Frawley admits other crimes

Brian William Frawley cruised the streets of Spokane at night searching for vulnerable women walking alone to kidnap and rape, a prosecutor said, and he now faces 52 years in prison for the three times he got caught.

The 26-year-old convicted killer agreed to plead guilty Wednesday to four charges that will eliminate the need for prosecutors to subject his remaining two victims to kidnapping and rape trials.

“To say (the victims) came here lightly or feeling that this was a winning situation for them would be inaccurate,” Deputy Prosecutor Andi Jakkola said. “They have both struggled with the event that took place with the defendant.”

Superior Court Judge Neal Rielly sentenced Frawley to about 46 years in prison in March after a jury found him guilty of kidnapping, raping and killing 20-year-old Margaret Cordova on Jan. 17, 2004.

Months before that trial, Frawley received a four-year sentence after he pleaded guilty to seven lesser charges, including failing to register as a sex offender.

On Wednesday, Frawley got a five-year sentence after he pleaded guilty to two counts of third-degree assault with sexual motivation and two counts of harassment. All four counts were reduced from the original charges of kidnapping and rape.

Since all the sentences run consecutively, Frawley will be 79 before he is eligible for parole, if the state does not give him credit for good time.

Rielly said he believes the plea bargain was a fair agreement.

“That doesn’t mean that five years even comes close to addressing what has happened to you,” Rielly told one of the victims who attended the hearing. “What Mr. Frawley did to you is just terrible. But I think (the agreement) brings safety to our community when you look at the totality of time here.

“I think it holds Mr. Frawley accountable and it avoids further trials in this matter that can be so damaging to so many people involved in this.”

At age 17, Frawley was convicted of child rape in Cowlitz County. When he came to Spokane four years ago, according to court records, he was a fugitive from pending assault charges in Yakima County, and he failed to register as a sex offender.

The plea agreement Wednesday combined two cases from the spring of 2004, after Cordova had been killed but before investigators had obtained the DNA tests that linked Frawley to that killing.

On April 18, a woman told Spokane County sheriff’s detectives that she accepted a ride from Frawley, who eventually drove her to a construction site in Spokane Valley. He raped her and left her gagged and tied to a tree, according to court records.

Then, on June 5, just five days before the DNA evidence came back in the Cordova case, a woman said Frawley picked her up in downtown Spokane. He drove her to Peaceful Valley where he raped her at gunpoint, according to court records.

That woman told police that Frawley demanded her money – $2 – before releasing her. Frawley told the woman to hurry if she didn’t want to die and that she was lucky he wasn’t doing to her what he had done to other women, court records state.

Rielly on Wednesday asked Frawley if he had any comments. Frawley, who was wearing white Spokane County Jail coveralls and a scruffy beard, said: “I have nothing to say.”

But his victim read a poem that she prepared for the hearing.

“I used to have what I thought was a perfect life,” the poem read, in part.

“You killed all that I love and left me alone to see all that I once was and all I never again can be.”

Assistant Public Defender Richard Mathisen said drugs skewed Frawley’s view of the world. He said his client has a lot to offer society.

“Like anyone who comes before the court, Mr. Frawley is more than the sum of his past actions,” Mathisen said. “I have come to know him as an intelligent, reasonably insightful and often humorous person. Actually I find him pretty good company.”

Unfortunately, Jakkola said, Frawley sought the company of women who were at risk.

“Clearly, life for them is a struggle,” she said of the two victims in the plea agreement. “That is why he chose them.”

Jakkola said Cordova fit that same mold.

“But she fought and he killed her,” Jakkola said. “The other two women weren’t going to fight, which in the end is why they are alive.”