Woman gets at least 18 years for husband’s murder
BELLEFONTAINE — The 63-yearold woman dropped her head into her hands and cried, her shoulder-length gray hair curtaining her face, as the judge sentenced her to spend at least the next 18 years in prison.
Neither Rosalie Kennedy’s age nor her sobs were enough to sway the family of Gary Kennedy, the man to whom she had been married for almost 24 years when she shot him to death with a handgun in the kitchen of their rural Rushsylvania home on March 10.
“We lost my father to murder, a senseless and brutal crime,” Gary Kennedy’s son, Jason, told Logan County Common Pleas Judge William T. Goslee at the sentencing hearing Thursday. “It just seems unbelievable
to even say. To hear the evidence in the case and to hear the aftermath of that night, it is difficult to imagine what Gary experienced in the final moments of his life.”
Goslee sentenced Rosalie Kennedy to 15 years to life on a murder count, and added a mandatory three years because a gun was used.
Even though a jury convicted her last month of murder and felonious assault in her husband’s death, she maintains that he didn’t kill him.
“I am innocent,” she told Goslee. “I loved my husband. I’ve grieved for him every day since he’s been gone.”
Her attorney said she will
appeal her conviction.
In a rambling 911 call to police after the shooting, Rosalie Kennedy confessed but blamed her husband: “He pulled out a gun and turned it on me, and I shot him.” While being recorded in the back of a sheriff’s cruiser that night, however, she mumbled to herself and, at one point, spoke to her dead husband and told him she would never hurt him.
During the trial, defense attorney Tina McFall suggested that a night of drinking led to a struggle over a handgun and that Kennedy doesn’t recall exactly what happened. Three shots were fired, and one pierced Gary Kennedy’s aorta, according to detectives
with the sheriff’s office.
In court, this was a devastated family divided. Rosalie Kennedy’s daughters and a sister sat on one side, weeping at their loss. She waved to them and blew them a kiss. They told her to stay strong.
On the other side sat many members of Gary Kennedy’s family, including his son and a brother. They couldn’t stop their tears.
Jason Kennedy spoke of how his 66-year-old father, a Vietnam veteran and musician who was active in his church, worked for almost 40 years as a lineman and supervisor with American Electric Power, retiring in 2012.
“Gary was … kind, loving and hardworking, and left his mark on the world,” his son said. “He did not deserve the ending of life he was given, most of all it having been at the hands of his own wife, in his own home where a person should feel safe.”
He asked the judge to impose the maximum sentence.
Jason Kennedy referenced what he called the “disturbing” 911 call, and his stepmother’s apparent troubling behavior during the marriage: “I believe we all saw a glimpse of what he regularly experienced with her when he was alive, which is very tragic.”
Rosalie Kennedy sobbed as he spoke, and shook her head no.
“We can forgive Rose for what she did; however, we will never forget,” Jason Kennedy said. “This will haunt all of us forever.”