Accused killer's letter: 'I am guilty'

NEW ALBANY, Ind. (AP) - A southern Indiana man charged with killing three women has sent a letter to a newspaper saying he is guilty of the crimes and will accept the death penalty.

"I am guilty," William Clyde Gibson III, 54, of New Albany, said in a letter received Friday by The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Ky.

"I will pled guilty to the death penalty ... just to save some more heart ache," Gibson said in the letter, the newspaper reported (http://cjky.it/Kps9aK).

Gibson, who is being held in the Floyd County Jail in New Albany, told the newspaper he also has written prosecutors to inform them he will plead guilty. They said in a court filing this week they had received a letter from Gibson but did not reveal its contents.

Chief Floyd County Public Defender J. Patrick Biggs said he intends to "vigorously defend" Gibson.

Gibson faces two capital murder counts for allegedly strangling and sexually assaulting Stephanie Kirk, 35, of Charlestown and Christine Whitis 75, a longtime Gibson family friend, and a third murder charge in the 2002 stabbing death of Karen Hodella, a Florida woman who was visiting the area. Hodella's body was found near the Ohio River in nearby Clarksville in January 2003.

Not guilty pleas have been entered on Gibson's behalf, and his first trial is scheduled for Aug. 27.

Defense lawyers not involved in the case told the newspaper that if Gibson tries to plead guilty to a capital crime, his defense lawyers will contest his competency to enter that plea and his sanity at the time of the offenses.

Brian Butler, a former prosecutor, said he expects Gibson's lawyers will do "everything legally possible" to keep him from keep him from pleading guilty and accepting a death sentence, including saying "he is not in his right mind."

Court records show a 1991 test on Gibson indicated he had an IQ of 79, in the "borderline range of intelligence." The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that executing mentally disabled individuals violates the ban on cruel and unusual punishment in the Constitution's Eighth Amendment.