Arrasmith Tells Jury His Side Of Story Defendant In Double-Murder Says He ‘Never’ Intended To Kill Victims
At various times he was “dumbfounded,” a father tortured by the thought of having delivered his daughter to “sexual predators,” and now, a man trapped in a nightmare.
“These are things you would read in a cheap paperback police story,” Ken Arrasmith said as he testified in his double-murder trial Friday.
Taking his first shot at conveying what it has been like to deal with the sexual assault of his 15-year-old daughter by a Clarkston, Wash., couple, he said, “It was the beginning of a nightmare that’s still going.”
Arrasmith took jurors part way through a narrative of events leading to the couple’s murder, speaking in dismayed tones of learning how Ron and Luella Bingham drugged, raped and threatened his daughter and how police seemed to drag their feet in bringing the two to justice.
His testimony, cut short by a scheduled noon break for the weekend, aimed to show the Binghams’ murder was not premeditated but borne from what defense lawyer Craig Mosman called the “cumulative effect” of events.
Arrasmith is facing two first-degree murder charges - and a possible death penalty - for gunning down the couple on May 17. Mosman’s questioning did not lead up to the actual murder, but after asking Arrasmith to describe himself, he asked: “Did you ever intend to kill either Ron or Luella Bingham?”
“Never,” Arrasmith said emphatically.
Arrasmith, described in earlier testimony as a regular user of methamphetamine, said he was a devoted, albeit twice-divorced, father, a “cowboy, truck driver, basically kind of straight” guy. Even while driving cargo to California, he was in regular contact with his four children, including 15-year-old Cynthia.
She was a troubled child who had moved out of her mother’s Lewiston home, he said.
So when he learned last April that she had moved in with the Binghams, a married couple living two blocks from his own parents, he felt it was better than her “running to California to live in a drug-infested environment.”
But in early May he was told the Binghams were making her sleep with them.
Asked how this made him feel, he said: “About like I feel right now - pretty sick. I was, I don’t even know how to explain it. When you take your daughter to somebody’s house and you leave her there and something’s happened to her, as a father, I had fed my daughter to a predator. That’s how I felt.”
Arrasmith said he was “dumbfounded” that a Nez Perce County sheriff’s captain would not interview him about Cynthia’s sexual abuse until the day after he called to report it. Then the captain read to him a 2-week-old eyewitness report of Cynthia being raped by the couple and having her pubic hair shaved by Ron Bingham.
“There is no way to explain how hurt - sick, miserable, rotten - I don’t know how to explain it,” he said firmly but without tears. “I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy. This is the worst thing you could wish on anyone. To have your child violated by two animals.”
With that ringing in the jurors’ ears, the court recessed for the weekend. Final testimony and closing arguments are expected Monday.
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