Colby student’s killer receives life sentence

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AUGUSTA – Wearing a dusky blue sports coat and dark pants, with handcuffs on his wrists and shackles on his ankles, Edward Hackett made one request Friday morning of Justice Donald Marden: He would plead guilty to killing a 21-year old Colby senior last fall “as long as you give me natural life.”

Hackett got his wish.

Marden sentenced Hackett, 47, to life in prison for the murder of Dawn Rossignol of Medway and then added another 90 years for aggravated assault, robbery and kidnapping. The sentences are to be served concurrently.

“May God have mercy on you, sir,” Marden concluded.

The day he picked Rossignol as his fourth and final victim, Hackett was a bomb waiting to explode, his defense attorney Pamela Ames of Waterville said after the hearing at Kennebec County Superior Court.

“He had told his Crisis and Counseling workers that he was a danger to himself and others. He asked them for help, and they just upped his medication,” Ames said. Crisis and Counseling is a private agency that provides mental health services.

He told crisis workers in the days before the murder that his mental status was deteriorating and he was afraid he would hurt someone, the defense attorney said. “Yet the notation by the caseworkers was that there was no psychosis present,” she said after the hearing.Assistant Attorney General William Stokes said outside the courthouse he agreed that Hackett had a tough life.

“But this is really about a choice he made,” the state prosecutor said. “He is not the victim in this case.”

Both Ames and Stokes agreed that Hackett never should have been in Maine at all. The state of Utah transferred his parole here because he wanted to be closer to his parents in Vassalboro.

“He should have never left Utah,” Stokes said.

“But the state accepted him before they ever got his mental health records,” Ames said.

She said he had been diagnosed with bipolar, paranoid schizophrenia and has schizo-affective disorder.

“These have been lifelong conditions for which he was never treated by corrections facilities where they just warehouse people and then let them go,” Ames said. “This man should have set off bells and whistles to our mental health community.”

Hackett has been in and out of jail since he was 16 years old. He has three previous convictions, two in Connecticut and one in Utah, for abducting women and attempting either to rob or rape them.

During the hearing, Hackett mumbled a simple “I’m sorry” to the court, not once looking over at the nearly two dozen members of the Rossignol family attending the hearing. He also shed a tear.

“He feels genuine remorse” and accepted responsibility for what he did, Ames said after the hearing. “He told me, ‘I can’t function in the outside world. Put me away for the rest of my life.'”

Those who spoke during the hearing also asked for life imprisonment, including Janice Kassman, dean of students at Colby College. Kassman listed Rossignol’s accomplishments, which included dean’s list status and acceptance at the Albany School of Pharmacy.

“She was beloved by her teachers, classmates and friends,” the college official said.

Kassman said that before Hackett set foot on the Colby campus, the school and its students had a sense of well-being and comfort. After the murder, the campus was “gripped by terror.”

“Dawn became everyone’s daughter, sister and friend,” she said. “If this could happen to Dawn, it could happen to anyone. If this could happen at Colby, it could happen anywhere.”

A representative of the court’s victim-witness advocate program read a statement to the court from Rossignol’s mother, Carlene Rossignol, a litany of love and of hope for their daughter’s future that was destroyed.

While the letter was read, relatives of the victim stood holding large pictures of Dawn. Both parents and many other relatives sobbed through the reading.

At least 10 deputies and police officers provided security in the courtroom, and after the sentencing Hackett was returned to the Maine State Prison in Warren.

Stokes said after the hearing that “any woman with the right characteristics [21 years old, long blonde hair parted in the middle] was Hackett’s potential victim.”

On the morning of Sept. 16, Hackett pulled into a parking lot at Colby and saw Rossignol walking to her car. “He told himself, ‘If she is still there by the time I park my car, it’s a sign,'” Stokes said.Hackett then forced Rossignol into her car at knifepoint, and they ended up at Rice Rips Road just off campus, where he brutally attacked her and killed her by smashing her head with a rock.

“The guilty plea sanitizes this,” Stokes said, “but make no mistake, this was a mean, nasty, violent event.”

In the days after the discovery of Rossignol’s body, probation and parole workers immediately began looking at Hackett as a suspect, Stokes said, but it was the thoughtful investigation by the Maine State Crime Lab that sealed the case.

Stokes said the detectives took a “blind swab of the door handle on the driver’s side of the car and came up with epithelials [skin cells] and, voila, it was his DNA from his hand.”

Stokes also said a fifth charge against Hackett for unlawful sexual contact with penetration was dropped because it was the only charge he contested.

“After talking with the family we determined we didn’t need it. We already had him for life,” the prosecutor said.

Ames said after the hearing that her client could not remember his engaging in any sexual attack.