Suspect avoided death penalty by leading officers to girl's body

TACOMA — As police searched for 12-year-old Zina Linnik in the days after she was abducted from her Tacoma neighborhood, prosecutors were faced with a difficult decision.

With a man in custody, but no way of knowing whether Zina was still alive, Pierce County Prosecuting Attorney Gerald Horne weighed an offer that could potentially spare the lives of both victim and suspect.

"We were afraid that time was running out," Horne said Monday. "Had the suspect stashed Zina? Was she bound and abandoned but actually alive? Was she imprisoned somewhere? Did she need water? There was only one who could answer those questions: the suspect."

So Horne offered Terapon Adhahn a deal: Take investigators to the little girl and prosecutors would not seek the death penalty in the event she was dead.

On July 12, eight days after she was kidnapped from outside her family's home, Adhahn led police to a rural area west of Eatonville. There they found the girl's body. She had been killed by a blow to the head.

With members of Zina's family seated behind him, Horne said during a news conference Monday that his office will honor the verbal agreement he struck with Adhahn's defense attorneys and will not seek the death penalty. The announcement came just hours after Adhahn, 42, was charged with aggravated first-degree murder, first-degree kidnapping and first-degree rape in the abduction and slaying of the girl.

A conviction for aggravated first-degree murder carries only two possible punishments in Washington state: life in prison without parole or execution.

As a result, if Adhahn is convicted of the charges filed Monday he will spend the rest of his life behind bars.

However, police continue to investigate him in connection with attacks on other girls, including the murder of 10-year-old Adre'Anna Jackson, whose body was found four months after she disappeared in December 2005.

Horne would not comment on whether prosecutors would pursue the death penalty if Adhahn faces additional murder charges.

During a brief arraignment Monday, Adhahn's attorney opted to hold off entering a plea to the charges filed in connection with Zina's death. A judge entered a plea of not guilty on Adhahn's behalf.

Adhahn did not speak during the hearing.

The judge set Adhahn's bail at $5 million, which is in addition to the $2,025,000 bail a judge set last week after Adhahn was charged in connection with attacks on two other girls and for failing to register as a sex offender.

Charging papers filed Monday in connection with Zina's death spelled out the case prosecutors are building against the 42-year-old handyman and laborer.

Adhahn's DNA was matched to DNA found on the girl, charging papers allege. An autopsy showed that Zina died of blunt trauma to the head, according to charging papers, but the time of death could not be determined.

Horne, during the news conference, said she died from a blow to her head that did not break the skin or fracture her skull but caused internal bleeding of the brain. She also had two other injuries that were not fatal, Horne said.

Charging papers said she died at a different location from where her body was found but do not speculate on where she was killed.

Charging documents allege that a co-worker of Adhahn's told police that on July 5 — a day after the girl's disappearance — Adhahn's van was unusually clean and appeared to have been vacuumed out.

Other co-workers told police that on that same day Adhahn told them that he "needed to get out of the country and go to Thailand," court charging papers said.

The co-workers said the statement was not something Adhahn, a Thai immigrant, would normally say.

In defending his deal with Adhahn, Horne said he supports the death penalty. But his decision to offer the deal was based on the need for prompt information, he said.

"So we agreed to take the death penalty off the table to get help from the suspect," Horne said.

Years earlier, Horne's office refused to honor a plea deal make by prosecutors in Spokane that spared the life of convicted serial killer Robert Lee Yates.

Spokane prosecutors had agreed not to seek capital punishment in order to garner confessions from Yates. Yates subsequently confessed to a series of murders, including two in Pierce County. But Pierce County refused to be constrained by the Spokane agreement and in 2002 won two death-penalty convictions against Yates, who is now on death row.

One of Zina's uncles, Anatoly Kalchik, said during Monday's news conference that the family is happy the death penalty could be used as a tool to get information about the girl's fate.

"Authorities promised to take it off the table and he showed us where [the body] is," Kalchik said. "Her body was found and we could bury her with dignity and now we know that she rest in peace."

Zina's father, who had given police a description of the suspect, his van and a partial license plate that led detectives to Adhahn, sat with his hands in his lap and his eyes toward the floor. Occasionally, he looked up and swallowed hard.

Adhahn was first taken into custody on July 8 by Tacoma police. He was arrested the following day on charges of failing to register as a sex offender and was held in federal detention on immigration charges.

Adhahn was booked into the Pierce County Jail and charged last week with seven counts of rape for repeated assaults against a girl who lived with him for four years, and three counts of rape and one count of kidnapping in connection with an attack on an 11-year-old girl in 2000.

He was also charged with one count of failing to register as a sex offender in connection with a 1990 conviction for first-degree incest.

According to court documents, Adhahn allegedly abducted the 11-year-old girl while she was walking to school alone on May 31, 2000. Prosecutors say Adhahn threatened the girl with a knife, duct-taped her hands, mouth and eyes and then drove to a remote training area in woods on the Fort Lewis base, where he repeatedly raped her.

A DNA sample was taken from that victim. Pierce County Deputy Prosecutor Ed Murphy said a crime lab has matched the DNA sample to Adhahn.

Adhahn is also charged with repeatedly raping a girl who moved in with him in 2001 when she was 12 because her mother had unspecified troubles that made her unable to care for her. The girl, now 19 and living in Wichita, Kan., told Tacoma detectives that she was raped at least 150 to 200 times over the course of the four years she lived with him.

Christine Clarridge: 206-464-8983 or cclarridge@seattletimes.con

Information from Seattle Times staff reporter Jennifer Sullivan is included in this report.