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PHOENIX — A Maricopa County Superior Court jury imposed a life sentence Wednesday on an Arizona woman for the 2009 murder of her husband, whose head was bashed in with a claw hammer. The judge will now determine whether Marissa DeVault, 36, will serve a natural life sentence or have the possibility of release after 25 years. That decision will be made June 6.
On April 8, DeVault was found guilty of first-degree murder of her husband, Dale Harrell, 34. A week later the jury determined that the murder was especially cruel, qualifying DeVault for the death penalty.
When police responded to DeVault's 911 call at 2:45 a.m. MT on Jan. 14, 2009, they found her hysterical and covered with blood outside the Gilbert, Ariz., home she shared with Harrell, their three children and DeVault's friend, Stan Cook.
Harrell was upstairs on the floor next to his blood-soaked bed, writhing and thrashing, the right side of his face and head caved in. DeVault had hit him with a claw hammer. Cook apparently had taken it away from her.
Harrell died three weeks later.
Police coaxed a confession out of DeVault on the morning of the attack. She claimed that she killed Harrell in self-defense because he had raped her and choked her and had abused her for years.
DeVault's lover, Allen Flores, bailed out of jail. She had met two years earlier on a website that helped women meet "sugar daddies."
Afterward, DeVault changed her story: She suddenly claimed that Cook, who has brain damage that seriously impairs his memory, had killed Harrell while defending her. Flores helped out by editing Cook's confession letter.
Police did not buy the new story. The prosecution claimed that DeVault killed Harrell to collect on insurance policies she had taken out on him.
During a forensic examination of Flores' computer, a specialist hired by the defense uncovered child pornography. Flores has not been prosecuted for the pornography or for his assistance to DeVault before and after the murder.
In fact, the prosecutors defended Flores by trying to have the pornography precluded from evidence, claiming that the defense had violated his Fourth Amendment rights against illegal government search and seizure.
Instead, both the Maricopa County Attorney's Office and the U.S. Attorney in Phoenix granted Flores limited immunity though County Attorney Bill Montgomery said Flores still could be prosecuted.
On the witness stand, Flores told how he had lent more than $360,000 to DeVault, money she told him she would pay back from trust funds and insurance monies she was due.
She told friends and family that Flores was her dead stepfather's gay lover, even though her stepfather was neither gay nor dead. And Flores isn't gay.
Flores became the principal witness establishing DeVault's premeditation in the murder. She told Flores on one occasion that Cook already had killed Harrell and on another that she would have Harrell killed while the two stayed at a casino hotel.
Another of DeVault's former lovers also testified that DeVault had approached him to "take care of" her husband. He refused.
And although prosecutors paraded friends and neighbors of the couple past the jury to claim that Harrell never abused DeVault, their three daughters graphically described beatings.
The trial was tumultuous. Superior Court Judge Roland Steinle frequently sent the jury out of the courtroom to reprimand the prosecutors and defense lawyers for their tactics.
He scolded the defense for arranging a telephone conference with one of DeVault's daughters despite a court order and for trying to introduce a PowerPoint display without prior notice.
He scolded the prosecutors for trying to embarrass witnesses with sexual details.
The jurors took a week to come back with a guilty verdict. They refused to agree on the aggravating factor of committing the murder for monetary gain, even though the prosecution based its case on DeVault killing Harrell for insurance money.
Instead the jury settled on the more vague aggravator that the murder was especially cruel.
Similarly, they lingered over the final sentence. On Monday at least one juror called in sick, keeping the rest from deliberating. On Tuesday, they asked the judge if they could consider the welfare of DeVault's children as a mitigating factor.
Steinle could not directly answer the question. In Arizona capital cases, victims' relatives cannot say whether they want a life or death sentence for the murderer, which becomes more complicated in cases where the victims' relatives also are relatives of the defendant and likely to oppose death.
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