Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 18, 1995 TAG: 9504210041
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: KATHY LOAN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PULASKI LENGTH: Medium
Shanks, 31, pleaded guilty last November to aggravated malicious wounding, robbery, burglary in the night time, and conspiracy to commit robbery.
On Monday, Shanks, a paroled murderer, asked Judge Colin Gibb to impose the maximum sentence. The judge obliged, imposing the three life terms for malicious wounding, robbery and burglary. The judge also imposed a 10-year sentence on the conspiracy conviction.
"So that's the end of Mr. Shanks," Commonwealth's Attorney Everett Shockley said after court. "It couldn't happen to a nicer fellow."
The charges revolved around a Nov. 8, 1993, robbery and beating of Robert H. McDaniel, a Hazel Hollow Road man.
Authorities believe Shanks' desire for money to pay a parole supervision fee led him to beat McDaniel with a large carpenter's tool, take more than $100 from him, then leave him for dead.
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.
According to evidence offered last November, McDaniel was preparing to leave his home Nov. 8, 1993, to meet friends when Shanks and Billy Joe Hampton, another paroled murderer, came by, saying they needed to borrow something. McDaniel agreed, and the three went into a garage, where McDaniel turned off an alarm.
It was then that Shanks attacked McDaniel with the hammer. A day or two later, Shanks gave a money order to his parole officer to cover his supervision fee.
McDaniel was found by his mother Nov. 9, 1993, lying in a pool of blood. Doctors had to remove skull fragments and dead brain tissue from the hole in his head, and he continues to recuperate from his injuries.
Hampton, paroled in 1992 after serving prison time for the 1975 murder of a 95-year-old Montgomery County woman, is scheduled to go on trial next month in Pulaski County Circuit Court for charges he faces in McDaniel's robbery.
Shanks still faces sentencing in Montgomery County for the June 1993 robbery of a Blacksburg convenience store. He pleaded guilty in January to robbery, wearing a mask to conceal his face, using a firearm while committing the robbery, and possessing a firearm after being convicted of a felony.
He was charged last month with sodomizing a fellow inmate in the Montgomery County Jail. A May 16 preliminary hearing has been set on that charge, which deputies say happened Jan. 5.
by CNB