Michael Wayne Yoder pleaded guilty and mentally ill Monday to the kidnapping and aggravated sexual abuse of a 6-year-old girl in West Valley City last fall.
His decision means the child will not have to testify about the evening of Oct. 22 when Yoder scooped her up as she took a garbage sack to a trash bin serving her family's apartment complex.Police found the girl four hours later inside a storage closet on his balcony. She had been bound, gagged and stuffed in a cardboard box.
Yoder, 36, is charged with two first-degree felonies, each carrying a 5-years-to-life sentence. However, the plea arrangement stipulates that the sentences would be served concurrently, not con-sec-u-tively.
He will spend at least five years behind bars, though 3rd District Judge Kenneth Rigtrup could lock up Yoder for at least 15 years, according to state law. A sentencing is scheduled for April 3.
The girl's parents say that's too long to wait.
"I'm severely frustrated . . . it seems so never-ending," said the child's father, Don Fiedel. "We thought it would be over around the first part of March."
The Fiedels supported the plea arrangement because they thought it would speed the process. "We just want it to be over," said Susan Fiedel after the court hearing.
Prosecutor Jim Cope agrees that justice sometimes seems an interminable pursuit.
"I have no magic wand to make this go away. Everybody who is familiar with the legal process knows nothing is finally over. That's the system and I accept it; that doesn't mean I always like it," he said.
Yoder could draw the court's attention from prison by appealing an earlier decision by Rigtrup.
The judge, reacting to a motion by Yoder's attorneys, ruled Dec. 6 that evidence police gathered at the man's apartment when the girl was found would be admissible dur-ing trial.
Defense attorney Lisa Remal had argued any such evidence should be suppressed because statements by Yoder on that night were not part of an official investigation and that officers had no probable cause to search his
No appeal has been filed, and Remal and co-counsel Richard Mauro are still deciding whether one is warranted.