Kentucky mom escapes the death penalty with plea deal in killings of daughters, husband
A Whitley County woman is facing a life sentence without parole for the 2017 murders of her husband and two daughters after a plea deal.
On Wednesday morning, in a pretrial hearing in Whitley Circuit Court, Courtney Taylor, 44, of Williamsburg, entered an Alford plea to three counts of murder, according to the Associated Press. An Alford plea means Taylor is not admitting guilt, but she acknowledges that Laurel and Knox County Commonwealth Attorney Jackie Steele has enough evidence to convict her.
Taylor was charged in 2017 with fatally shooting her husband, Larry Taylor, 51, and two daughters, Jessie, 18 and Jolee, 13. She later testified that she shot her daughters “so they wouldn’t grow up without a mother.”
Law enforcement responding to the scene shot Taylor after she pointed a gun in their direction. As a result, she was charged with two counts of attempted murder. Prosecutors dropped those charges on Wednesday as part of the plea agreement and downgraded her recommended sentence from the death penalty to life without parole.
Police found Taylor’s husband and daughters in their shared home after Taylor was shot in January 2017. A wounded Taylor “begged the deputies and emergency medical services personnel ... to let her die,” according to court documents.
She was taken first to Baptist Health Hospital in Corbin and later transferred to University of Kentucky Medical Center in Lexington, where she underwent two abdominal surgeries over the next few days.
In an August 2019 motion to suppress Taylor’s statement, her attorney, Joanne Lynch argued that Taylor’s statement — given to police while she was under the influence of prescription drugs, including the powerful opioid fentanyl, and general anesthesia — was involuntarily coerced by two state police detectives.
KSP formally arrested and charged Taylor a day after she was shot, after her first surgery at UK, according to court records. Taylor later indicated she had no knowledge at the time that she had been arrested.
A day after her second surgery, two state police detectives in plain clothes introduced themselves — not as police, but by their names — and began asking Taylor questions. They spoke for nearly two hours and used a “hidden audio recorder” to record the conversation, according to the defense motion.
“It appears that the detectives deliberately concealed their occupations and the primary purpose of their visit ... in order to get her to talk to them,” Lynch wrote.
At the time, Dr. Don Nelson testified, Taylor was under the influence of more than eight medications, including fentanyl, oxycodone and muscle relaxers, and was recovering from general anesthesia.
Lynch argued that Taylor was likely cognitively impaired and unable to voluntarily give a statement to police.
When asked by a detective if she understood her Miranda rights, Taylor said she “did not know,” according to the defense motion. She asked if she needed a lawyer, saying “How do you know if you need one?”
Lynch argued that Taylor did not fully understand or waive her Miranda rights, which require law enforcement to warn people in their custody before questioning that they have certain rights, including the right to an attorney.
Taylor’s “responses do not demonstrate that she had a full understanding of her rights or of the consequences in waiving them,” Lynch wrote.
The motion to suppress Taylor’s statements was eventually overruled by Judge Jeffrey Burdette in October of last year.
Formal sentencing is scheduled for April 8.
This story was originally published February 19, 2020 at 4:40 PM.
