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BLADE COLUMBUS BUREAU Ohio News
Taft Grants 4th Delay In Spirko Death Sentence
Monday, June 19, 2006 COLUMBUS -- Gov. Bob Taft today postponed the scheduled execution of John Spirko from July 19 until Nov. 29, marking Spirko’s fourth reprieve in a year. “It is my hope that the additional time permits the completion of the DNA testing and analysis agreed upon by the attorney general and Mr. Spirko’s counsel,” said Mr. Taft. Spirko, 60, faces a death sentence for the August 1984 murder of Betty Jane Mottinger, postmaster in the tiny Van Wert County village of Elgin. He had recently been released from a Kentucky prison on an unrelated murder charge and was living in Swanton with his sister at the time of Mrs. Mottinger’s death. Mrs. Mottinger had been stabbed repeatedly. Her body was discovered weeks later in a soybean field near Findlay. Attorney General Jim Petro’s office has been conducting modern DNA testing on 22-year-old evidence in the case, including the old theater curtain/painting tarp that shrouded her body and, most recently, between 30 and 100 cigarette butts recovered from the Elgin post office. Mr. Petro’s office said it needed more time for the testing and left the door open in its latest letter to Mr. Taft last week that it might request a fifth delay later. Spirko’s attorneys hope the results will either point at someone else or, in the absence of any sample linking Spirko to the scene, raise more questions about his guilt.
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