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player ready...A judge sentenced Christopher Richee Monday to natural life in prison without the possibility of parole for the 1996 murder of a Florida woman in a Crestwood hotel, saying the former handyman snuffed out her life purely for sport.
Richee, 34, sat expressionless as Judge Frank Zelezinski pronounced the sentence in the Markham branch of Cook County Circuit Court for the machete slaying of Nan Toder, 33, of Hollywood, Fla. She was on a business trip for a flower distributor when she was found slain at the Hampton Inn on Cicero Avenue.
Asked by the judge if he wished to make a statement, Richee stood and said: “I don’t know where to start. I don’t believe I was found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. I’m always going to protest my innocence.”
Turning to the victim’s relatives in the courtroom, Richee said, “As far as the Toder family is concerned, I sympathize with the loss in your family. You only know what these people tell you. You don’t know me. Maybe you, by reading the record, will come to a different conclusion. In [the record] there’s more that points away from me than points to me.”
Toder’s father, Sol, was unswayed.
“He’s a beast. No matter what the beast says, he’s still a beast,” he said after the sentencing. “He’s still a subspecies. I could not even look at him when he spoke to me.”
Tom Justic, one of three public defenders for Richee, said his office will appeal the conviction on several points, including the presence of a newspaper photographer on the jury and the judge allowing prior crimes to be presented at trial.
Richee was found guilty of first-degree murder in November in a case prosecutors built largely on circumstantial evidence. No murder weapon was found and none of the DNA evidence collected by investigators linked Richee to the crime scene.
During the nearly two-week trial, prosecutors described Richee, a former maintenance manager at the hotel, as a thrill killer who had sought to make Toder’s slaying look like the work of a stranger who picked a lock to get into her room.
Richee plotted the crime, perhaps for months, prosecutors said, and disabled a deadbolt lock on a doorway shared by Toder’s room and a room that was almost always vacant.
“This crime was not random. It was a sinister, premeditated act,” the judge said.
Outside the courtroom, Richee’s mother, Lindy, maintained her son is innocent. “The judge did what he had to do. My son did not kill anyone,” she said. “He’s not a killer.”
One of the assistant state’s attorneys who prosecuted the case, David Sabatini, said, “We got exactly what we thought was the proper sentence for the protection of our society [from Richee].”
Prosecution witnesses included several business owners from a Willow Springs mall that Richee was convicted of burglarizing in 1998. And a friend of Richee’s, Patrick Brennan, testified about a burglary he said he committed with Richee in 1992 at Hollywood Park, just a few blocks from the Hampton Inn. An undisclosed amount of money was taken from a safe at the park, but Richee was never charged in the case.
Prosecutors contended Richee had a penchant for “making inside jobs look like outside jobs.”
Toder’s murder had remained unsolved until 1999, when another friend of Richee’s, Michael Duello, told police Richee called him several days after the murder to have him remove a bloody towel from Richee’s bedroom.
The defense argued the towel had nothing to do with Toder’s killing but that Richee didn’t want police to get the wrong idea.
Duello also testified that Richee had told him the woman looked like she was bludgeoned with a machete, and that her feet, which investigators testified were covered, were tied up with a phone cord. After the verdict, two jurors said only the killer would have had that information.