Murderer pleads guilty a second time
A 68-year-old man who murdered a woman in Spokane 18 years ago pleaded guilty a second time Wednesday and soon will head to Chicago to pay for an even older murder.
Robert Daniel Clark strangled Rochelle M. English with a cloth in April 1987 because he didn’t want to pay her for a sex act. English’s body was found in an apartment at 1221 N. Monroe, and police found Clark’s fingerprint on a beer can. He was in the Grant County Jail on unrelated charges when police caught up with him and took his confession.
A machinist who grew up in Wisconsin, Clark had been living in Moses Lake when he murdered English.
Clark pleaded guilty to second-degree felony murder under a law that made it murder if a victim died in the course of some other felony. His conviction was recently overturned because of a Washington Supreme Court ruling that the so-called felony murder rule didn’t apply to assaults committed between 1975 and 2003.
The Spokane County Prosecutor’s Office charged Clark again, with regular second-degree murder, and he pleaded guilty again Wednesday under a deal that called for a sentence roughly equal to the time he has already served. He faced a standard range of 133/4 to almost 191/2 years in prison, but Superior Court Judge Linda Tompkins imposed the recommended sentence, which was one month longer than the minimum.
Assistant Public Defender Douglas Boe said Clark was very drunk at the time of the murder and thought English was merely unconscious when he left her. Clark didn’t intend to kill her, Boe said.
“I’m sorry about what happened,” Clark said.
When the Washington Department of Corrections releases Clark in a few months, he will be transferred to Cook County, Illinois, to begin serving a 40-year sentence for strangling a woman in Chicago in July 1978.
Cook County authorities said Clark, then 42, lived in the same apartment building as his victim, 25-year-old Ruth Arambula. He entered her apartment and began sexually assaulting her. When she resisted, Clark beat her with his fists and a bottle, then strangled her, a county official said.
Clark fled after killing Arambula, and Chicago police finally found him in the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. He was furloughed to the Cook County Jail in 2001 for a trial in which a jury convicted him of first-degree murder.