Accused Utah shooter Angela Hill lost the effort to suppress potentially damning statements she made to police after her capture last year and was granted a three month long continuance to her trial last week.
Both the denial of her motion to suppress and the continuance were made by elko District Judge Nancy Porter.
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While the exact content of Hill’s statement to police has not been released to the public, her comments were considered so inflammatory and incriminating that Hill’s attorney red Lee move to suppress them from being presented to a jury.
Lee argued that at the time Hill made them she was suffering from mental and physical exhaustion from spending to days hiding in Pequop Mountains as well as drug withdrawal.
“The video of the interview clearly shows Ms. Hill as being in an exhausted and worn down condition,” Lee wrote in his motion. “Her lack of sleep and drug use was known to her inquisitors.” The motion also indicated that Hill tested positive for multiple drugs, including methamphetamine, THC and opiates, after her arrest.
Porter may well have ruled that while not in the best shape Hill was coherent at the time of her arrest and had been read her rights and the statement she gave officers was voluntary.
However because Hill’s statement may critically if not fatally undermine her defense strategy, in her upcoming trial Porter allowed for the continuance for her attorneys to devise a new strategy.
Hill is accused of the kidnapping and attempted murder of Wendover gym owner Rattana Keomanivong as well as along list of other felonies committed during a week long crime spree over during the New Year’s holiday of 2012.
In jail house interviews Hill placed almost all of the blame for the shooting and the other crimes squarely on the shoulders of her accomplice Logan McFarland and claimed she was another victim.
This ‘good girl in bad company’ defense was aided during the preliminary hearing by the testimony of Keomanivong who failed to remember certain parts of her statement to police at the time of the shooting.
Shot in the head the former Wendover gym owner still suffers from memory loss and other brain damage from her almost fatal wound. Since the shooting she has had to relocate to Las Vegas where she is receiving physical and mental therapy as well as preparing for the ordeal of the coming trial.
But while Hill defense may have benefitted from the grievous injury she allegedly caused, the Utah woman may have damned herself with her own words, and those words her lawyer fought hard to keep under wraps will now be heard by a jury.
In addition to the kidnapping and attempted murder charges she faces in Nevada, Hill and McFarland are persons of interest in the double murder of an elderly Mt. Pleasant, Utah couple Woody and Ann Fullwood which occurred the day before the shooting in Wendover.
While found competent to stand trial last summer, Hill entered her “not guilty by reason of insanity” plea in September. She changed it in December to a simply “not guilty”.
McFarland who spent most of last year in and out of the Lake’s Crossing Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Reno also recently dropped his bid to be declared mentally incompetent to stand trial.
His trial date was set last week for September.
