By Scott North
Herald Writer
Jim Elledge didn’t ask for mercy.
In a calm, measured voice, he sat before a Snohomish County jury three years ago and told them there was a "wicked" part of him that needed to die.
On Monday, the state Clemency and Pardons Board in Olympia will hear testimony on whether Elledge is right.
Gov. Gary Locke has asked the board’s opinion on whether the former Everett man should be executed Aug. 28. He was sentenced to die for the 1998 killing of a Lynnwood woman while still on parole for another woman’s murder 24 years earlier.
More than a dozen groups opposed to the death penalty have asked the state to spare Elledge’s life. The clemency plea was made even though Elledge has signed court papers saying attempts to block his execution are unwelcome.
Those seeking clemency for Elledge argue justice was short-circuited because he chose not to tell jurors anything that may have argued against a death sentence.
Jurors never heard, for example, that in 1987 Elledge protected a prison guard’s life when Cuban inmates rioted at a federal lockup in Atlanta. In 1977, he also tipped officials at the state penitentiary in Walla Walla that inmates were trying to tunnel their way out of the maximum security prison, with its high stone walls and acres of razor wire.
While those actions were certainly to Elledge’s credit, they don’t mitigate against a death sentence, Snohomish County prosecutors contend.
"Mr. Elledge has a lengthy history of extreme violence against women," deputy prosecutor Seth Fine said in documents filed with the clemency board in preparation for Monday’s hearing.
Elledge’s life story is told in hundreds of legal papers that fill four boxes at the prosecutor’s office. More than 30 years of reports from prison officials, parole officers, police and prosecutors document a lifetime of crime and punishment.
Born in Baton Rouge, La., in December 1942, Elledge’s first conviction came in 1953 when, at age 10, he was sentenced to reform school for burglary. He returned to reform school three more times before 1959, each time for property crimes.
Reform school "was the vehicle for his socialization, and juvenile delinquents were his peers," a state corrections official wrote in 1974. Elledge’s home life "was so deplorable that he asked his parole officer to return him to reform school so that he could escape the unhappiness and poverty at home."
Elledge committed his first known violent crime in 1964 in Roswell, N.M. He was 21 when he grabbed a female clerk during a robbery at the Western Union office and knocked her unconscious by hitting her on the head with a handgun. Elledge doused the woman with gasoline and attempted to rape her before she escaped, according to court papers.
He was convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to serve 10 to 50 years in prison. Elledge was released 7 1/2years later, in spite of a 1966 escape and a thwarted escape attempt in 1969 in which he nearly sawed through his prison cell bars. After serving some additional time in Texas and New Mexico for parole violations, he headed to Seattle in May 1974.
That’s when Elledge checked into the Eldorado Motel on Aurora Avenue, then managed by Bertha Lush, 63.
Lush’s body was found in her office on May 18, 1974. She’d been struck in the head at least 28 times with a ball-peen hammer, according to court papers. Elledge left behind the murder weapon, a bloodstained shirt and plenty of fingerprints. He fled the state, but it wasn’t long before he was back behind bars admitting that he had killed the woman in an argument over rent. Elledge said he had planned on robbing Lush after she refused to let him stay at the motel for free.
Under Washington’s now-discarded sentencing scheme, Elledge was sent to prison for life, with eligibility for parole. It was while he was behind bars for Lush’s murder that he stopped the Walla Walla prison tunnel plan and protected the prison guard in the Atlanta riot.
Elledge was paroled in July 1989 to live in Ruston, La., but his parole was revoked five months later after he broke out four windows at a bar. The ex-con was accused of attempted burglary. He disputed that, but in 1990 told Washington parole officials he’d broken the windows out of a mix of alcohol abuse and frustration.
He asked for another shot at freedom, noting, "I have been confined since July 1974, and in this period of 16 years there was no violent acts committed by this inmate. And there will never be one again on any human life."
The parole board was skeptical. In 1992, it held that Elledge was a man with "a long history of criminality and violence who has been incarcerated for most of his adult life and has spent his brief moments of freedom unemployed, wandering the countryside, drinking and committing crimes."
In April 1994, Elledge was again cleared for parole. But within four days he was caught using amphetamines.
"This man’s periods of parole are getting shorter instead of longer," one corrections officials wrote. "He is without question serving life on the installment plan."
Elledge was sent back to prison in September 1990, but only after he left a Seattle work release center and headed to Bellingham for a few days.
Ralph Ensign, a community corrections supervisor, recommended state officials be "extremely careful" with Elledge.
"I am strongly of the opinion that he is at high risk to reoffend in a manner similar to his original crime," Ensign wrote.
Elledge remained in prison until August 1995. Parole board members noted at the time that he’d been locked up for all but about two years in the past three decades and had become "highly institutionalized."
After his release, Elledge found work in machine shops and later as a janitor at the Lynnwood church where he killed Eloise Fitzner, 47, in April 1998.
Elledge later told police that he killed Fitzner because he was angry over a letter she had written to his then-fiance in 1997, urging her to break off their relationship. That didn’t happen, and the woman married Elledge in October 1997.
Elledge’s wife was gone on a religious retreat the weekend he invited Fitzner and a Seattle woman out to dinner. They instead wound up at the church where he worked, in a basement room, where Elledge strangled and stabbed Fitzner and kidnapped the other woman.
Prosecutors contend Elledge took the surviving woman to his Everett mobile home and raped her before releasing her the next morning, an act Elledge has repeatedly denied.
The clemency board’s job is to recommend to the governor whether Elledge’s death sentence should be commuted. Barring some legal intervention, it is ultimately up to Locke whether Elledge will face the execution he seeks.
No matter what happens, freedom is not an option for Elledge. If his death sentence is commuted, he would face life in prison without possibility of release.
You can call Herald Writer Scott North at 425-339-3431
or send e-mail to north@heraldnet.com.
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