WTOL.com - Toledo's News Leader | Jerry Anderson interviews John Spirko -- convicted killer

Jerry Anderson interviews John Spirko -- convicted killer

TOLEDO -- For nearly 24 years, John Spirko has lived on Ohio's death row... until last week.

Governor Ted Strickland commuted John Spirko's scheduled date with death slated for one week from today.

But he didn't free Spirko, who is convicted in the 1982 kidnapping and murder of Elgin, Ohio postmistress Betty Jane Mottinger, the woman who ran Elgin's post office. John Spirko's new prison address is now Toledo -- his hometown.

Jerry Anderson interviewed him this week for a News 11 exclusive report. 

"Did you expect to die in January of 2008?" Anderson asked.

"Of course," Spirko answered.

This execution date, Spirko's seventh one assigned, seemed more certain. He'd exhausted appeals.

His attorneys pleaded for clemency. The governor, citing a lack of physical evidence, spared John Spirko's life. Still, Spirko remains anything but ecstatic. "I appreciate what the governor done. But again, life without parole. For what?"

"Did you kill Betty Jane Mottinger?" Anderson asked.

"Absolutely not. I've never seen Betty Jane Mottinger. Never been to Elgin, Ohio."

Spirko had been to prison in Kentucky following a conviction on the charge of murder. He'd been freed only days before Betty Mottinger disappeared.

Spirko was already in trouble with the law again in Toledo and coaxed his girlfriend to smuggle two saw blades into his jail cell. She was caught, faced jail time herself, and Spirko says he saw cutting a deal as his best option.

His offer was to keep his girlfriend out of jail and he'd give information on that Elgin murder case. It almost worked. He met with postal inspector Paul Hartman.

"I told him probably all kinds of things. I just made things up as I went, and he knew it." Much of what Spirko told Hartman, while gruesome, was flat-out wrong. "I said she was stabbed in the back and the front. She wasn't. She was just stabbed in the front, according to the autopsy."

Spirko had called Mottinger fat. In reality, she weighed just over 100 pounds. But for all Spirko's lies, inspector Hartman said he also heard other things. Bits of information the public didn't know -- that only a perpetrator could know.

That made John Spirko a suspect, he contended, and likely the killer.  Spirko told Anderson, "Well, we've shown that their contention is nothing but hogwash. It's lies. I didn't know anything. Not one thing. I didn't tell them anything they didn't already know."

But the case stuck. Spirko was convicted and sentenced to die.

Postal inspector Paul Hartman, with whom Anderson spoke on Thursday, not only stands by the case, the evidence and the verdict, but labels Spirko a sociopath.

There will be more of this interview on News 11 at 11 p.m. Thursday and on wtol.com Friday morning.

Posted by LS