A prison inmate convicted of the 1986 murder of Lisa Strong will serve a five-year-to-life sentence on top of his current term, a judge ordered Friday.
Forrest L. Whittle, 30, fired six .38-caliber slugs at Strong while she was walking home from work at Kensington Avenue and 800 East. One of the bullets pierced her skull.Whittle, who is serving time for his part in the 1987 rape and robbery of a man near Liberty Park, maintained his innocence Friday and sought mercy from the judge.
"I made some mistakes when I was a kid. But I've progressed in the prison system. . . . I've gotten my high school diploma. I'm 60 credits away from a bachelor's degree. How much more do I have to do to prove I've advanced?" he said. "I just ask you for a little bit of leniency."
Whittle and his attorney, Lynn Brown, hoped for a concurrent sentence, rather than back-to-back terms. Such an arrangement would free Whittle sooner.
But 3rd District Judge Frank G. Noel responded that he could not ignore the "absolute senselessness" of the crime and ordered Whittle to serve his life term consecutive to any remaining time on his current sentence.
"I'm sure there are a lot of factors that brought you to this point. But you are here and a jury convicted you," the judge said.
Brown suggested Noel should extend some mercy to his client because of a difficult childhood. Whittle, he said, was put in foster care at age 14.
"He really never had a home or a family life. He's been in prison for 10 years . . . he could be described as `institutionalized.' But, remarkably, he has no juvenile (criminal) history," Brown said.
Brown has filed a motion seeking a new trial and argued earlier that no physical evidence connected Whittle to the killing.
Until Whittle was indicted for the crime in March 1995, Strong, 25, was one more victim in a series of unsolved murders of young women in the mid-1980s.
Friends and family of two other victims, Christine Gallegos, 18, and Carla Maxwell, 20, hoped Whittle's conviction would at least resolve some questions about their cases. Gallegos was shot and stabbed on a street near the old Derks Field in May 1986. Maxwell was shot while working as a clerk at a 7-Eleven in Layton in April 1986.
Bullets extracted from Strong and the two women were determined to have been fired from the same handgun, a .38-caliber revolver. In addition, police began looking at several other possibly related unsolved killings, most notably the stabbing death of Tiffany Hambleton, 14, whose body was found in a West Salt Lake field in February 1986.
But prosecutors so far have not filed any additional charges against Whittle. And none of the victims' families or friends attended his sentencing Friday.