The governor of Washington state granted a reprieve to a condemned sicko who raped and murdered a 14-year-old girl, according to published reports.
Clark Richard Elmore was slated to be executed on Jan. 19 at Washington State Prison in Walla Walla for raping and killing his girlfriend’s teen daughter, Kristy Lynn Ohnstad, inside a van near Lake Samish in Bellingham in 1995.
But in granting the reprieve Thursday, recently re-elected Gov. Jay Inslee — who two years ago announced a moratorium on executions in his state — argued that the “use of capital punishment across the state is inconsistent and unequally applied, sometimes dependent on the budget of the county where the crime occurred,” according to the Bellingham Herald.
Elmore had filed 21 years of appeals — all of which have been struck down by the court — the first of the state’s death row inmates to exhaust all of their appeals.
A future governor can void the reprieve and allow the execution to proceed, the paper reported.
Elmore’s crime was particularly heinous. After he raped the teen, he strangled her until she was unconscious, slammed a metal skewer through her skull, pounded her with a sledgehammer, and then dumped her body in the woods, according to reports.
The girl’s rotting corpse was discovered by Elmore — who was leading his own search party in an apparent effort to throw off police.
Elmore even told local media that the police weren’t doing enough to find Kristy.
He eventually got cold feet and fled to his home state of Oregon, but then had a change of heart and returned to Bellingham to turn himself in.
At the time, Kristy’s mother, Sue Ohnstad, said death was “too good” for her daughter’s killer, preferring that he instead rot in jail for the rest of his life.
“We just wanted it all to be done and over with,” Ohnstad told the Bellingham Herald in 1995. “It’s just going to cause more pain and suffering for us. We’ve had enough.”