Inmate admits to the killing; state attorney seeks death penalty for Enoch Hall
By Ludmilla Lelis
Orlando Sentinel
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DAYTONA BEACH — “I snapped. I killed her.”
Witnesses said they heard prison inmate Enoch Hall say that repeatedly on the night corrections Officer Donna Fitzgerald was killed.
However, newly released documents don’t confirm one allegation in the case: that she had been raped as well as slain.
Testing couldn’t confirm “foreign” DNA on her body, the reports said.
These details were released Thursday, shortly after Hall appeared in court for his arraignment.
Hall is charged with first-degree murder in Fitzgerald’s June 25 death at the state prison in Daytona Beach.
State Attorney John Tanner is seeking the death penalty against Hall, who already is serving a life sentence for a 1993 rape and kidnapping.
“We hope the results of this trial will act as a deterrent to other inmates who might consider killing or harming a corrections officer,” Tanner said.
In court, Tanner read aloud the indictment against Hall, to which Assistant Public Defender Jim Valerino said that Hall would plead not guilty.
Tanner pressed for a trial within the next six months, and Chief Circuit Judge J. David Walsh scheduled a Sept. 23 pretrial hearing.
After Thursday’s hearing, several reports and three CDs of crime-scene photos were released, offering a more detailed account of what investigators first found at the scene.
The reports say Fitzgerald went inside a prison work building to look for Hall, and that he attacked her and stabbed her repeatedly with a knife fashioned out of sheet metal.
Earlier that day, Hall had consumed four white pills, hoping to get high, then lingered at the work building to look for more pills, the documents said.
Early reports suggested Fitzgerald had been sexually assaulted, and the new reports confirm that Fitzgerald’s body was found partially undressed.
Hall denied he had raped her.
Copyright 2008 Orlando Sentinel