Slaying Suspect’s Mother Says Son Should Get Death Penalty

COLORADO SPRINGS – The mother of a Fort Carson soldier accused of sexually assaulting and then slitting the throat ofa Springs woman said her son should get the death penalty.

Robert Hull Marko, 21, is being held without bond on suspicion of first-degree murder and sexual assault with a deadly weapon in connection with the slaying of Judilianna “Judi” Lawrence, 19.

El Paso County Sheriff’s Department investigators found Lawrence’s naked body off Old Stage Road, west of Colorado Springs on Monday. A police affidavit said that investigators were led there by Marko, who admitted having “rough sex” with Lawrence and then cutting her throat as she stood next to a tree.

Lawrences mother alerted authorities when her daughter didn’t show up for class at a school for students with learning disabilities. The mother later had a sister check Lawrence’s computer and found she had been conversing with someone on MySpace and the two were to meet in person last Friday.

Investigators checking the MySpace page of Rex290, saw photos of the man in Army fatigues and read the name MARKO on the uniform. That name led them to Fort Carson Army Base where they detained and questioned Robert Marko.

On the MySpace page, Marko writes, “I’m becoming (sic) a cold hearted killer and can kill without mercy or reason.”

A woman with the MySpace name of Liz, from Claypool, Ind., identified herself on Marko’s MySpace page as his mother. She warned the girls posting comments on the page that they should be aware of what her son is accused of:

“Open (your) eyes up. This could have been one of you. I am devastated by what my son has done and I will never know how her poor mother must be going through right now, but he has not only destroyed his (life) but he has destroyed her family and his own family. I believe with all of my heart even though I am his mother I will always love him, but he deserves the death penalty for what he has done.”

She has a photo of herself with Marko in his Army uniform on her MySpace page and identifies him there as “my son.”

A man who answered the door at the family’s two-story farmhouse at the end of a dead-end gravel road Tuesday afternoon told a reporter he had no comment.

A fellow soldier from Fort Carson who said he served with Marko in Iraq also posted a comment on MySpace that Marko had a “huge imagination” and that most of the things Marko said about Iraq never happened.

“Shawn” wrote: “We never had a hard time. We had guard (duty) and we went out on patrols … but as fire fights and death were to blame for this, it is fake. He never saw blood. He never saw action to shoot at.”

“The Army had nothing to do with this except to give him a different place to live and I would bet this would of happened in Michigan, if he was there,” the poster wrote.

That sentiment was echoed by a high school friend of Markos who talked to the Kalamazoo Gazette.

Rylie Haas, now 20, told the newspaper that she exchanged e-mails with Marko as recently as about a month ago.

Haas said that Marko sometimes called himself “Raptor Robert” while in high school. “One time, he said he was going to kill everybody,” she said.

Fort Carson sources told the Colorado Springs Gazette that Marko received counseling for “an over-active imagination” after irregularities were found during a mental-health screening upon the soldier’s return in February from Iraq. Marko was deemed fit for duty after the counseling and wasn’t undergoing further treatment, the sources said.

A Fort Carson spokeswoman told a local newspaper Wednesday that Army officials don’t look at the MySpace accounts of soldiers returning from service in Iraq.

“They have First Amendment rights,” said Lt. Karen Linne.