1991 dying of Rachael Johnson in Akron, The (Akron) Beacon-Journal reported. Prosecutors agreed to vary the underlying offense from rape to kidnapping as a part of an settlement sparing the defendant a trial and a potential dying sentence.

“I’m a monster,” Rees mentioned in remarks to the courtroom. “What I did is horrendous. The crime I did is horrendous.”

Choose Susan Baker Ross sentenced Rees to life in jail with potential parole after 30 years, essentially the most extreme penalty within the state apart from the dying penalty on the time of the crime.

Johnson was discovered useless on March 30, 1991, in Akron’s Chapel Hill neighborhood. The Tallmadge girl suffered blunt drive trauma and had been sexually assaulted, stabbed a number of instances and set on fireplace, police mentioned.

Rees was arrested in March 2020 after authorities mentioned he was linked to the crime by DNA from distant kinfolk. A good friend of the sufferer’s daughter who labored with the sufferer’s sister at a printing firm, Rees had no important legal historical past and hadn’t been a suspect within the case.

Protection attorneys unsuccessfully challenged the admissibility of their consumer’s assertion to investigators about Johnson’s homicide and DNA proof collected from his trash, and plea talks started after the proof was dominated admissible.

Protection lawyer Joe Gorman mentioned Rees is not the identical individual he was three a long time in the past and did not need the household to need to undergo a trial. He additionally mentioned it is probably his consumer, who will likely be 90 when he first comes up for parole, will not go away jail.

“It is a life sentence,” Gorman mentioned. “He understood that strolling in right here.”

Rees apologized to Johnson’s household not only for her slaying but in addition for a way he befriended them afterward, calling that “the worst factor to do.” Relations expressed fury on the defendant, calling him a monster. The sufferer’s sister, Leila Hanes, mentioned he was “an abomination and a coward.”

Larry Johnson, the daddy of the sufferer, had bother delivering his remarks as a result of he was so distraught.

“It by no means ends,” he mentioned. “They are saying ‘closure.’ What the hell is closure? I ask that you just, your honor give him what he deserves, please. I’d prefer to see him spend a lifetime in jail.”

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