Mid-Missouri judge considers child killer’s request

LaDaynea Spencer said Thursday she was angry and frustrated when she heard Scottie Willet wanted to withdraw his guilty plea for first-degree murder and armed criminal action.

Willet shot and killed her 6-year-old son Dayne Hathman in 2014.

Her husband’s mother is in a relationship with Willet’s dad, which made Willet almost like a part of the family. She said Hathman, who had Down syndrome, loved Willet and affectionately called him “Uncle Squishy.”

Boone County Judge Jeff Harris will now consider whether to grant Willet’s appeal to withdraw his guilty plea.

Willet, 30, pleaded guilty in 2016 but now his lawyer, Val Leftwich, is fighting the plea. She said because Willet is intellectually disabled, he didn’t have the mental capacity to understand the implications of the plea.

In a two-day hearing, Leftwich called several witnesses including a neuropsychologist and a psychiatrist who both evaluated Willet last year. Because Willet has an IQ in the 60s and was in the bottom percentile in many basic cognitive tests, they said he wouldn’t have been able to knowingly enter a plea of guilty in Hathman’s death. They said he had the mental capacity of a 7 to 12 year-old.

Callaway County prosecutor Chris Wilson offered the plea to Willet shortly after his arrest. If he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, he would get a life sentence without parole.

“If he went to trial, I would have filed for death penalty,” Wilson said.

Leftwich said Wilson’s intent to file “aggravated circumstances” and trigger the death penalty was a way to coerce Willet into pleading guilty to first-degree murder. According to state law, a person with an intellectual disability can’t be given the death penalty. Leftwich said the fact that Willet’s disability could exempt him was never fully explained to him.

Wilson said the circumstances of the murder were just cause for the death penalty to be sought and he didn’t threaten or coerce Willet into taking the plea.

Leftwich also said that Willet’s attorneys at the time, Justin Carver and Chelsea Mitchell, failed to recognize that Willet had moderate mental retardation and couldn’t knowingly, intelligently and voluntarily enter a plea.

“Counsel should have known that the state could seek death penalty, but he probably wouldn’t receive it because of the intellectual disability,” she said.

Carver and Mitchell did retain the services of a clinical psychologist in March 2016 to evaluate Willet because they had doubts about his cognitive functions as well. The doctor reached the conclusion that Willet would be capable of pleading and the two didn’t ask him to evaluate further.

“We believed he was capable,” Carver said. “At that point I’d been working with him [Willet] for some time and we were of the opinion he was capable, and then Dr. Scott’s opinion settled the issue for me.”

Hathman’s grandmother, Laura Armstrong, said Thursday that Willet was a high functioning, intellectually disabled man.

“He only plays that card when it suits him,” she said.

Leftwich said in her closing summary Thursday that Scott evaluated competency, but not the threshold of whether Willet could knowingly, intelligently, and voluntarily plead. She said that Willet didn’t understand that pleading to murder in the first degree meant that he contemplated the murder before it happened. She said his disability would not allow him to do so.

Assistant Attorney General Ted Bruce said that Carver and Mitchell went above and beyond their due diligence.

“Mr. Willet understood he was looking at the possibility of the death sentence,” Bruce said. “I think that we can all feel confidence that they would not plead guilty unless he understood it.”

Wilson said Thursday that he refused an offer from Carver for Willet to plead down to second-degree murder. Leftwich said Willet could have had a defense of diminished capacity and amended the charges to second-degree murder as opposed to first. That charge carries a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison.

“If he would get relief from either this court or an appeal then he would be sent back for a new trial if the state refiles the charges against him,” Leftwich said.

Spencer said she doesn’t know that there will ever be a light at the end of the tunnel following the death of her son.

“We’ll never get over the loss of Dayne,” she said. “He [Willet] took my son, but he didn’t take my memories.”

Willet’s parents were also in court the past two days. They said they didn’t have a comment, but mentioned how hard the experience has been on the family as a whole.

“It just blew our minds when it happened,” said Ruth Spencer.

LaDaynea Spencer’s husband Kenneth is her son.

Judge Harris has given both sides 45 days to file their summaries and then he will decide what to do. Neither attorney could estimate how long that could take.