Child Killer Briggs Could Get Parole

It was the sort of unspeakable crime that wasn’t supposed to happen here.

Not in sleepy Spokane. Not in 1965.

Our small-town sense of security was rocked on a June day 34 years ago with horrific news: The body of a 12-year-old boy had been found in a wooded area seven miles south of the city.

The boy had been strangled, the rope still knotted tightly around his neck.

His name was John Siverts.

He lived on the South Hill near Cannon Hill Park. His dad was a doctor. Siverts had just finished 6th grade at a Catholic school.

A witness spotted the skinny kid with a crew cut hitchhiking at Ninth and Monroe. Siverts was headed downtown to buy a belt.

That was the last time anyone saw him alive.

Siverts was supposed to take the bus. He instead accepted a ride from a monster.

His name is Melvin Harris Briggs.

Briggs was 25 at the time, but looked much younger and probably quite harmless. He was anything but.

A diagnosed sexual psychopath, Briggs had spent three years in Eastern State Hospital after choking a 7-year-old boy in King County in 1958. The hospital released him despite a psychologist’s warning that Briggs was “likely to repeat.”

Before the King County case, Briggs had already choked and sexually molested another young boy in Arizona. Both of those victims were lucky enough to live.

Like all crimes, the murder of John Siverts faded from public memory, replaced by an ever-changing array of human predators and their prey.

But Briggs’ name surfaced again the other day in a press release from the state’s Indeterminate Sentencing Review Board.

Briggs is housed with 2,000 other inmates inside the Airway Heights Corrections Center, a few miles west of Spokane.

In August, a three-member panel will visit the medium-security prison and consider whether Briggs is finally worthy of parole.

Pray he is not.

This is a man who deserves to take his last breath behind high walls and razor wire.

That was certainly the intent of the prosecutor, parole officer and judge, who gave Briggs a 99-year sentence back in 1966.

In lieu of standing trial for murder in the first degree, Briggs copped a guilty plea to second-degree murder.

But that was under the old system. In 1984, the Sentencing Reform Act came along and changed the rules of the justice game.

Not counting three-strike felons, only those convicted of aggravated first-degree murder are destined to spend their lives behind bars without the chance of parole.

Had he been sentenced under the reform act, a second-degree murderer like Briggs would have done his time and walked away from prison 20 years ago.

Those who will determine Briggs’ fate have a wide latitude. They can grant freedom or force Briggs to serve out every nanosecond of his sentence.

In 1980, a counselor at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla actually recommended the prisoner for work release. He called Briggs a person “who takes advantage of all the programs here to his best interest.”

After a public outrage, the prison wisely shot down the counselor’s foolishness. Since then, he’s been rejected for parole after several hearings.

But time goes on. Newspaper clippings yellow with age. People forget.

By all accounts, Briggs has behaved himself in prison.

That shouldn’t be too surprising. There haven’t been any young boys around to molest and strangle.

Giving Melvin Harris Briggs another chance at freedom simply poses too many risks. Too many questions.

Who would be the next boy to die?

Who would be the next parent to grieve?

“Nothing in our lives was ever the same again,” says Siverts’ mother, Connie, now living in Southern California. “I just hope they won’t allow him to go free.”