Update, noon Monday:
Judge Jack McKenna on Monday resentenced Winona Fletcher to 60 years. With mandatory parole reducing that by a third, to 40 years, it means Fletcher will be released from prison.
-- Casey Grove/Alaska Public Media
Original story:
Winona Fletcher’s past 40 years have been spent in Alaska prisons, ever since she was a dropout seventh grader accused of a grisly and notorious Anchorage triple homicide.
On Friday, a judge heard evidence and arguments about whether Fletcher should be released from her 135-year prison sentence early in an all-day resentencing hearing in Anchorage Superior Court.
In 1985, Fletcher and her then-18-year-old boyfriend broke into a Russian Jack home to rob it and shot to death the three people inside, Tom Faccio, 69, and Ann Faccio, 70, as well as 75-year-old Emilia Elliott. The case transfixed and horrified Anchorage, drawing intense media coverage both for the brutality of the crimes and the fact that Fletcher was just 14 years old.
She was sentenced to a staggering 297 years in prison, later reduced to 135 years, becoming the youngest female ever to be convicted of murder in the state.
In 2023, Fletcher’s extraordinary sentence was reexamined under an Alaska Court of Appeals decision that found juvenile defendants must be sentenced under criteria that take their youth, vulnerability and rehabilitation prospects into consideration, part of a national reappraisal of the severe sentences handed down to teenagers in the 1980s and 1990s.
At Friday’s hearing, prosecutor Alice Curci asked that the court reduce Fletcher’s sentence to 90 years, and make her immediately eligible for a discretionary parole hearing.
Defense attorney Marcelle McDannel asked that Anchorage Superior Court Judge Jack McKenna reduce the sentence to 60 years — which, with Alaska’s mandatory parole or “good time” provision subtracting a third of a sentence for good behavior, would allow Fletcher to walk free immediately.
McKenna ended the seven-hour hearing without ruling in the case, saying he needed time to consider the evidence and a weighty decision.
Putting Fletcher’s release in the hands of the Alaska Board of Parole would far from guarantee her release: In 2024, the Alaska parole board granted discretionary parole only 34% of the time, according to corrections department statistics. Of the 10 people who applied for discretionary parole with the most serious offense of murder that year, half were denied.
Fletcher’s past and prospects for the future
Much of Friday’s testimony revolved around testimony from a psychologist hired by Fletcher’s public defenders to assess her.
Dr. Bethany Brand, a psychology professor at Maryland’s Towson University and trauma specialist who evaluated Fletcher for her resentencing, testified about Fletcher’s childhood: A father who abandoned the family. An alcoholic mother who brought abusive, drug-addicted boyfriends into the home. Being raped by a step-grandfather starting when she was 5.
Those experiences meant Fletcher, who by what should have been her seventh grade year, was desperate for love and affection and easy to manipulate by her older boyfriend, Brand testified.
Fletcher had good prospects for a healthy life outside of prison, she said.
“She’s no longer a child,” Brand testified. “She doesn’t have the extreme vulnerability to negative influence that she once did. Her brain has finished developing. She’s had trauma treatment she really took to heart and worked hard to overcome the impact of trauma.”
People who have known Fletcher during her decades at Hiland also testified, including a former employee kitchen supervisor who told the courtroom he trusted Fletcher so much he’d welcome her into his own home if she were released. The orchestra director described Fletcher as calm and even-tempered.
Curci argued that Fletcher had clearly made strides in her life, but that she wasn’t completely rehabilitated.
“The narrative that’s being presented to this court is that there are two options, and one is the offensive portrayal of Ms. Fletcher from the 1980s, which we can all agree by modern standards … was not entirely fair,” Curci said.
The other narrative, which Curci called “also offensive,” was the idea that Fletcher was controlled by her older boyfriend, Cordell Boyd, and had no agency in committing the killings. Giving Fletcher an immediate chance at discretionary parole represents a “meaningful opportunity for release,” she said.
“That is plenty,” she said.
McDannel argued that Fletcher had “made atonement her life’s mission” and had demonstrated her ability to change.
“I have never seen someone try so hard to make up for something that they did when they were so young,” McDannel said.
McDannel argued that putting Fletcher’s fate to the parole board wasn’t adequate because it wouldn’t be bound to consider her youth at the time of sentencing or other factors.
A sentence of 60 years would be a stride toward making her sentence proportional to the 99-year sentence handed down to Boyd, who McDannel argued was the main planner and mastermind of the killings.
‘You keep living it’
After the murders, the daughters of Ann and Tom Faccio, frustrated with their experience in court, started an enduring and influential movement to extend rights to the victims of crimes in Alaska. Janice Faccio Lienhart founded Victims for Justice, which still exists today.
Today, generations have passed. The Faccio grandchildren and great-grandchildren were the ones attending the resentencing Friday.
“I don’t want to feel like I have no compassion,” said Cynthia Arnold, a granddaughter of Ann and Tom Faccio, in a brief interview outside the courtroom. “I mean, who wants a 14-year-old to be put in jail for the rest of their life?”
But, Arnold said, many people — including her grandparents — experienced traumatic childhoods and didn’t go on to murder others.
Fletcher ended three lives, she said, and the family has been forced to relive the crime over and over for 40 years now. Every court hearing, every case development, she is transported to the horror of seeing her beloved grandparents’ home on Glacier Street transformed into a crime scene.
“I am brought right back to walking in the house. There’s my grandpa’s food he was eating. There’s the body outline and there’s the blood stains,” she said. “You keep living it.”
It never seems to end, Arnold said. The family has carried the crime for generations now.
“When will we be done with this? When will our life sentence be over?” Arnold said.
Fletcher, who attended the hearing handcuffed in the yellow prison jumpsuit, dabbing her eyes with a tissue, spoke briefly in court.
“I wanted to make sure that my actions spoke for how sorry I was for what I did,” she said.
McKenna, the judge, asked the parties to reconvene in court on Monday for a decision.
This story has been republished with permission from the original at the Anchorage Daily News.