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Friday, March 12, 2010
Man Admits To Slaying Girlfriend
By Scott Sandlin
Journal Staff Writer
A murder case that garnered national attention as the first use of a federal law that makes it a separate crime to kill an unborn child while causing the mother's death ended Thursday with a guilty plea to a lesser crime.
Frederick Beach, appearing before U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert Scott, pleaded guilty to the second-degree murder of his estranged girlfriend Verlinda Kinsel in September 2008 west of Gallup on the Navajo Reservation. Both Beach and Kinsel are enrolled members of the Navajo Tribe.
He faces up to life in prison when he is sentenced later this spring.
Beach, 39, assaulted Kinsel with an aluminum baseball bat after both had pulled over on the shoulder of a road at the intersection of Stillwater Wash and Rocky Point Road. According to a criminal complaint, Beach wanted to rekindle their on-and-off relationship and encountered Kinsel as he was driving back to Gallup from her home.
The two got into an argument, and he began pulling her hair, pulling her to the ground and kicking her repeatedly before retrieving the bat from the front seat of his car, according to the complaint.
After pummeling her, Beach put the bat in the trunk of his vehicle and fled. He returned home and later turned himself in to Navajo Nation authorities.
The beating was witnessed by at least one of her three children, a 9-year-old boy.
Beach was charged in December 2008 with first-degree murder and with causing the death of her unborn child under the 2004 Unborn Victims of Violence Act. A superseding indictment filed a year later, however, eliminated the charge.
Defense lawyers Amy Sirignano and Michael Davis argued that the government could not have proved the unborn child count, anyway.
"Even the government's own evidence reveals that the claim that Ms. Kinsel was pregnant is dubious," they said in a motion seeking dismissal of the count.
An expert hired by the defense offered the opinion that the absence of an amniotic sac meant Kinsel was not pregnant.
Prosecutors dropped the charge in a new indictment, and the issue was moot.
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