Predator. Steven Walker
various times. During one of these attacks, he was struck in the head with a baseball bat when he was only nine years old. As a result, he was diagnosed as suffering from psychomotor epilepsy. Several weeks after he received that blow to his head, he attacked a female family friend, who was a St. Petersburg, Florida, detective. He exposed himself to her and then tried to tear her clothes off as well. As he grew older, his behavior included increasingly aggressive sexual overtones. The number of attacks against women increased with each passing year.
In 1974, LaRette was charged as an adult for raping and strangling a woman named Ms. Hecker. He was admitted to the Larned State Hospital in Kansas for a pretrial evaluation on the charges of rape and aggravated burglary. He was found competent to stand trial. He entered a guilty plea to the charge of rape and was incarcerated at the Kansas State Reformatory. During his stay there, he received psychiatric treatment. According to the Amnesty International Web site: The doctor treating him reported that sexual offences [sic] such as indecent exposure, choking of older women and rape were possibly committed during black-out spells.
LaRette was paroled in 1976 and married Janet Suther within the next year. He claimed that he stopped taking the medication that was prescribed to control his mental illness and replaced it with illegal drug use and alcohol. He said that he unsuccessfully tried to kill his wife on two separate occasions after he found her in bed with another man on their anniversary in 1980, and that his feelings of anger intensified. He remembered driving to St. Charles, Missouri, to stay with a friend, and it was at this point that he hallucinated killing his wife. He was actually accused of killing another woman, Mary Fleming, and then attempted to kill himself by stabbing himself several times in the chest and slashing his neck with a knife. After LaRette was charged with Fleming’s murder, his attorney requested a psychological evaluation of his client based on his suicide attempt. LaRette was found to be mentally competent.
A jury found him guilty of murder, and he was subsequently sentenced to death. After spending thirteen years behind bars, he became Missouri’s longest-serving death row inmate. According to a book, She Had No Enemies, by Mary’s brother, Dennis Fleming, The police placed the number of [LaRette’s] victims—all women—at two dozen, but he later claimed to have raped and killed thirty.
Echols did not report finding any past official records to confirm Snider’s suspicions that LaRette was responsible for Witte’s murder, and he could not interview LaRette in regard to the incident because he was executed by lethal injection in November 1995 under then-governor Mel Carnahan.
In the meantime, investigators in Cape Girardeau continued to pursue every single possible lead and open up interdepartmental communications between law enforcement agencies across the nation.
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