Eric Sutton
EDWARDS CO. – Edwards County residents were offered a sad reminder at the end of August of one of the darkest moments in crime history in their county – the death of a child at the hands of her father and an accomplice in 1997.
That would be the duo of Joseph Bradley Powell and Eric A. Sutton, who, in February of that year, engaged in the attack on Powell’s wife and 4-year-old daughter with a ball peen hammer that severely injured Powell’s wife and claimed the life of the child after her head was bashed in.
Sutton was 19 when the attack occurred; Powell was 24.
Their trials ran through early 1998 and culminated in lengthy sentences for both: Powell received a 38 year/three months sentence on the conviction for the Murder of his daughter and 8 years on the Attempted Murder of his wife; Sutton received a sentence of 27 years on the Murder conviction and separate sentencing of 14 years and 6 years on the Attempted Murder charge of Mrs. Powell.
Joseph Bradley Powell
However, due to Illinois’ truth-in-sentencing laws and all the terms and conditions that surround it, all of it designed to cut lengthy prison sentences down so that overcrowding won’t be the order of the day, these sentences are never served in full. Instead, credits are extended to the convict, resulting in his emergence back into society quite before anyone realizes it’s happened.
This is the case with Sutton, who at age 39 was released from Illinois Department of Corrections on August 22 of this year and is currently going to be serving three years of mandatory supervised release (parole) on the conviction. Sutton service just 19 years of the 27-year sentence.
It’s unclear Sutton’s whereabouts currently, but he was last imprisoned at Shawnee Correctional Center in Vienna, and it’s possible he might have remained in that location.
Powell remains in custody in Hill Correctional Center in Galesburg in upstate Illinois.
Despite the appearance of the “lengthy” sentence Powell received of 38 years, he is set to be paroled in April of 2020. He, like Sutton, will spend three years on parole. He will be 47 when he is released.
The murder of the little girl was the first murder tiny Edwards County had had in almost 100 years.
The county was visited with yet another murder about a year after the Powell/Sutton cases were resolved, when a rural Albion man, Larry Sams, was shot and killed in a random crime spree engaged in by two Indiana men, Chalk Wessell and Steve A. Hale, in April of 1999.
The two also shot Edwards County man David Chalcraft in the neck at the same location where Sams was killed; others were shot that day too, including Jeremiah Miller, 18, who was found dead in a pickup truck in Indiana; Marlin Knepp was shot off his tractor, and Pam Cook was killed on her front porch by the two, all of those occurring in southwestern Indiana.
The community was deeply scarred by all of this, but the Powell/Sutton situation is embedded in the minds of those in Edwards who read the reports of the trial, during which testimony was issued that the little girl, after the hammer attack, had been making sounds in her bed, prompting the two to realize she was still alive…and they went back in to “finish her.”
Be watching for updates on Sutton’s whereabouts if they are learned.