Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, November 15, 1994 TAG: 9411150082
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: KATHY LOAN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PULASKI LENGTH: Medium
After beating Robert H. McDaniel last November, Shanks took more than $100 from him, bought a money order, then gave the order to his probation officer to cover his fines.
That's the case Everett Shockley, Pulaski County's commonwealth's attorney, would have outlined to a jury Monday in Circuit Court.
But Shanks, 31, of Christiansburg, pleaded guilty to aggravated malicious wounding, robbery, unlawful entering and conspiracy to commit robbery during a brief hearing in Judge Colin Gibb's chambers while a pool of potential jurors waited in the courtroom.
A charge of conspiracy to commit murder was dropped.
Shanks was paroled in April 1993 after serving 13 years of a 41-year sentence for the 1979 murder of Edward Charles Disney, a teen-ager he met at a Blacksburg street festival.
Shanks faces a maximum sentence of three life terms plus 10 years for the Pulaski convictions. Gibb delayed sentencing after Public Defender David Warburton requested a presentence report. Shockley also asked that a victim-impact statement be prepared.
McDaniel, 44, walks with a pronounced limp, wears a brace on one leg and uses a cane. But his mother, Bonnie Price, has seen measurable progress since she found her son in a pool of blood at his home on Hazel Hollow Road.
"We're just glad Bobby doesn't have to get on the stand and just hope that they make it strong enough that [Shanks] doesn't get out and do this to anybody else. We hope another family doesn't have to go through what we've gone through," Price said as she left court.
Shockley, summarizing what the state's evidence against Shanks would have been had the case gone to trial, told Gibb that McDaniel had returned home after a hunting trip Nov. 8 and was preparing to leave to meet friends when Shanks and Billy Joe Hampton, also a paroled murderer, came by sometime after 7 p.m. Hampton and Shanks told McDaniel they had come to borrow something. McDaniel agreed, and the three went into a garage where McDaniel turned off an alarm.
It was then, Shockley said, that Shanks used a large carpenter's hammer to beat McDaniel severely, then stole more than $100.
"He was left for dead," Shockley said. "The evidence would be that Mr. Shanks did all the beating."
Shanks later bought a money order with the cash.
"A day or two later, he gave that money order to his parole officer," Shockley said, so he would not risk additional parole infractions against him for failing to pay fines.
Bonnie Price found her son, McDaniel, Nov. 9 after he didn't report to work at her husband's car dealership.
He was lying in a pool of blood larger than his body, the prosecutor said.
McDaniel was taken to a Roanoke hospital where doctors had to remove skull fragments and dead brain tissue from the hole in his head.
A year later, McDaniel still bears the scars of the attack. He has a significant speech impediment, and, while he understands what people are saying to him, he finds it difficult to verbalize a response, Shockley said.
Shanks sat quietly through Shockley's recitation of the evidence until the prosecutor mentioned that Shanks and Hampton had aborted a previously planned robbery attempt against McDaniel. He asked aloud if there was any proof of that, but was silenced by his lawyer.
McDaniel's beating and robbery went unsolved until Shanks confessed to Pulaski County investigators in March. He first said Hampton had beaten McDaniel but later told investigators he had been the one to beat him, Shockley said.
Shanks still faces a robbery charge in Montgomery County and has confessed to robbing the A&J Quick Shop in Blacksburg in June 1993.
Hampton, paroled in 1992 for after serving prison time for the 1975 murder of a 95-year-old Montgomery County woman, is scheduled to go on trial next month for his part in McDaniel's robbery.
by CNB