Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 1, 1994 TAG: 9406010089
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Michael Scott Hairston received the maximum sentence for killing his girlfriend, Judith D. Cook, who was stabbed in the back nine times and struck as many times in the head with a baseball bat.
Before leaving Cook's battered body on the floor of her Windsor Avenue Southwest apartment Dec. 13, Hairston ate a pizza and watched television within a few feet of the corpse.
"I don't pretend to understand you or to understand what motivated the crime you committed," Roanoke Circuit Judge Clifford Weckstein told Hairston.
But in sending him to prison "for so long as you shall live," Weckstein said he believes that Hairston, 26, still poses a risk to society.
That risk, Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Wanda DeWease said, is evident in a letter that Hairston wrote to his ex-wife in April, shortly before he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder.
While in jail for killing Cook, Hairston threatened to do the same to his former wife if she didn't visit him regularly, put money in his jail account and generally stand by him.
"Dearest Shelia," the letter began. "Woman, you ain't s---."
"Here I am down and out, damn near my life ruined for life, and you're saying that you can barely be my friend," Hairston wrote. "I'll ... kill you if you don't start doing right by me. ... I swear I will. Mark my words."
DeWease said the letter best explains why Cook was killed - portraying Hairston as an obsessive man who refused to give up on a failed relationship. Testimony showed that Cook, 40, was trying to break up with Hairston at the time of her death.
"I'll never let you go," Hairston wrote to his ex-wife five months after he killed Cook. "If you dare try to give what is mine to another I'll haunt you and hunt you down until you are as dead as Judith."
Hairston, a nursing assistant who met Cook on the job at a Roanoke nursing home, began his testimony calmly on Tuesday, but ended in tears.
At one point, he turned to members of Cook's family, who filled half the courtroom, and sobbed four times, "I'm sorry." They became so upset that Weckstein called a recess minutes later.
Hairston blamed the killing on his addiction to crack cocaine, and said he acted in self-defense after Cook swung a knife at him during an argument.
"A great many hurtful things were said," Hairston testified. "She never told me to get out of the house; she said, ``Get out of my life.'''
But Hairston had no answer when DeWease asked if he still had to defend himself after delivering the sixth, seventh or eighth knife blow to Cook's back.
Assistant Public Defender Roger Dalton had asked Weckstein to set a sentence that gave some hope for Hairston to resume his life. A life sentence is "an easy, knee-jerk reaction," given the brutality of the crime, Dalton said.
Hairston, who has been in jail since his arrest, will become eligible for parole after about 11 1/2 years.
After his arrest, Hairston told police that he ate a pizza and later smoked crack cocaine after having a "spat" with Cook.
Spreading gruesome photographs of Cook's body on the witness stand in front of Hairston, DeWease asked him, "How in the world could you characterize doing something like this to someone a spat?"
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