Charges Pending in Richardson Case; Ex-Con Whose Sentence Reduced by state Supreme Court Found with Dead Woman in Back Seat of his Car Last Week

Today's Sunday Gazette-Mail reports that police in Clay County are preparing to charge Raymond Richardson with murder in the case of the woman the State Police found stabbed to death in the back seat of Richardson's car during a routine traffic stop on I-79 last week.

Richardson, you will recall, had his 30-year prison sentence for a 1999 kidnapping conviction reduced to 10 years by the state Supreme Court and got out of prison last year with good time credit that further reduced his sentence to just 5 years. In the 1999 case, Richardson kidnapped his girlfriend at gunpoint and forced her to walk naked to an abandoned house, where--during a terrifying 14-hour ordeal--he urinated on her, burned her with lit cigarettes, doused her with gasoline, and threatened to set her on fire.