Emanuel Lovell Webb Pleads No Contest to Three Murders of Women in Bridgeport's East End
DNA in a national database had tied Webb to the killings years after he left Connecticut for Georgia. He was later sentenced to 60 years.
Published
Between 1990 and 1993, four women were found dead in separate places in Bridgeport's East End. On May 22, 2008, Emanuel Lovell Webb entered conditional pleas of no contest to the murders of three of them, and the court found him guilty.
The pleas covered the deaths of Sharon Cunningham in April 1990, Minnie Sutton in March 1992 and Elizabeth "Maxine" Gandy in April 1993. Webb kept the right to appeal a May 6 ruling that joined the three cases and allowed prosecutors to use evidence of a death in Georgia to prove his identity. He had moved to Georgia, where he pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in the 1994 death of Evelyn Charity and was paroled in 2001. Detectives later matched his DNA in the national CODIS database to evidence from the Bridgeport cases, and he was extradited to Connecticut.
On June 23, 2008, Webb was sentenced to 60 years in prison on each count, to run concurrently. Prosecutors dropped the fourth murder charge, in the death of Sheila Etheridge. The Connecticut Appellate Court upheld the convictions in May 2011.
Webb was charged with four Bridgeport murders but convicted of three; the charge in the death of Sheila Etheridge was dropped at sentencing.
Sources
- State v. Webb, No. 31710, Appellate Court of Connecticut (via FindLaw)
- 'East End Killer' Extradited, Charged with Four Deaths, The Justice Journal