Killer of 4 gets life in prison

Greg Tuttle

Thursday, Nov. 16, 2000 | 11:20 a.m.

A Clark County District Court jury took four days to find Richard Powell guilty of slaying four people in a revenge attack against a police informant, but jurors took only three hours to sentence him to life in prison.

Powell was spared the death penalty when the jury Wednesday rejected arguments by prosecutors that he deserved to join his accomplice on death row.

Instead, jurors sent the 37-year-old drug dealer to prison for life with no possibility of parole.

Powell was convicted by the same jury of four counts of first-degree murder for the May 1992 deaths of Samantha Scotti, 24, Lisa Boyer, 26, Jermaine Woods, 19, and Stephen Walker, 18.

Prosecutors said Powell and Vernell Evans Jr. shot the four inside Scotti's apartment on the night riots broke out in Las Vegas following the first verdict in the Rodney King police beating case in California. Powell and Evans chose the day knowing police in Las Vegas were busy controlling angry protesters.

Scotti was the target of the two men after she had given information to police about Powell's drug dealing activities. Boyer, Woods and Walker were visiting Scotti and were killed to cover up the crime, prosecutors said.

A 4-year-old girl in the apartment was unharmed, and she later identified the two gunman. Evans was given a death sentence at a separate trial. Powell was sentenced to prison in 1994 for drug offenses, but prosectors did not have enough evidence to charge him with the murders at that time.

One of the witnesses at Powell's murder trial was a cellmate who said Powell bragged of the killings and often said he wished he had killed the young girl also.

During closing statements Wednesday, prosecutors Mel Harmon and L.J. O'Neale told jurors it was Powell who was most responsible for the killings because he had the motive to kill Scotti.

Scotti was shot multiple times by two different guns while taking a shower. She was also beaten. Boyer was shot three times, and Woods and Walker were each killed by a single gunshot to the head.

"Four people were killed, proving that evil is a disease, and it has infinite forms," Howell said in asking jurors for the death penalty.

Powell's attorney, Lee McMahon, said there was no need to sentence the man to die by lethal injection. A life sentence would punish him by taking away his freedom forever and also protect society from future violence at his hands, McMahon said.

"All that will be accomplished by killing Richard Powell is another needless death," she said.