Darrell Plumb suffered a horrific beating and then was strangled hard enough to break two bones in his neck, a deputy prosecutor told a Snohomish County Superior Court jury on Tuesday.
The evidence to be presented at trial will be enough to prove that Plumb’s roommate, William Douglas Lance, 45, of Bothell, was the person who killed Plumb April 23, deputy prosecutor Matt Baldock said in court.
Lance is on trial for charges of first-degree murder and first-degree solicitation to commit murder for allegedly trying to get a jail cellmate to kill a chief witness in the case. The trial will continue well into next week.
If Lance is convicted, the offenses would be enough to send him to prison for life under the state’s three-strikes law, which calls for persistent offenders of violent crimes to be locked up without the possibility of release.
Lance has previous robbery, drug and burglary convictions.
Plumb and Lance shared a rented home on 35th Avenue SE. Baldock told jurors some of the witnesses may be involved in criminal activities, but they helped Snohomish County sheriff’s detectives piece together what happened.
“No matter what approach you take … you’ll end up in the same place,” Baldock told jurors. He said the evidence will point toward a conviction.
The case came to light a few days after Plumb was bludgeoned to death when word spread about the killing, and calls started coming in to local police departments, Baldock said.
A woman who came to visit Lance on April 24 saw Plumb’s body in the house. Lance threatened to do something the woman would “regret” if she called police, Baldock said. Instead, Lance called a man who came over to help remove marijuana plants and growing equipment from the garage, Baldock said.
Plumb’s body remained on the floor of the house for at least a day while the marijuana-growing materials were removed and some of the blood was cleaned from the walls and the floor, Baldock said.
When detectives served a search warrant and arrested Lance three days after the death, a tracker led detectives along drag marks through tall grass in the back yard to a spot where Plumb’s body was buried, Baldock said.
When questioned, Lance had little to say other than “it was self-defense,” according to court documents.
The case is not as clear-cut as the prosecutor says, public defender Robert O’Neal said.
Forensic scientists who will testify are expected to “overreach” in their assessment of what happened when Plumb died, he said.
In addition, many of the witnesses were part of a marijuana-growing operation and have everything to gain from coming to court to support the prosecutor’s case and avoid prosecution for their own misdeeds, O’Neal said.
They have “an agenda to keep themselves out of trouble,” O’Neal said.
The former cellmate who is expected to testify about Lance planning to kill a witness also has something to gain from the state, O’Neal said.
That witness, he added, is looking for “a ticket out” of years in prison for the testimony.
From the evidence, jurors will be looking at “conclusions, conjecture and best guesses” about what really happened in that house, O’Neal said. In the end, they will still be asking who killed Plumb, why it happened and who did the cleanup.
“You’re not going to know what to believe,” O’Neal told jurors.
Reporter Jim Haley: 425-339-3447 or haley@heraldnet.com.
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