Victim's mom tells jury she wants Thacker put to death

POTEAU, Okla. -- A LeFlore County District Court jury is expected to be called on today to decide if Elvis Aaron Thacker should be put to death or imprisoned for life for the brutal murder of a Fort Smith woman in 2010.

The mother and sister of the 22-year-old victim, Briana Ault, told the jury of six women and six men Monday that they wanted Thacker to be sentenced to death.

After three weeks of testimony, the jury deliberated for three hours Friday and returned with guilty verdicts against Thacker, 28, on charges of first-degree murder and forcible oral sodomy for the Sept. 13, 2010, attack on Ault. Her nude body was found with her throat cut floating in a secluded pond just over the Arkansas state line in Pocola, Okla.

The jury's verdict recommended that Thacker be sentenced to the maximum 20 years in prison for the sodomy conviction. Because the state is asking for the death penalty, a second stage of the trial began Monday to determine whether Thacker would be sentenced to death, life in prison without parole or life with the possibility of parole.

In Oklahoma, a life sentence is defined as 45 years. A person so sentenced, unless sentenced to life without parole, would be eligible for parole after serving 85 percent of the sentence.

Thacker's brother, Johnathen, 27, had also been charged with first-degree murder and forcible sodomy but pleaded guilty to the first-degree murder charge in April 2014 in exchange for testifying against his brother and to avoid the death penalty. Johnathen Thacker told jurors in testimony earlier in the trial that he is to be sentenced to life in prison without parole sometime after his brother's trial.

Bethany Ault-Pyle, the victim's mother, said in a victim-impact statement she read to jurors Monday that she has sat through all the court hearings for the past 5½ years in cases involving the Thackers in Arkansas and Oklahoma.

"I've been to all the hearings to be the face of Briana, but now I am her voice," she said in her prepared statement.

The brothers pleaded guilty in Sebastian County Circuit Court in 2011 to charges of attempted capital murder in the stabbing of a Fort Smith police detective and to an unrelated kidnapping charge. Elvis Thacker was sentenced to 30 years in prison, and Johnathen Thacker to 25 years.

Baylee Bowman, Briana Ault's sister, also said she wanted to be a voice for Ault. She said that although her sister's death "brought us to our knees," they were still a family. And even though her sister is gone, Bowman said, her sister still lives through her family.

Elvis Thacker's attorneys called former teachers and relatives to testify about Elvis Thacker's character and his life. His aunt, Sherry Osman, testified she knew about some of the abuse her nephew and his siblings suffered growing up and felt guilty about it.

She also said that when the brothers were allowed to spend time with Osman's family, Elvis and Johnathen Thacker came to life, playing outside, eating heartily, going to church and church camp and bonding with her and her husband.

She told the jury that one of the nicest things that ever happened to her was when Elvis Thacker asked her to sit in for his parents, who didn't show up, during his graduation from Van Buren High School.

She said she wanted to apologize for what Elvis Thacker did to the Ault family but that she still loved him.

"Elvis is the spitting image of my brother [Elvis' father], and I love him dearly," she said.

Also Monday, the lead attorney for Elvis Thacker's legal team, Gretchen Mosley, asked District Judge Jonathan Sullivan to declare a mistrial after she said she discovered Monday that a collection of letters the brothers exchanged while in jail and offered as evidence was incomplete.

She accused the prosecution of "cherry-picking" five letters that Elvis Thacker wrote to Johnathen Thacker and introducing those as evidence instead of the complete collection of approximately 40 letters the brothers wrote back and forth, which included letters written by Johnathen Thacker.

Statements in some of the letters in the evidence exhibit were said to reveal Elvis Thacker's guilt. In one of them, he wrote to Johnathen Thacker that the police knew they were together the night of the murder.

The defense's theory is that Johnathen Thacker acted alone in the killing, told police that his brother killed Ault and pleaded with Elvis Thacker to take responsibility for the murder. Mosley argued that statements Johnathen Thacker made in letters he wrote to Elvis Thacker reinforced that theory.

She said Monday that she did not know during the trial that First Assistant District Attorney Margaret Nicholson did not include the complete collection of letters, which Mosley said she and Nicholson had agreed to include, in the exhibit she put into evidence.

"It was a lie," Mosley told Sullivan. "We were tricked."

The jury was not in the courtroom during Mosley's argument.

Nicholson argued that the only letters she believed the attorneys agreed to put in evidence were the few she had put before a defense witness to testify about.

Sullivan denied Mosley's motion, saying his records show she had not objected to the letters' admission when Nicholson offered them during the trial. Mosley said she never examined the sheaf of letters Nicholson had offered before consenting to their admission.

The trial resumes at 8:30 a.m. today.

State Desk on 05/03/2016

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