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Cave looter pleads guilty to corpse abuse PDF Print E-mail
Written by DeadGirl   
Friday, 22 October 2004
Defendant also faces murder-for-hire charges
October 20, 2004


MEDFORD, Oregon (AP) -- A man accused of plotting the murder of people involved in a 1996 grave robbing case against him pleaded guilty Tuesday to two counts of abuse of a corpse.

Jack Harelson, 64, admitted the headless, mummified corpses of two Indian children that police found in his garden had been dug up from ancient graves in the Nevada desert in the 1980s.

He still faces trial on charges alleging he tried to pay an undercover police informant $10,000 in opals to kill the police detective and judge who sent him to jail in 1996, and two business partners who put investigators on his trail.

By pleading guilty to abuse of a corpse, Harelson, a former insurance agent, avoids testimony in the rest of his trial about the missing skulls.

Jury selection was scheduled to begin Wednesday on the remaining charges of criminal conspiracy to commit aggravated murder, attempted aggravated murder, solicitation to commit murder and being a felon in possession of a firearm.

Jackson County Deputy District Attorney Timothy Barnack said he hoped to win a sentence of 10 to 20 years in prison if Harelson is convicted of the remaining charges.

Prosecutors are expected to present tape-recorded conversations between Harelson and the undercover police informant he allegedly paid to kill four people.

Harelson's lawyer, Robert Abel, is seeking to include testimony from a clinical psychologist that Harelson suffers from an unspecified personality disorder. The judge issued no final ruling on Abel's request, but said he was inclined to deny it.

Harelson was convicted in 1996 of criminal charges in Oregon related to the grave robbing and sentenced to three months in prison. An appeals court reversed that conviction, finding that the abuse ended when Harelson reburied the headless remains and the statute of limitations had run out.

Two years ago, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management fined him $2.5 million for damaging rare archaeological sites on federal land.

http://edition.cnn.com/2004/LAW/10/20/murderforhire.plea.ap/
 
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