LONDON (AP) — An American woman accused of killing her two youngest children in Colorado last December told her 11-year-old daughter who survived the attack that God made her do it, a prosecutor said in a London court.
The girl begged for her life after Kimberlee Singler stabbed her and — despite the child's plea for mercy — cut her again, prosecutor Joel Smith said.
The harrowing details came as Singler fights extradition to the United States in Westminster Magistrates’ Court.
Singler denies attacking her children and is concerned her daughter's statement to police was coerced, defense attorney Edward Fitzgerald said.
Singler should not be extradited from the United Kingdom because if she’s convicted of first-degree murder in the U.S. state of Colorado, where the killings took place, she would face life without parole — a sentence that violates European human rights law, Fitzgerald argued on Friday.
Singler, 36, is charged with two counts of first-degree murder in the shooting and stabbings of her 9-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son, and one count of attempted murder for harming her older daughter.
She faces additional counts because the children were under the age of 12, along with an additional count of assault.
Fitzgerald, who represented Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in his long extradition fight to face espionage charges in the U.S., argued that life without parole would be inhuman because it offers no prospect for release even if she is rehabilitated.
Despite the possibility that the sentence could be commuted by a Colorado governor, that would amount to “political suicide,” Fitzgerald said, citing experts who said it had not been done before.
“In Colorado, as a matter of history and political reality, there is no realistic prospect of release, whatever progress is made,” Fitzgerald said. “No matter how bad the crime, there should be some opportunity of release.”
As Fitzgerald was winding up his argument, Smith rose to say he had become aware of evidence that former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper had commuted first-degree murder sentences of six men in 2018.
Judge John Zani then adjourned the three-day hearing “in light of potentially important information" until Dec. 2 to allow lawyers to confirm a news report about the commutations and provide further arguments.
Singler, who is in custody, was in the dock and only spoke to acknowledge that she understood why the hearing was being continued.
The hearing was primarily focused on the legal issues surrounding extradition.
On Wednesday, Smith outlined new details in his opening statement.
He said that at the time of the killings, Singler was in a custody battle with her ex-husband, Kevin Wentz. He had been awarded more time with the children and she had been ordered to turn them over to him from Dec. 16-31, but had not done so.
Shortly after midnight on Dec. 19, Singler made an emergency call to Colorado Springs police.
Officers found the two youngest children, Aden Wentz, 7, and Elianna “Ellie” Wentz, 9, dead in bed together in their apartment. They had been shot and stabbed, Smith said.
Singler's older daughter, identified in court papers only by her initials, M.W., was seriously wounded.
Singler, who had superficial knife wounds, was initially considered a victim in what was reported as a burglary, police said.
“She would later tell police that she had woken on (Dec. 18) feeling ‘weird’ and ‘woozy,’ and that the children had seemed drowsy as well,” Smith said. “She said that she suspected her former partner (the children’s father) of killing them, or organizing to have them killed. She said that a ‘dark figure’ had entered her apartment and that she had fainted.”
Singler's ex-husband, however, had a solid alibi, Smith said. He was driving a truck that had GPS tracking.
The daughter who survived her attack initially told police that a man entered their home from the patio and attacked them. But after recovering from her wounds and being transferred to a foster home, she told a caretaker that her mother was responsible and had asked her to lie to police.
The girl said Singler gave the children milk with a powdery medicine to drink and told them to close their eyes as she guided them into one of the children's bedrooms, Smith said.
“The defendant told her that God was telling her to do it, and that the children’s father would take them away,” Smith said.
DNA tests on the weapons found a mixture of blood matching the children and their mother. An empty bottle of sleeping pills was also found in the house.
After her daughter changed her story, police sought to arrest Singler on Dec. 26 in Colorado but she had fled abroad. She was caught in London’s posh Chelsea neighborhood four days later.
Colorado Springs Police Department investigators and officers work on the scene of a burglary that resulted in the deaths of two people at the Palomino Ranch apartment complex on Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2023 in Colorado Springs, Colo. ( Parker Seibold/The Gazette via AP)
Colorado Springs Police Department investigators and officers work on the scene of a burglary that resulted in the deaths of two people at the Palomino Ranch apartment complex on Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2023 in Colorado Springs, Colo. (Parker Seibold/The Gazette via AP)
WASHINGTON (AP) — American consumers and home buyers, business people and political leaders have been waiting for months for what the Federal Reserve is poised to announce this week: That it's cutting its key interest rate from a two-decade peak.
It's likely to be just the first in a series of rate cuts that should make borrowing more affordable now that the Fed has deemed high inflation to be all but defeated.
Consider Kelly Mardis, who owns Marcel Painting in Tempe, Arizona. About a quarter of Mardis' business comes from real estate agents who are prepping homes for sale or from new home buyers. Customer queries, he recalls, quickly dropped almost as soon as the Fed started jacking up interest rates in March 2022 — and then kept raising rates through July 2023.
As the housing market contracted, Mardis had to lay off about half his staff of 30. It was the worst dry spell he had experienced in 14 years.
After the Fed begins cutting rates on Wednesday, Mardis envisions brighter times ahead. Typically, a succession of Fed rate cuts leads over time to lower borrowing costs for things like mortgages, auto loans, credit cards and business loans.
“I'm 100% sure it would make a difference,” Mardis said. “I'm looking forward to it.”
At the same time, plenty of uncertainty still surrounds this week's Fed meeting.
How much will the policymakers decide to reduce their benchmark rate, now at 5.3%? By a traditional quarter-point or by an unusually large half-point?
Will they keep loosening credit at their subsequent meetings in November and December and into 2025? Will lower borrowing costs take effect in time to bolster an economy that is still growing at a solid pace but is clearly showing cracks?
Chair Jerome Powell emphasized in a speech last month in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, that the Fed is prepared to cut rates to support the job market and achieve a notoriously difficult “soft landing.” That is when the central bank manages to curb inflation without tipping the economy into a steep recession and causing unemployment to surge.
It's not entirely clear that the Fed can pull it off.
One hopeful sign is that as Powell and other Fed officials have signaled that rate cuts are coming, many interest rates have already fallen in anticipation. The average 30-year mortgage rate dropped to 6.2% last week — the lowest level in about 18 months and down from a peak of nearly 7.8%, according to the mortgage giant Freddie Mac. Other rates, like the yield on the five-year Treasury note, which influences auto loan rates, have also tumbled.
“That really does help lower those borrowing costs across the board," said Kathy Bostjancic, chief economist at Nationwide Financial. “That helps to give nice relief to consumers.”
Businesses can now borrow at lower rates than they've been able to for the past year or so, potentially boosting their investment spending.
“The question is if it's helping quickly enough ... to actually deliver the soft landing that everyone's been hoping for," said Gennadiy Goldberg, head of U.S. rates strategy at TD Securities.
Many economists would like to see the Fed announce a half-point rate cut this week, in part because they think the officials should have begun cutting rates at their previous meeting in July. Wall Street traders on Friday signaled their expectation that the Fed will carry out at least two half-point cuts by year's end, according to futures prices.
Yet Goldberg suggested that there would be downsides to implementing a half-point rate cut this week. It might signal to the markets that the Fed's policymakers are more worried about the economy than they actually are.
“Markets could assume that something is wrong and the Fed sees something quite terrible on the horizon,” Goldberg said.
It could also raise expectations for additional half-point cuts that the Fed might not deliver.
In the long run, more important than Wednesday's Fed action is the pace of rate cuts through next year and the ultimate end point. If Fed officials conclude that inflation is essentially defeated and they no longer need to slow the economy, that would suggest that their key rate should be at a more “neutral” setting, which could be as low as 3%. That would require a series of further rate cuts.
Many economists think the economy needs much lower rates. Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG, notes that hiring has averaged just 116,000 a month for the past three months, a level equivalent to the sluggish job growth coming out of the 2008-2009 Great Recession. The unemployment rate has risen by nearly a full percentage point to 4.2%.
“There is a fragility out there when you are not hiring at a very strong pace," Swonk said. “This is still a much weaker labor market then we thought we had.”
Still, Fed rate cuts may provide a crucial boost to the economy just when it's needed.
Michele Raneri, head of U.S. research at TransUnion, a credit monitoring company, noted that lower rates typically lead consumers to refinance high interest-rate debt — principally credit card borrowing — into lower-cost personal loans. Doing so would ease their financial burdens.
And once mortgage rates fall below 6%, Raneri said, more homeowners will likely be willing to sell, rather than holding on to their house out of reluctance to swap a low mortgage rate for a much higher one. More home sales would help relieve the supply crunch that's made it hard for younger people to buy a first home.
“That starts to break up this logjam that we’ve been in where there’s a low inventory of houses,” Raneri said. “We need some people to start moving to start that churn.”
Other small businesses are seeing signs that the churn is picking up. Brittany Hart, who owns a software consulting firm in Phoenix that works with mortgage brokers, wealth managers and banks, is noticing more interest from potential clients in adopting new software to boost efficiency. That is because they expect the housing market to pick up.
Hart has started looking for three new employees to help handle the expected business, to add to the roughly 20 employees she has now.
“This is the first leading indicator that we are getting back to that normal activity in the housing market," she said.
FILE - A screen displays a news conference with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange in New York, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)
FILE - Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell speaks during a news conference at the Federal Reserve in Washington, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)
