Jury to hear Sampson’s graphic taped confession
Convicted killer facing resentencing
A federal jury will hear Gary Lee Sampson’s brutally explicit taped confession today, matter-offactly recounting how he tortured three strangers to death in one week — and claiming he did it to punish the FBI for dropping a July 2001 call he made to give himself up for a spree of bank robberies in North Carolina.
“Well, if they don’t (expletive) want me, then the hell with it … I had nothing to lose,” Sampson told police he reasoned with himself before carjacking and stabbing to death a retired father of six and a George Washington University student from Kingston who picked him up hitchhiking later that week. Sampson said he was “pissed off” the FBI disrespected him.
A federal jury of 13 men and five women yesterday began hearing evidence toward reaching their decision of whether Sampson returns to death row or life in prison. Now 57 and battling cirrhosis of the liver, hepatitis C, heart failure and diabetes, Sampson was condemned to die for the carjack killings 15 years ago. While his conviction stands, the death sentence was later tossed because of one juror’s misconduct.
The Abington native’s last murder — the killing of Robert “Eli” Whitney, 58, who was lashed to a chair in Meredith, N.H., and strangled with a nylon rope — was not a federal crime. However, prosecutors are presenting it as an aggravating factor for why Sampson forfeited his right to live.
Sampson told investigators he “cried for two hours” when he read the nearly decapitated body of his first victim, Philip McCloskey, 69, of Taunton, had been found in the Marshfield woods where he’d stabbed him 24 times. “Yeah, I can be human,” Sampson said. “But I lost that.”
Former state police Lt. Michael Crisp, the first of the feds’ 70 witnesses, testified yesterday that after arresting Sampson in Vermont, the killer said of tying 19-year-old Jonathan Rizzo to a tree in Abington and repeatedly stabbing him, “‘Killing that young kid was nothing but cold-blooded, premeditated murder.’ ”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Dustin Chao said Sampson fooled his victims into trusting him by slipping into his “murder outfit” of a polo shirt, pressed slacks and dress shoes — and later, a silver wristwatch he stole off McCloskey.
Sampson’s attorney, William McDaniels, has lined up 108 defense witnesses. He argued his client suffered multiple serious head injuries between the ages of 4 and 36 as a result of everything from falls to car crashes to prison beatdowns. McDaniels said Sampson’s brain “has been broken for a very long time … Nobody chooses to live the life that Gary Lee Sampson has lived.”