JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. — Three of the people convicted in the infamous Lillelid murders, in which almost an entire family was gunned down in a remote area of East Tennessee, are asking authorities to fingerprint the gun.
Karen Howell, Dean Mullins and Crystal Sturgill filed a motion for the gun to be fingerprinted. The state has not responded to the request as of Monday.
There were six total defendants in the case. The others included Natasha Cornet and Joseph Risner. Some insisted that Jason Bryant, the youngest defendant who was also not old enough to get the death penalty, pulled the trigger.
However, Bryant claimed that Millins and Risner were the shooters.
Howell, Mullins and Sturgill said they believed they could have possibly received a lighter sentence if it was proved they were not the shooters. Instead, they were offered a plea deal where the state would not seek the death penalty and were given two days to consider the offer.
They ended up pleading guilty to the shooting and were sentenced to life in prison without the chance for parole.
Three people died in the Lillilid Murders, and then-2-year-old Peter Lillelid was rushed to the emergency room after the shooting with severe injuries. He is the only one to survive the shooting.
The family had pulled into a rest stop in Greene County in April 1997 and a chance encounter with the six young people from Kentucky, ranging in age from 14 to 20, proved deadly. The six defendants kidnapped the family, forced them to drive their van to a remote gravel road to steal it, lined them up along a ditch and gunned them down.
Two days after the shooting, law enforcement tracked down the killers in the stolen van at the Arizona-Mexico border crossing.
The murders ignited anger and fury across East Tennessee, with some people in Knoxville demanding the defendants face the death penalty.
Some of this story was reported by WCYB.