Woman denies having anything to do with murders
URBANA — Champaign County jurors will have to decide Wednesday if they believe Crystal Myrick’s denials that she had anything to do with the murders of Jerry and Sue Haigh.
“I wasn’t really thinking. I was just so angry at Sean (Kelly). I was making stuff up that I got out of newspapers and off TV shows,” said the 32-year-old mother of five, accused of participating in the fatal beatings and stabbings of the Champaign couple in their home on July 1, 2006.
Myrick was the only defense witness to testify Tuesday after Assistant State’s Attorney Troy Lozar rested his case in chief against her. She did so against the advice of her court-appointed attorney, Walter Ding of Champaign.
Myrick was on the stand about an hour and after a nettlesome cross-examination by Lozar, she leaned over with her head in a wastebasket as if she was going to vomit. She said suffers from panic attacks.
Myrick said she was never at the 1702 Scottsdale Drive home and that the statements she gave to Champaign police detectives saying that she was there with Kelly, 37, and her uncle, Russell Pitcher, 52, were merely tales she created because she was angry with Kelly for having testified against her in an earlier residential arson case.
Myrick was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison for setting a small fire on the side of Kelly’s grandmother’s home on Park Street in Urbana in December 2006. Days after her motion to reconsider her sentence for that was denied in October 2007, Myrick told Champaign investigators about the Haighs’ murders, implicating herself and the others. It was the first break police had in the case in more than a year because physical evidence at the home had been thoroughly washed away.
Kelly has since pleaded guilty to Jerry Haigh’s murder and is serving a 50-year prison sentence. Pitcher’s case is unresolved but he admitted taking part in the killings and agreed to testify against Myrick in hopes of getting a reduced prison sentence, he testified last week.
Myrick said besides news accounts, she also gleaned details about the Haigh home from a cellmate at the Champaign County jail who used to live in their neighborhood. She admitted giving “at least four” versions of what happened to Champaign detectives.
“I was not there. I lied,” she said, adding that she was living in Indiana with another man at the time of the murders. Kelly and Pitcher never told her anything about the killings, she said.
Asked why they would say she was there, she replied: “I don’t know why they would do that. Maybe they’re angry at me for bringing them up.”
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