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BY DOUG HARLOW and DARLA PICKETT
Staff Writers 01/02/2009

SKOWHEGAN — The year comes to a close this week with two convicted murderers behind bars, but no sentencing dates as family and friends of victims Cheryl Murdoch and Rhonda Wakefield-Reynolds look to 2009 for closure.

Those who knew Cheryl Murdoch wept July 2 when Shannon Atwood, 38, of Canaan was found guilty of murdering her in the summer of 2006.
Justice Nancy Mills delivered her decision in Somerset County Superior Court following a five-day, jury-waived trial.

Atwood was convicted of murdering Murdoch, then 38, and leaving her bludgeoned body in the woods of rural Canaan, where police discovered it on Aug. 11, 2006.

The charge that he also murdered his estranged wife, Shirley Moon Atwood, 35, was dropped in November 2007. She has been missing since April 2006.
The verdict ended months of rumor and speculation surrounding a highly-publicized case that included widespread searches of the Canaan woods, for first Murdoch and then for Shirley Moon Atwood, who has never been found.

After the verdict, defense attorney John Alsop sought a retrial, saying that Justice Mills had used a hairdresser whom Atwood had been convicted of beating in 1993. Atwood served 12 years in prison for that crime.

Mills acknowledged that she had read a newspaper account about the hairdresser, Jennifer Nickerson, prior to delivering her verdict, but in October, denied the request for a new trial. The judge said she never finished reading the story once she realized she had known Nickerson.
Mills also pointed out that she had told Atwood’s defense team about the situation prior to rendering her verdict, and they had not objected at the time.

However, in a document filed Nov. 24, Mills removed herself from the case before sentencing, saying the information surrounding the case created a circumstance in which the court’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned.
Assistant Attorney General Andrew Benson said because the case has been assigned to a new judge, there will be a delay in sentencing.
The new judge will have to read the transcript of the trial, he said.

In the same Skowhegan courtroom in early November, Justice Andrew Horton, also in a jury-waived trial, found Richard Reynolds, 42, of Waterville, guilty in the 2007 murder of his estranged wife, Rhonda Wakefield-Reynolds.
Horton told the court he did not believe the assertions of defense attorney Peter Barnett that Wakefield-Reynolds, 37, had been shot by accident and that Reynolds had intended to kill himself, not his wife, as he had testified under oath.

Wakefield-Reynolds was shot in the head as she sat on a mattress on the floor of her brother’s home on Bunker Avenue in Fairfield on Jan. 12, 2007.

The couple’s two sons, then 4 and 6, were in the next room.

She died the following day.

Barnett attempted to show that his client loved his wife and had intended to shoot himself that morning. He never denied that Reynolds shot his wife.

“He knows he is guilty of manslaughter,” Barnett told the judge. “He is not a killer.”

But Justice Horton was having none of it, noting that Reynolds had written a note to his older son from a previous marriage, saying he would do anything to prevent the courts from returning his younger sons into the “hands of the devil.”
The judge also noted that Reynolds never sought to assist his dying wife after he shot her, did not call for help and never stopped to dial 911 during what the judge said had to have been an “oh-my-God moment” for him, especially if he had not intended to kill his wife.

Rhonda Wakefield-Reynolds’ father, Kempton Wakefield Sr. of Fairfield, a former Waterville police dispatcher, sat through the entire trial, often staring hard at Reynolds.

“He killed my daughter, and now he’s going to get what he deserves,” Wakefield said later. “I hope they put him in there for the rest of his life and not let him see daylight.”

Sally Rogers, assistant clerk at superior court in Skowhegan, said no date has been set yet for Reynolds to be sentenced.

Doug Harlow — 474-9534 ext. 342
dharlow@centralmaine.com

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