ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, October 5, 1996 TAG: 9610070051
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WINCHESTER
SOURCE: Associated Press
A woman whose live-in boyfriend tortured and beat to death her 12-year-old daughter was sentenced Friday to 12 years in prison for her role in the killing.
Wanda Smelser knew her daughter Valerie was in danger for months and did nothing, a prosecutor said. The child died last year after Norman Hoverter beat her severely and knocked her down the steps to an unheated basement where Hoverter forced her to sleep amid her own waste, the prosecutor said.
Smelser saw and heard Hoverter beating the child and neither intervened nor checked on the girl afterward, Frederick County Commonwealth's Attorney Lawrence Ambrogi said.
``She is charged with murder because of what she did not do,'' Ambrogi said in court.
Smelser, 44, pleaded no contest to second-degree murder and abduction in August. She could have faced up to 50 years in prison. On Friday, she spoke publicly about the death for the first time since her arrest.
``I realize now I should have done more to stop Norman,'' Smelser said in a sobbing, mumbling statement to Circuit Judge James Berry. ``At the time I couldn't think straight.''
Valerie Smelser's brain swelled after she was beaten in the head Jan. 22, 1995, an autopsy showed. The autopsy also showed she was sexually assaulted, but no one was charged in that crime.
Smelser's lawyer, William Crane, said she was a battered woman dominated by an abusive, sadistic man. In asking for leniency, Crane quoted from a psychologist's report that labeled Hoverter an egocentric psychopath.
Hoverter cruelly isolated Smelser and her children, and singled out Valerie for the harshest treatment, Crane said. Smelser naively hoped Hoverter would change or move out, he said.
Hoverter, 51, is serving a life term. He pleaded no contest to first-degree murder and abduction, but is trying to have the conviction overturned.
At his sentencing last summer, he blamed the worst of the abuse on Smelser and said he obeyed her wishes out of love.
Both Hoverter and Smelser were originally charged with first-degree murder. Ambrogi agreed to a plea bargain in which Smelser would receive a shorter prison term in order to spare Valerie's disabled older sister, Brittany, from testifying against her mother.
``Because of physical, emotional and psychological problems, she simply could not testify,'' Ambrogi said.
Brittany has had portions of a foot amputated because of frostbite she apparently suffered when she was forced to stand outside in cold weather, prosecutors have said.
Smelser slumped low in her chair Friday and hid her face in her hands while a former Virginia State Police investigator described the squalor and filth inside the Smelsers' ramshackle Middletown home.
Valerie, who weighed 51 pounds at death, was kept locked in the basement for several months, unable to eat with the family or use the family bathroom, retired investigator William Shevokas said.
The basement steps were piled with human waste, and the basement floor was littered with waste and trash, he said. Upstairs, the rooms were piled with stored food, papers and debris so that it was difficult to move through the rooms, Shevokas said.
LENGTH: Medium: 68 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Wanda Smelser reads a statement at her sentencingby CNBFriday as William Crane, her public defender, looks on.