Convicted killer and rapist Anthony Quintin Kelly is expected to be sentenced today for a 2002 crime spree that included the shooting death of a Silver Spring man and his 9-year-old daughter, as well as sexual attacks on two women.
The 44-year-old Washington, D.C., resident, who is now being held at a county jail in Clarksburg, faces life in prison without parole for the slayings of 47-year-old George Gregory Russell and his daughter, Erika Smith, and life in prison for the rapes of 20-year-old college student and a 61-year-old woman. Other crimes associated with the spree amount to 125 additional years.
John McCarthy, state's attorney for Montgomery County, who prosecuted the case, said he will seek the maximum sentence.
"That's what we're asking for: Every minute of every day of every year," McCarthy said Friday. "He will effectively die in jail."
McCarthy said he had previously considered the death penalty but said given Supreme Court rulings over the death penalty and the mentally ill, "that would have been difficult or impossible to succeed with." After consulting with family members, it was determined "this was the appropriate sentence," he said.
Sentencing is scheduled for 1 p.m. in Courtroom 2 on the ninth floor of the Montgomery County Circuit Court building in Rockville. Judge Durke Thompson will handle sentencing proceedings.
McCarthy called the trial complex in that it involved multiple police departments, DNA and forensics experts, medical examiners from two jurisdictions, and about 140 witnesses with more than 40 appearing in court. The trial had been postponed for years because psychiatrists originally ruled that he was unfit to stand trial. Earlier this year, he was deemed competent and trial dates were set for June, July and August.
Kelly was convicted Aug. 4 on two counts of first-degree murder and charges of burglary and robbery with the use of a handgun in commission of a violent felony after a weeklong trial.
He was convicted earlier this summer in Montgomery County of two rapes and is scheduled to stand trial in the District for the slaying of Katie Lynn Hill, a 36-year-old Seattle woman whose body was found two blocks from the Takoma Metro station Aug. 9, 2002, three days after the slayings of the Silver Spring father and daughter.
McCarthy said Friday the crimes were motivated by theft.
"These are stranger and stranger cases," he said Friday. "As a citizen, your greatest nightmare is a crime in which there is no rhyme or reason or logic for who is selected. They are crimes of opportunity. You cross this man's path and he chooses you."
McCarthy said before the Washington, D.C.-area sniper attacks of October 2002, "this was the biggest case in the county if not the region," largely because of the slaying of Hill and 9-year-old Smith, as well as the randomness and brutality of the crimes.
Prosecutors said Kelly broke into Russell's home on Columbia Boulevard in Silver Spring on Aug. 6, 2002, wearing a wig and beard.
After climbing through a rear window, they argued, Kelly pistol-whipped and shot the girl once in her bedroom, then fired eight rounds into Russell as he ran toward his screaming daughter.
Takoma Park police pursued Kelly in a high-speed car chase while trying to make a routine traffic stop Aug. 20, 2002, but Kelly ran away, leaving handguns linked to the slayings and a wig that matched fibers found at the crime scene, prosecutors said.
Kelly was apprehended Sept. 5, 2002, in College Park.
Searches of Kelly's home yielded items prosecutors said he stole from the victims, including a pocket-sized Bible that held three dollar bills.
DNA taken from Kelly after the arrest led to his arrest for two rapes that occurred in 2002.
Prosecutors said Kelly attacked a 61-year-old grandmother from behind on a sidewalk next to Greenwood Avenue in Silver Spring at about midnight March 21, 2002, as the victim was walking to her daughter's house to deliver some water.
Kelly pushed the woman to the ground and struck her several times in the head and face with a handgun before raping her. She was hospitalized with cuts to her head, a separated shoulder and a fractured wrist.
During the rape, the woman knocked the gun away. When a car drove past the area where the attack occurred, Kelly grabbed the gun and ran away.
"But for a car's headlights coming around a corner, I think he would have killed her," McCarthy said. "The victim herself told us through a translator that she thought he killed her."
Three months later, Kelly attacked a 20-year-old college student June 20, 2002, after asking her for directions in his white Cadillac while she was walking along Veirs Mill Road trying to catch a bus. Kelly came up behind the victim with a knife, threatened her, and forced her into the back of his car, which he then drove to a wooded area, where he raped the woman. The victim was able to stop the driver of a passing car, which took her to Shady Grove Adventist Hospital where a DNA sample was taken.
While awaiting trial psychiatrists at Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center in Jessup concluded in 2004 that Kelly was mentally incompetent to stand trial because he did not fully understand the charges.
At that time, Judge Thompson ordered that Kelly remain at the hospital.
But in December 2007, doctors at Perkins re-evaluated Kelly and found that he was competent to stand trial. One of Kelly's first acts was to dismiss his attorneys. He represented himself in subsequent hearings and trials.
McCarthy said he can't fathom the pain of the surviving victims or the losses suffered by the families of the victims, calling them "extraordinary people."
He said Carol Smith, Erika Smith's mother, told him her daughter aspired to be a writer and had penned stories and books since she was 7 years old.
"She will read one of those books at sentencing," he said, noting that Carol Smith still keeps in her closet the uniform she bought for her daughter's first day of school.