The surviving family of Sandy Little, who was murdered more than 30 years ago at the age of 21, confronted the man who took her life and the lives of at least four other women in St. Charles court this morning.
Last year, 73-year-old Gary Muehlberg confessed to murdering five women between 1990 and 1991. He picked them up on the city's southside and then strangled them back at his home in Bel-Ridge. After killing the women, he put their bodies in various containers, which he left along roads and highways throughout the region. The macabre MO caused some to refer to Muehlberg as the Package Killer.
The cases remained unsolved for 30 years until last summer when O'Fallon Police Department Detective Jodi Weber connected Muehlberg's DNA to physical evidence from the 1990s. When confronted with this evidence, Muehlberg confessed to the murders. He was already in prison at the time, having been given a life sentence in 1995 for murdering Kenneth "Doc" Atchison.
Muehlberg previously expressed an eagerness to plead guilty to the crimes and be sentenced by the courts as quickly as possible. He told the RFT in November that he's in an honor wing of Potosi Correctional Center, and he worries that if has to spend time in a county jail, he might lose his cell.
Muehlberg got his wish today in St. Charles. He entered his plea via video link, appearing in his prison grays with a bruise underneath his left eye. He fidgeted with a pen. Muehlberg, who recently suffered a brain bleed as well as a fall that left him with bone fractures, said he has been taking muscle relaxers and pain pills.
Over the course of a 75-minute hearing, Judge Daniel Pelikan accepted Muehlberg’s guilty plea and sentenced him to another life sentence in addition to the one he is already serving.
After Muehlberg’s guilty plea but prior to his sentencing, Little's stepsister Barb Studt and half sister Geneva Valle-Palomino had the opportunity to confront Muehlberg for the first time.
"Sandy was only 21, and, regardless of the path she was on at that time, she didn't deserve to die,” Valle-Palomino said, referring to the fact that her sister was a sex worker at the time Muehlberg abducted her. "The lack of remorse you have shown is a shame. How can you sleep for 33 years knowing what you did?"
"She was a mother, a sister, a daughter," Studt added. "She left behind a baby who was less than a year old. And the impact on that child growing up without a mother has been tremendous. He has been on his own."
Several times in her statement, Valle-Palomino called Muehlberg a monster. "What happened to my sister Sandy, to all the victims, will forever be undeserved and forever will be an act of a monster."
"You've had 33 more years than any of your victims, with no remorse. It will be a blessing to this world to know you're gone, and I hope you rot in hell."
If Muehlberg was affected by any of these statements, he didn't show it. He listened with his gaze straight ahead, only hanging his head for a few moments after both women finished speaking.
Prior to handing down his sentence, the judge asked Muehlberg to recount facts of the crime to which he'd pled guilty. Muehlberg spoke in a clinical, detached way that Studt later said sounded like he was reading details from a magazine.
"I picked up this young lady in south city and took her back to my home in Bel-Ridge," Muehlberg said. "We had a relationship, and then I strangled her until she was deceased."
When Pelikan handed down the life sentence, a bystander who happened to be in the courtroom on other business spontaneously clapped and said, "That's what you get."
Pelikan ended the hearing by telling Muehlberg, "May God have mercy on your soul."
In total, Muehlberg has confessed to murdering five women between 1990 and 1991. In addition to Little, his victims include: Robyn Mihan, 18; Donna Reitmeyer, 40; and Brenda Pruitt, 27. Earlier this year, he revealed to detectives that he had killed a fifth woman, whose name he doesn't remember — if he ever knew it at all — and whose body he says he left in a steel barrel at a Ram-Jet self-service car wash. That victim is still unidentified. Muehlberg is expected to plead guilty to those murders in St. Louis County and Lincoln County courts later this month.
Studt, who lived with Little for several months in the 1980s, said after the court hearing that she was bothered both by Muehlberg being allowed to appear via video and by his being so unforthcoming about the facts of his crime.
"There was zero emotion there," Studt says. "And he didn't even mention why he kept her in his house for eight months."
Studt says she knows it's macabre, but she can't help but wonder about the final moments of her stepsister's life.
"What I imagine in my head could be worse than what it was, could not be as bad as what it was," she said. "I do think about it."
This story has been updated.
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