Man’s sentence cut by 43 years
Published 10:42 pm Friday, February 8, 2008
A state Supreme Court decision will result in shaving 43 years of prison time off the sentence handed down to a former Arlington businessman convicted of trying to have his ex-wife and three of her family members killed.
Mitchell Lee Varnell, 46, is to spend nearly 36 years behind bars — not the 79 years first ordered in 2003.
A Snohomish County Superior Court judge Friday imposed the new sentence while following the orders of the high court.
In 2002, Varnell was arrested at a north Everett restaurant after Snohomish County sheriff’s detectives recorded a conversation between him and a would-be hit man.
During the conversation, Varnell offered to pay the “hit man” $60,000 to kill his ex-wife, her parents and her brother following a bitter divorce.
Varnell didn’t know that the man he was talking to was an undercover sheriff’s deputy.
Earlier, Varnell asked the secretary from his excavating business to kill his ex-wife.
A jury convicted him of five counts of solicitation to commit first-degree murder: one count for asking the secretary, plus four counts for seeking the deaths of as many people in the restaurant conversation with the sheriff’s deputy.
Snohomish County Superior Court Judge Linda Krese sentenced Varnell on five counts.
In November, the high court ruled in a 7-2 decision that the restaurant conversation was really only one count, and sent the case back to Krese’s court for sentencing again.
The ruling knocked out three of the five crimes on which the original sentencing was based.
On Friday, Krese imposed the 36-year sentence. Varnell, who gets credit for time already served, likely will get out of prison when he’s about 70 years old.
“I wish it was a lot longer,” said the ex-wife, Karen Varnell. In court, Karen Varnell said she fears her ex-husband.
“This man never gives up and our safety will always be at risk,” she told Krese. She asked for about a 40-year sentence.
Public defender Donald Wackerman asked the judge to impose about 30 years.
Mitchell Varnell’s mother also pleaded for a shorter term, telling Krese that her son has changed and found religion in prison.
“I have no violence in me,” Mitchell Varnell told the judge. “I never laid hands on anybody.”
Reporter Jim Haley: 525-339-3447 or jhaley@heraldnet.com.
