Sobs echoed around the room at several points during an emotional sentencing hearing on May 10 in Lincoln County Superior Court in Wiscasset.
Earl “Buddy” Bieler, 25, and Corina Durkee, 43, both of Waldoboro, stood together and received prison sentences for the brutal killing and near-fatal stabbing of two Waldoboro women in April, 2009.
Justice Andrew Horton sentenced Bieler to 55 years in prison for the murder of Rachel Grindal, 27, and attempted murder of Tracey Neild, 32.
Bieler slit the throats of both victims in front of Neild’s home at 161 Controversy Lane in Waldoboro. Both Bieler and Durkee pleaded guilty last month to charges associated with the attacks.
Durkee received a 15-year sentence for her involvement. Evidence shows that Durkee did not actually stab either of the victims, but her involvement was substantial enough to make her a knowing accomplice, said Assistant Attorney General Leane Zainea.
“This was a savage, brutal killing that has no explanation,” Horton said while explaining his decision in Bieler’s sentencing. The only significant mitigating factor in his decision was the guilty plea, Horton said.
“A guilty plea is the sincerest form of remorse,” Horton said. However, because of the strength of the prosecution’s case against Bieler, Horton said the plea might represent an “acceptance of reality” as much as an acceptance of responsibility.
Following the sentencing, Grindal’s mother, Rita Grindal, said she felt Bieler’s sentence was fair. As for Durkee’s sentence, she said she didn’t have enough evidence to make a decision.
“Justice was not served today,” Neild said after the hearing.
Despite DNA evidence the prosecution said proved that Bieler stabbed both victims, Neild believes that it was Durkee that cut her throat.
At the sentencing, Neild gave a detailed account of the events on the night she was stabbed, and said she remembers Durkee jumping on her back and slitting her throat. “I felt hot liquid all over me,” she said. “I knew I was dead.”
Prior to delivering the sentence, Horton gave friends and family of the victims an opportunity to address the court. Many of those who knew Neild and Grindal, including Neild herself, called for the judge to give Durkee a harsher sentence than 15 years.
Both the prosecution and Durkee’s attorney, Phillip Cohen, recommended the 15-year sentence as part of a plea bargain in which Durkee pleaded guilty to the lesser charges of felony murder, attempted murder and burglary.
In order to impose a harsher sentence, Horton said he would have to refuse Durkee’s guilty plea, which would likely result in her going to trial. “Based on my understanding of the evidence, convicting her [in a jury trial] – even of being an accomplice – is uncertain,” Horton said.
The wheeze of air through that tube was audible throughout the courtroom during the proceedings and her frequent sobs were punctuated with a sharp, rasping whistle.
At an upcoming doctor’s appointment in Boston, Neild will have to decide between breathing and speaking, members of her family said. Doctors can remove the tracheotomy tube so she will breathe more normally, but if they do she may never speak again.
“Most days, I’m thankful to be alive,” Neild told the courtroom. “But I want you to know how hard it is to rely on family for everything. They’ve made me a prisoner within myself.”
Several of Neild’s friends and family said that she’s an entirely different person now, and said they’ve struggled watching her try to cope.
“We can’t embrace her enough to make her understand she did not bring this on herself,” a friend of the Neild family said.
Cohen read a letter written by Durkee.
“I apologize, but do not expect forgiveness,” Durkee wrote. In the letter she told the court she didn’t stab either of the victims and never wanted to hurt them.
“In a way, my life ended that night, too; I lost two friends,” Durkee wrote.
Although lives ending was a constant theme throughout the hearing, the only person for whom it was literally true was Grindal.
She leaves behind, among others, a mother, a wife and a young son.
“There is no sentence that will replace their loved one or put their daughter or sister back where they were the day before,” Zainea said. “Durkee and Bieler alone are responsible for the death of Rachel Grindal.”
Rita Grindal was crying as she stood beside her husband Richard and acknowledge her daughter’s troubled youth. Grindal had an emotionally tumultuous adolescence that included drug use, Rita Grindal said.
“I always hoped that life would become better for her,” Rita Grindal said. “That hope was destroyed.”
Grindal’s son, Gavin, has struggled in the year since his mother’s death, Rita Grindal said. In the week before the sentencing, he gave his Mother’s Day gift to his teacher, she said.
Recently, Rita Grindal and Gavin were in a store, and someone said, “Hey little buddy,” to Gavin. “He got angry, because he couldn’t figure out why anyone would call him that,” Rita Grindal said.
Rachel Grindal’s wife, Madalynn Wiggins, told the courtroom that Bieler and Durkee were among Grindal’s closest friends.
“She told a lot of people that she trusted them with her life,” Wiggins said. “And that she would always be there for them.”
Wiggins agreed with the others who said that a 15-year sentence for Durkee didn’t do justice to the damage she had caused, even if she never wielded the knife.
“When Rachel needed help, needed her dear friend, she allowed her to be slaughtered,” Wiggins said.
“I don’t understand myself how this happened. I don’t fathom it. I don’t know if I ever will,” Bieler said. “I can’t ask for forgiveness, because I’ll never forgive myself.”
He told the families that the victims were his friends. He said that he wanted them to know that he didn’t plead guilty for himself, but to spare them.
“It isn’t fair that you should suffer for the rest of your life because of me,” he said.
Bieler’s mother, Annabelle Bieler, spoke at the hearing, telling the courtroom that as a kid, Bieler “got in trouble, but he was never disrespectful to me,” she said. “He talks to me now, and I know he’s in a lot of pain,” she said.
Annabelle Bieler apologized to the victims’ families, calling it, “a shame that your family is all broken up because of his stupidity.”
Judges are instructed to issue sentences that, among several other things, restrain convicted persons when required in the interest of public safety, Horton said.
“Grindal was killed because she was driving away,” Horton said. “There is nothing that would motivate anyone to do what [Bieler] did.”
Horton described Bieler’s lengthy criminal history as a significant aggravating factor. Beginning when he was 18 years old, Bieler has been in and out of state custody for a litany of offenses, including assault, theft, burglary and trafficking in prison contraband, Horton said.
He has been arrested on several occasions for violating conditions of release, and he was out on bail from an assault charge when he killed Grindal, Horton said.
Avantaggio pointed out that the assault was the only violent crime Bieler had been convicted of prior to the murder.
