A 40-year-old Kent-area man was sentenced June 18 to 50 years in prison for killing his 3-year-old stepdaughter in 2003 in an attempt to recover life insurance money from the girl’s death.<\/p>\n
A King County Superior Court jury found Joel Zellmer guilty of second-degree murder April 28 for the drowning death of Ashley McLellan at a pool in his backyard.<\/p>\n
King County Superior Court Judge Catherine Shaffer issued the sentence in Seattle.<\/p>\n
King County Sheriff’s Office detectives arrested Zellmer in 2007 at his home in the 22000 block of 159th Avenue Southeast in unincorporated King County, east of Kent.<\/p>\n
Zellmer was married to McLellan’s mother, Stacey Ferguson, at the time of the girl\u2019s death. Zellmer said he found McLellan in the family pool at his home at about 5:30 p.m. on Dec. 3, 2003. McLellan never regained consciousness and died two days later. Ferguson was not at home during the incident.<\/p>\n
According to court documents, after initially ruling the drowning an accident, investigators from the sheriff\u2019s office reopened the case after finding that the death fit a pattern of bizarre injuries and near-drownings to young children of women that Zellmer dated or married.<\/p>\n
Zellmer had convinced Ferguson, whom he had married three months before Mclellan’s death, to take out a $200,000 life insurance policy on the girl’s life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A 40-year-old Kent-area man was sentenced June 18 to 50 years in prison for killing his 3-year-old stepdaughter in 2003 in an attempt to recover life insurance money from the girl’s death.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-3577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3577"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3577\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3577"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=3577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}