Post by carolinem on Feb 15, 2009 19:49:57 GMT -5
Vicious killer courts penpal ladies online
By Laurel J. Sweet
Friday, February 13, 2009
He can’t promise a future, let alone the moon, but lonely-heart rampage killer Gary Lee Sampson is hoping a kindred sucker for romance will be his death-row date this Valentine’s Day.
The 49-year-old monster, who during one week in July 2001 carjacked and slaughtered two Massachusetts men who picked him up hitchhiking, then strangled the caretaker of the New Hampshire cottage he hid out in, has been looking for love online, pitching himself as “an easygoing kinda guy” with “a good sense of humor.”
“Real funny,” said Scott McCloskey, 45, of Plymouth, whose father, Philip McCloskey, 69, a Boston Gas retiree from Taunton, was repaid for his kindness to Sampson by being dragged into woods off Route 3A in Marshfield at knifepoint and slaughtered.
“It’s just sickening. Good luck to those women,” McCloskey said of Sampson’s prospective courters. “I would ask them, ‘Have you ever had anyone you loved taken from you in such a grotesque manner?’ Twenty-four stab wounds and a slit throat is not a good way to go.”
Sampson’s Washington, D.C., attorney, Thomas Windom, did not return a call.
From his 24-hour lockdown cell on executioner’s row at the high-security U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., Sampson, an Abington native and career bank robber, has succeeded in spreading the word - and at least one rugged seaside photo, presumably from happier days - that he’s a “straight” guy who likes “the outdoors, beaches, hiking, camping, Harleys and animals.”
“Enjoy cooking when I get the chance,” Sampson says, pitching himself as husband material on one prison penpal site.
Sampson, the only Massachusetts offender ever sentenced to capital punishment under federal law, says right up front he’s divorced, and “never to see the free world again,” but adds, “Ladies, I’m always willing to answer all letters and will always keep it real.”
The state Supreme Judicial Court abolished the death penalty in 1984. But after Sampson admitted in 2003 to killing McCloskey, lashing college student Jonathan Rizzo, 19, of Kingston, to a tree and cutting his throat, and gagging and choking Robert “Eli” Whitney, 58, of Concord, N.H., to death, U.S. District Court Judge Mark L. Wolf senenced him to be executed in New Hampshire.
Sampson’s death sentence was upheld on appeal in 2007, but while the Granite State has capital punishment on its books, including hanging, it has no facility to carry it out and has not executed anyone since 1939.
The New Hampshire Department of Corrections referred questions to the state’s attorney general’s office, which did not respond to a request for comment.
“He’ll never see death,” Whitney’s widow, Susan, 64, said resignedly. “He needs to die, I think, but not many do, not less they kill a police officer.
“It’s been seven years,” she tearfully said of her husband’s death, “and we’ve got three beautiful grandchildren he’s never seen.”
By Laurel J. Sweet
Friday, February 13, 2009
He can’t promise a future, let alone the moon, but lonely-heart rampage killer Gary Lee Sampson is hoping a kindred sucker for romance will be his death-row date this Valentine’s Day.
The 49-year-old monster, who during one week in July 2001 carjacked and slaughtered two Massachusetts men who picked him up hitchhiking, then strangled the caretaker of the New Hampshire cottage he hid out in, has been looking for love online, pitching himself as “an easygoing kinda guy” with “a good sense of humor.”
“Real funny,” said Scott McCloskey, 45, of Plymouth, whose father, Philip McCloskey, 69, a Boston Gas retiree from Taunton, was repaid for his kindness to Sampson by being dragged into woods off Route 3A in Marshfield at knifepoint and slaughtered.
“It’s just sickening. Good luck to those women,” McCloskey said of Sampson’s prospective courters. “I would ask them, ‘Have you ever had anyone you loved taken from you in such a grotesque manner?’ Twenty-four stab wounds and a slit throat is not a good way to go.”
Sampson’s Washington, D.C., attorney, Thomas Windom, did not return a call.
From his 24-hour lockdown cell on executioner’s row at the high-security U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., Sampson, an Abington native and career bank robber, has succeeded in spreading the word - and at least one rugged seaside photo, presumably from happier days - that he’s a “straight” guy who likes “the outdoors, beaches, hiking, camping, Harleys and animals.”
“Enjoy cooking when I get the chance,” Sampson says, pitching himself as husband material on one prison penpal site.
Sampson, the only Massachusetts offender ever sentenced to capital punishment under federal law, says right up front he’s divorced, and “never to see the free world again,” but adds, “Ladies, I’m always willing to answer all letters and will always keep it real.”
The state Supreme Judicial Court abolished the death penalty in 1984. But after Sampson admitted in 2003 to killing McCloskey, lashing college student Jonathan Rizzo, 19, of Kingston, to a tree and cutting his throat, and gagging and choking Robert “Eli” Whitney, 58, of Concord, N.H., to death, U.S. District Court Judge Mark L. Wolf senenced him to be executed in New Hampshire.
Sampson’s death sentence was upheld on appeal in 2007, but while the Granite State has capital punishment on its books, including hanging, it has no facility to carry it out and has not executed anyone since 1939.
The New Hampshire Department of Corrections referred questions to the state’s attorney general’s office, which did not respond to a request for comment.
“He’ll never see death,” Whitney’s widow, Susan, 64, said resignedly. “He needs to die, I think, but not many do, not less they kill a police officer.
“It’s been seven years,” she tearfully said of her husband’s death, “and we’ve got three beautiful grandchildren he’s never seen.”
