Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 9, 1995 TAG: 9506090083
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TODD JACKSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
At a formal sentencing hearing Thursday, Judge B.A. Davis III accepted the jury's recommendation.
An emotionally distraught Jarrells continued to maintain that she wasn't involved in the killing her husband, Robert D. Jarrells, 59, whom sheriff's deputies found lying in a pool of blood on a porch of his Endicott home in April 1994. Jarrells was convicted of being a principal in the second degree to first-degree murder.
Curtis Deel, Judy Jarrells' estranged lover, confessed to the killing in January. He is serving a 50-year sentence for first-degree murder.
Deel, 45, implicated Judy Jarrells at his trial, saying she asked him several times to kill her husband.
Deel met Judy Jarrells, 44, at a state mental hospital in Marion, according to court testimony.
Jarrells' attorney, Mary Harkins, said she told Davis Thursday how her client had been verbally, physically and sexually abused as a child by friends of her family - abuse that led to stays in mental hospitals as an adult.
But Commonwealth's Attorney Cliff Hapgood didn't buy that. "A lot of people have rough lives, but they don't go around asking people to kill their spouses," he said he responded.
Robert Jarrells' murder was a twisted tale told through court testimony from convicted felons, women who visit them in prison, and Deel - a small man with a nasal voice, who said he was heartbroken when Judy Jarrells left the Bassett trailer they shared to return to her husband just weeks before he was killed.
During his trial, Deel recounted how he had hitchhiked from Dickenson County, where he was visiting family members, to the Jarrells' home in rural Franklin County. Before confronting Robert Jarrells and then shooting him the morning of April 15, 1994, Deel said he camped overnight on a hill above the home.
At Judy Jarrells' trial, Wayne Moore, an inmate at Keen Mountain Correctional Center near Grundy, said Jarrells and one of her friends visited him while he was in prison and that Jarrells also sent him love letters.
He said Jarrells asked him to kill her husband.
Harkins asked Moore if he thought she was serious.
"I knew she was serious," Moore replied.
"Then why didn't you contact the police?'' Harkins asked.
"Because I was going to do it," Moore said.
Harkins said Thursday that she plans to appeal Jarrells' conviction.
Because the crime took place last year, Jarrells will be eligible for parole. Parole has been abolished for people whose crimes took place after Jan. 1.
by CNB