1998-04-10

Man gets life for murder

A Potter County jury sentenced an Amarillo man to a maximum life sentence Thursday for strangling his former girlfriend to death.

The seven-man, five-woman jury pondered Clifford Scott Medley's fate for more than two hours before doling out a life sen-tence. Medley was on trial for murder in the 1995 strangulation death of 36-year-old Frankie W. Steinbrecher.

Medley showed little emotion after the sentence was read, but he bowed his head when the victim's sister, Mattie Meachum, spoke about the crime's impact on her family.

Meachum wept while she looked at Medley and poured out her family's pain from the witness stand. While she spoke to the defendant, members of both families sobbed as emotion swept across the crowded court-room.

Steinbrecher's mother, she said, didn't even have a lock of hair from her daughter's body because it was so badly decomposed after lying in a gully for several days.

"Even a dog gets a burial," she said. "The least that you could have done was cut off a piece of her hair for us."

A life sentence offered little consolation in the wake of Steinbrecher's death, she said, noting that Medley will live out his life in prison.

The family was particularly upset, Meachum said, because Medley did not accept responsibility for the crime.

"You haven't even owned up for what you've done," she said. "Yet in all of this, I feel pity for you. But I don't know why."

In their closing statements, prosecutors Chuck Slaughter and Paul Hermann pressed for a maximum sentence and urged jurors to give Medley life imprisonment.

Hermann said the defendant offered bizarre testimony that focused more on his arrest by Potter County deputies than denying he killed the victim.

"It's not about insanity. It's about whether Clifford Scott Medley murdered Frankie Steinbrecher, " he told jurors.

Slaughter, the state's lead prosecutor, cited the defendant's arrest for trespassing and noted that Medley kicked out a patrol car window during an escape attempt.

"He did not want to be under arrest," he said. He knew that sooner or later somebody would be looking for him."

In a short closing statement, Medley spoke briefly of his relationship with the victim.

""She was 10 years older than me and sort of showed me the ropes as far as the streets go," he said.

He said the state largely had based its case on circumstantial evidence, but Medley contended he had little notice of key evidence prosecutors had against him. An FBI laboratory matched a hair taken from Medley with a hair found on blanket the victim's body was wrapped in, according to prosecution testimony.

"The circumstances do look bad against me," he said. "All I can say is I told you the truth. I am not going to change the truth."

Medley must serve at least 30 years in prison before parole eligibility.

The case arose after Steinbrecher's body was found in June 1995 lying in a ditch beside Texas 136 north of Amarillo. At the time, authorities estimated she had been left there about a week earlier.

Investigators linked Medley to the crime after his former wife, Wemberly Medley, told police she drove him to the area where the victim's body was found. Medley had called her earlier and asked for a ride, according to a criminal complaint filed in the case.

According to the criminal com-plaint, Medley unloaded a heavy object near the gully late that night.

Days later, Medley's ex-wife became concerned abound the incident and discussed it with Samuel Ed-wards, Medley's stepbrother. They returned to the gully, and Edwards found the victim's body wrapped in a blanket, testimony showed.