By Tim Hrenchir
Topeka Capital-Journal
TOPEKA, Kan. — The Kansas Prisoner Review Board has denied parole to George Rainey, who shot and killed a Kansas Highway Patrol trooper in 1981.
The board decided it will next consider Rainey for parole in July 2017, said Jan Lunsford, spokesman for the Kansas Department of Corrections.
Rainey, 53, a Hutchinson Correctional Facility inmate, was sentenced to life in prison for first-degree murder in the July 11, 1981, gunshot slaying in Butler County of Ferdinand F. “Bud” Pribbenow, 47, a married father of four daughters.
Rainey also was sentenced to five to 20 years on a conviction for aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer committed later that day in Sedgwick County.
Pribbenow stopped a car for speeding 98 mph in a 55 mph zone on the Kansas Turnpike north of El Dorado before the driver, Rainey, shot him in the chest and neck, then took his service revolver.
Authorities soon afterward chased Rainey’s car until he rear-ended a van stopped at a red light at a crowded Wichita intersection and exchanged gunfire with police, who shot him six times in the head, chest and legs.
Rainey, who lived at the time in Milwaukee, Wis., said afterward he didn’t remember shooting Pribbenow.
Rainey’s attorney said Rainey had delved into voodoo in the two months before the shooting and suggested he was under a hypnotic trance at the time.
Pribbenow’s great-nephew, James Leonard, and his wife, Mimi Leonard, asked the Prisoner Review Board at a public hearing in May in Topeka to keep Rainey behind bars. Mimi Leonard said he should only leave prison “in a body bag.”
Review Board members also heard testimony against Rainey’s parole at the Topeka public hearing from Kansas Highway Patrol Maj. Mark Goodloe, who read a letter from Superintendent Col. Ernest E. Garcia.
“Just short of 31 years have passed and newspaper articles have yellowed, but the thoughts of Trooper Pribbenow’s brutal murder remain as if it happened yesterday,” the letter said. “We cannot count the losses or forget this all occurred because of the actions of one man.”
No one spoke in favor of Rainey’s parole at the Topeka public hearing.
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