Miss. prosecutors will seek death against suspect in killings of eight people
BROOKHAVEN, Miss. -- Prosecutors will seek the death penalty against a Mississippi man accused of shooting eight people to death, including a deputy sheriff.
Willie Cory Godbolt pleaded not guilty Monday.
He's been indicted on four counts of capital murder, four counts of murder, one of attempted murder, two of kidnapping and one of armed robbery.
Assistant District Attorney Brendon Adams says prosecutors will seek the death penalty on the capital murder counts.
Godbolt has been jailed without bail since his May 28 arrest, hours after the killings in Lincoln County.
The first shootings happened at the home of Godbolt's in-laws. His mother-in-law, Barbara Mitchell; sheriff's deputy William Durr; and two others were killed there.
Godbolt reportedly showed up at the home in the southern Mississippi town of Bogue Chitto to demand that his estranged wife give up their two children. She and the kids had been staying with them for about three weeks, stepfather-in-law Vincent Mitchell told the Associated Press last year.
A deputy responded, and that's when Godbolt allegedly opened fire. Mitchell said he escaped along with Godbolt's wife, but Mitchell's wife, her sister and one of the wife's daughters were killed. Also slain was Lincoln County Sheriff's Deputy William Durr, a two-year sheriff's department veteran and former police officer in nearby Brookhaven, where authorities said Godbolt fled and killed four more people at two other homes.
Godbolt gave his own account of what happened in an interview with The Clarion-Ledger as he sat with his hands cuffed behind his back on the side of a road in Brookhaven just after the killings.
"I was having a conversation with her stepdaddy and her mama and her, my wife, about me taking my children home," he said. "Somebody called the officer, people that didn't even live at the house. That's what they do. They intervene."
"They cost him his life," he said, apparently referring to Durr. "I'm sorry."
"My pain wasn't designed for him. He was just there," Godbolt said. "I ain't fit to live, not after what I done."
