Prosecutors Play Taped Confession

A teenager who admitted tying up his younger sister and her best friend and suffocating them with plastic bags told police he wasn’t trying to kill them.

The taped confession of Daniel Betournay, 15, of College Place, was played Wednesday during the third day of his murder trial in Walla Walla County Superior Court.

“I didn’t want to kill them. I just wanted to tie them up,” Betournay said on the tape.

He has admitted killing his sister, April, and her friend, Beth Garbe, both 14, shortly after they returned home from school on Dec. 14. But his lawyer contends he suffers from diminished mental capacity and cannot be convicted of first-degree murder.

On the tape, Betournay said it was “common sense” that the girls would die if he taped bags over their heads. “But I didn’t think about it,” he said.

Betournay said he planned to surprise his older sister when she got home that afternoon. Then he planned to take her car and run away from home. His plans changed when his younger sister and Garbe arrived home first that afternoon.

“I just got going with the idea and didn’t even think about anything else. Not a rage. Not anger or anything. Just did it.”

About seven minutes of the inter view weren’t taped because investigators didn’t notice the tape had ended. During that time, Betournay talked about his “curiosity about dying and death,” testified Capt. Mike Humphreys of the Walla Walla County Sheriff’s Department.

“He wanted to know what it would be like to die or to see someone die,” Humphreys said.