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A tenacious lawyer, Lependorf pulled out all the stops. She
suggested to the jury that Timmendequas, whom she described as a man
easily led, may not have been Megan’s real killer. He was involved,
she ultimately admitted, but there were two other sex offenders who
lived in that house when Megan died. Ignore Timmendequas’
confession, she told the jury. "If you want to look at the
confessions and you want to accept those statements as absolute truth
I might as well sit down right now," Lependorf said.
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| Jesse Timmendequas in court
(AP) |
Lependorf went so far as to suggest that little Megan may have
somehow brought the attack on herself, that she had approached
Timmendequas and asked to see his puppy. "Jesse didn't suggest
it. He was minding his own business," Lependorf said “He was
washing the boat and she comes along and asks him. Jesse walked into
the house first. She followed him. He went up to the stairs. She
followed him. They went into Jesse’s bedroom and the question is,
what happened?"
That also failed to win over the jury. After just a few hours of
deliberation, the jury convicted Timmendequas of first-degree murder
and aggravated sexual assault.
At that point, with the jury holding Timmendequas’ fate in their
hands, charged with ordering him to spend the rest of his life in
prison or, sentencing him to death by lethal injection, Lependorf
turned over her last card.
As Guido had predicted, Lependorf led the jury through Timmendequas’
sordid and seedy past, the abuse he suffered as a child, the brutality
of his father, the seaminess of his mother’s life. Jesse, she was
going to prove, was not a monster. He didn’t deserve death. He also
was a victim, she said.
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