Wife given long sentence for murder

TACOMA – A woman who killed her husband and allegedly had her two grown children help her dispose of his body has been sentenced to a long prison term.

A third child, 5-year-old Alison Ferguson, now has nightmares, talks of seeing a monster in her mother’s face and repeatedly asks, “Why did my mommy kill my daddy?” a Pierce County Superior Court judge was told in the case of Angela Marie Ferguson.

Noting that the little girl was in the house and may have witnessed her father’s death, Judge Katherine M. Stolz sentenced Ferguson, 41, of Puyallup, a mother of five, to 26 years and eight months in prison, the high end of the standard range.

“You killed a man,” Stolz said. “You involved your own children. How a parent could do that, I don’t know.”

Ferguson pleaded guilty Wednesday to first-degree murder in the shooting of her husband, Randall Ferguson, 45, a Boeing Co. machinist, at their home on March 22, 2006.

Investigators allege she shot him twice in the head, then got a son, Claude Walz, now 20, and daughter, Lisa Marie Walz, 22, to help her put his body in the trunk of his car. She drove the car over an embankment near Gig Harbor, scattering some items to try to make the death appear to be the result of a robbery, prosecutors said.

Ferguson reported her husband missing, extolled his virtues in a newspaper interview and insisted for six days that she had nothing to do with his disappearance. After investigators found blood and a spent shell casing in the house, she admitted shooting him but maintained it was an accident.

Lisa Marie and Claude Walz, her children from a previous relationship, are awaiting trial on charges of first-degree rendering criminal assistance.