A jail guard who shot and killed her ex-girlfriend and an uncle, wounded her grandfather and kidnapped a niece pleaded guilty Wednesday to murder and other charges.
Kim Wolfe, 44, will be sentenced to a prison term of 22 years-to-life on Nov. 2. Nassau County Court Judge David Ayres noted she could have been sentenced to 50 years to life for the two murder counts alone.
“It is my intention that you never walk the streets as a free woman, do you understand that?” Ayres told Wolfe before accepting the guilty pleas. Wolfe agreed to waive any rights to appeal her conviction or sentence.
Wolfe’s former girlfriend, 45-year-old nurse’s aide Stacie Williams, was gunned down in June 2010 outside the Nassau University Medical Center in East Meadow. The pair had met during Williams’ lunch break to discuss a possible reconciliation.
The corrections officer then went to a relative’s home about three miles away in Hempstead. There, she killed her uncle, wounded her 88-year-old grandfather and took a 23-year-old niece hostage following a dispute over life insurance policies.
Wolfe began driving the niece toward Atlantic City, N.J., but made several phone calls back to the Hempstead home. During some of those calls, police hostage negotiators persuaded her to return to the home, where she was arrested. Her niece was released unharmed.
Wolfe was a 19-year veteran at the Nassau County jail, which is next to the medical center where Williams worked the midnight shift supervising inmates. Wolfe was kept in a New York City jail for her protection while awaiting trial.
Defense attorney Michael DerGarabedian said after the court hearing that relatives, including the grandfather whom she wounded, wrote letters to the judge seeking leniency.
“This monster that came out that night is not the Kim that they know,” the attorney said. He indicated Wolfe had been suffering from depression and was suicidal the night of the shooting because of personal tragedies.
“I think certain things in her life occurred which basically took a very good person over the edge to do some very horrible things,” DerGarabedian said. He noted he has concerns for her safety in prison because of her experience working in a jail and predicted she would likely be kept in protective custody during her prison term.
“There’s certain ways that you go into prison that you don’t want to go and one of them is as a correction officer,” he said.
Williams’ relatives, however, were upset that Wolfe did not receive a stronger sentence.
“There is no justice,” Williams’ sister Patricia Bines said after the court proceeding. “She destroyed two families.”
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.