Nine years after the Kanawha County sniper attacks that killed three people, we finally have some justice, but it’s still not a total resolution of one of the state’s most violent and convoluted murder cases.
Monday, Shawn Lester, 37, a vicious meth user, pleaded guilty to second degree murder, just as his trial was about to begin. Lester admitted in court to the 2003 sniper murder of Jeannie Patton.
However, charges that Lester also murdered Gary Carrier Jr. and Okey Meadows Jr. were dropped as part of the plea agreement.
All three were killed by sniper attacks in August, 2003 at gas stations in the Kanawha Valley. The case attracted national attention because it came just months after the beltway sniper attacks in the Washington, D.C. area.
Investigators were split at the time; some believed the attacks were random, while others thought the murders were connected and drug related. Lester was a suspect almost immediately, yet he was not charged until years later, after confessing to others that he was the sniper.
Lester killed Patton apparently because her long-time boyfriend, Marty Walker, stole methamphetamine from Lester that he had gotten from a Mexican drug dealer.
Prosecutors did not have a great case against Lester. They knew that all three murders were committed with the same .22 rifle, but that weapon is still missing. There were two other people with Lester when he shot Patton, but one of them is dead and the other isn’t a very credible witness.
The case linking Lester to the murders of Carrier and Meadows was even weaker. At best, prosecutors figured they had a 50/50 chance of conviction.
Kanawha County Judge Duke Bloom will likely give Lester the maximum sentence—40 years in prison. Even if he gets out early because of good behavior, Lester could head to federal prison because he faces additional drug and gun charges.
Kanawha County Prosecutor Mark Plants says he can justify the plea deal because Lester will spend most of the rest of his life prison. If Plants had gone to trial, there was a real possibility Lester would have been acquitted.
The toughest question of the plea is whether there is justice for the families of Carrier and Meadows, since there is no admission by Lester to their murders. In fact, it remains somewhat unclear why the two were killed. One theory is, as bizarre as it sounds, that Lester murdered two other people to throw police off the trail of Patton’s murder.
Add to the mix a jailhouse interview given by Lester last week to WSAZ TV where he denied killing anyone.
As Plants said of the case, “It’s a long, convoluted story.” Indeed, and because of the amount of time that has passed and the unreliability of some of the miscreants involved, the whole truth may never be known.
But we do know that Shawn Lester was up to his ears in these murders, even if he was not the trigger man for all three, and he’s going to be locked away for a long time.