Prosecutor clarifies murder plea deal
WEST CHESTER » The lead prosecutor in the murder case of a Schuylkill Township man who killed his girlfriend with a shotgun during an argument in the home they shared has clarified details of the incident and the case’s resolution in the wake of a family member’s com- plaints about published reports concerning the man’s guilty plea hearing.
Assistant District Attorney Alexander Gosfield said in an email to Digital First Media that his office had agreed to withdraw the most serious charge against Keith
Robert Smith and allow him to enter a guilty plea to the lesser charge of thirddegree murder in order to spare his child and those of his girlfriend the possibility of having to testify against him.
But Gosfield, who handled the prosecution with fellow Assistant District Attorney Samantha Ryan, insisted that his office would have been able to secure a first-degree murder conviction against Smith had he rejected the plea offer, and with it the mandatory life without parole sentence that comes with such a verdict.
“The Commonwealth and the family agreed that the evidence was more than sufficient to prove first degree murder, but that the risk of harm to the children was not worth pursuing the matter to trial if (Smith) was willing to accept the plea proposed,” Gosfield said in the email. “The Commonwealth’s primary purpose in this plea was to make it unnecessary for the children to testify.”
Gosfield made his comments in response to statements made by Desiree Del Romano, who identified herself in an email as Smith’s sister. Del Romano had taken issue with press accounts of the incident itself, the reasoning behind the plea agreement that was approved Jan. 5 by Chester County Common Pleas Court Judge William P. Mahon, and the prosecution’s strategy.
Del Romano, who lives in Florida, said that the family of the victim, Wesley Webb, had agreed to accept a plea to third-degree murder, “because it wasn’t murder one, which is premeditated, and because everyone has suffered enough. We just want what is best for all involved and to find peace.
“Both families are suffering,” she said. “Both sides are at a tremendous loss.”
Smith, 45, who had been scheduled to go to trial on the charges against him on Jan. 8, pleaded guilty to third-degree murder, recklessly endangering another person, and possession of an instrument of crime. He was sentenced as part of a negotiated agreement between the prosecution and his attorney, John J. Flannery Jr. of Media, to 28-to56 years in state prison for Webb’s killing.
According to earlier accounts, on May 2, 2016, Smith shot and killed 40-year-old Wesley Webb, when she said she was going to take her children and leave the house they shared. Immediately after shooting Webb in the chest with a shotgun, Smith allegedly attempted to commit suicide by shooting himself but failed.
Smith’s son and Webb’s children, all under the age of 14, were upstairs in the home at the time of the incident. When the children heard the gunshots, they came downstairs and called 911.
According to police, before Smith shot Webb, she started an audio recording on her phone. On the recording, Smith can be heard saying, “You want to record it now ...?” Following is the sound of a gun going off and Smith cursing at Webb. “How’s that?” he said. “That’s where we just went.”
In the proceeding before Mahon, Gosfield did not address specifically the prosecution’s reason for allowing Smith to plea guilty to third-degree murder. But after being made aware of Del Romano’s statements, he responded with a clarifications as to the office’s thinking.
“The children were subpoenaed, as are all witnesses, but they were always cooperative. No one was being ‘forced’ to testify,” he said. “No one asked not to testify. The reason the children were needed to testify was that the defense decided to claim that one of the children had manipulated the recording of the murder by deleting relevant portions before the phone was turned over to police.
“Though we had forensic evidence that proved conclusively that this did not happen, failing to call the children in light of that defense would have put the entire case at risk in the event that the jury did not believe or understand the forensic evidence,” he said. “Failing to call some or all of the children would have opened the door to a defense claim that we were hiding something by keeping them out of court.”
Gosfield said Smith “had every opportunity to concede the authenticity of the recording and refused to do so. The only one forcing the children to go through this ordeal was (Smith.)”
Del Romano also said that there was no evidence about what the couple had been arguing about before Smith fired the fatal shot, or whether Webb had threatened to leave the Buckwalter Road home they lived in. But Gosfield disputed that as well.
“The evidence that (Smith) and Ms. Webb were arguing about their relationship consists of (his) admissions and the statements of the two children who were awake in the house at the time,” he wrote. “The victim’s son was not asleep. According to (Smith), the argument covered a number of topics, all of which pertained in one way or another to problems in their relationship.”
Gosfield said evidence that Webb was going to leave with her children includes: Smith’s admissions; the forensic examination of the victim’s phone regarding her intent to leave at the end of the school year and with the agreement of Smith to that timetable; statements of various witnesses that Webb intended to leave, including at least one to whom she stated an intent to move up her timetable to that week; and statements from the children that, shortly before she was murdered and after the argument began, Ms. Webb came upstairs and said that they were leaving the home that night, then went back downstairs.
“The Commonwealth does not have any evidence that confirms whether it was that decision that led to her murder, or whether some other part of the argument did so,” Gosfield said. “According to our studies through the Lethality Assessment Protocol (“LAP”) with the Domestic Violence Center of Chester County, a woman leaving a man is one of the main precursors to extreme violence.
Finally, Gos-feild said that the suggestion that a first-degree murder verdict would not have been justified was inaccurate.
“Ms. Del Romano’s statement that Ms. Webb’s family “agreed to the plea because it wasn’t murder 1” is false. Ms. Webb’s family agreed to the plea proposal because it included a substantial amount of jail time that could, as a practical matter, end with (Smith) spending the rest of his life behind bars, and because this proposal would spare the children from having to be retraumatized by a trial that would have likely included a false defense claim that one or more of them fabricated or destroyed evidence and lied to the police about it.
“The Commonwealth and the family agreed that the evidence was more than sufficient to prove first degree murder, but that the risk of harm to the children was not worth pursuing the matter to trial if the (Smith) was willing to accept the plea proposed.”
Although Mahon accepted the plea and approved the sentence, he said he would delay a formal sentencing hearing until later, giving Webb’s family time to gather in court and present victim impact testimony. That date has not been set.