Man gets sentenced to death for killing wife

A Crafton Heights man was formally sentenced Monday by an Allegheny County judge to die by lethal injection for first-degree murder in the stabbing death of his wife.

Connie Williams, 51, was convicted Jan. 25 by a jury, which set the penalty at death in the slaying and dismemberment of Frances Williams, 53, in August 1999.

Common Pleas Judge Lawrence O'Toole also sentenced Williams to a consecutive one to two years in prison for abuse of a corpse for cutting off the victim's head, hands and feet in an attempt to cover up the crime.

After Williams had claimed his wife left him in August 1999, police continued to question him and used a chemical spray that detected the presence of blood in the basement of the couple's Clearview Avenue home.

In January 2000, Williams admitted to detectives that he had stabbed his wife in the chest during an argument, then dismembered her body in the basement.

He led investigators to where he threw the body, wrapped in a blanket, over a hillside on the North Side, and to the other body parts buried in McKees Rocks, near Kennedy Township.

The prosecution cited as an aggravating circumstance that warranted the death penalty Wlliams' conviction on second-degree murder in the 1974 stabbing death of his girlfriend's landlord.

Williams had been sentenced to seven to 20 years in prison for the fatal stabbing, in which he left the victim's body under a bed to rot. He was released after serving seven years in Western Penitentiary.