Death sentence follows double-murder cover-up
Thomas Knuff Jr. had been busted after burglarizing two beauty salons for fast cash, but as he sat in jail in Cuyahoga County in the spring of 2017, he was plotting to cover up a double murder.
The odor at the crime scene was getting worse. Neighbors were complaining to police. But somehow, when police finally did go inside the home, they didn’t find the bodies. They believed that the foreclosed home was so neglected that it had to have been abandoned. Trash bags lined the hallways. In the kitchen, they found raw meat on the counter. They threw it in the garbage, believing they had found the source of the stench, and left.
But the odor stayed, continuing to haunt neighbors. So as Knuff sat in jail for burglary, he wrote to a friend with detailed instructions: Start the fire in the bedroom, to torch the “most incriminating s---.”
He asked his girlfriend to pay the man — but the plot never came to fruition, and finally, a month later, police came back. This time, they searched the bedroom. They found Regina Capobianco’s skull.
Now, more than two years after prosecutors say that Knuff fatally stabbed his longtime prison pen pal, Capobianco, and her boyfriend over a roommate dispute — after he hid their bodies beneath blankets and trash in their home and recruited his friends and former prisonworker lover for help in the cover-up — the 45-year-old career criminal has been sentenced to death.
At his sentencing hearing Wednesday, Cuyahoga County Pleas Court Judge Deena Calabrese said that she had “hardly seen someone with so little remorse as you,” and had rarely witnessed a more horrific crime scene. The smell was so bad, she said, she needed Vicks Vaporub to breathe inside the home.
“Driving to that nice cul-de-sac and that nice neighborhood,” she said, “my first thought was the amount of flies at that location. It was like stepping into a horror movie, a really real and terrible horror movie. The truth in this case is stranger than fiction.”
Knuff was serving a 15-year prison sentence for aggravated robbery when he started corresponding with Capobianco, 50, through an inmate-to-inmate pen-pal program in the late 2000s; Capobianco was in on a drug-possession conviction. They traded letters for nearly a decade, until Knuff was released in April 2017, joining Capobianco in the free world. Capobianco welcomed him to live with her and her boyfriend, 65-yearold John Mann.
However, the two ex-cons soon learned that the conditions of their probation and parole didn’t allow them to live under the same roof. Mann could pick only one of them and soon the former pen pals were competing for Mann’s sympathy.
On the night of May
11, 2017, the argument turned fatal: Knuff stabbed Capobianco six times and Mann 15 times in their necks and shoulders, police said. He rolled their bodies up in blankets and ditched the house.
Knuff later wanted to offer someone money to set the house on fire, so on the night of May 18, 2017, he broke into two mom-and-pop beauty salons and walked out with the cash registers, police said. He was arrested for the break-ins on June 13, 2017.
On Wednesday, Knuff continued to deny responsibility for the slayings. He insisted throughout his trial that he had acted in selfdefense after witnessing Mann stabbing Capobianco.
Capobianco’s sister, Toni Bender, who had gotten police to go to the house both times in search of her missing sister, told Knuff in court: “Your death cannot come soon enough for me.”