Clarence Butterfield claimed that his murder conviction should be overturned because an Orange County prosecutor improperly implied he'd had sex with his own 21-year-old daughter before killing her.
You can forgive law enforcement for believing something was kinky and terribly wrong with Butterfield beginning with the fact that he likely stripped his daughter Rebekah, hogtied her and locked her in a freezer, where she suffocated.
Oh, and there were these tidbits: The girl had also been shot eight times, according to an autopsy report of the corpse Butterfield left rotting in his mobile home for 22 months.
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During his trial, Butterfield testified that he found Rebakah already
dead and, based on his religious views, thought that she would heal if
her corpse was locked in the freezer.
The autopsy report shows that the girl struggled against her bindings
during the five or so gruesome minutes it took for her to lose conscience and
die.
A California Court of Appeal considered Butterfield's complaint, but late last month determined that prosecutor Ebrahim Baytieh's
case was solid. They upheld the conviction. This murderer will continue
to serve his life in prison sentence without the possibility for
parole.
–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.