After leading officers on a foot chase, Jeffery Conrad stood waist deep in Lake Erie in August 2014, wielding a knife police later learned he had used hours before to stab his ex-girlfriend more than 55 times in the backyard of her Cuyahoga Falls home.
“What’s your objective, man?” an officer asked him during an exchange captured on a body camera video.
“I don’t have one,” Conrad calmly replied.
“What are you doing out here?” the officer asked.
“Waiting for you,” Conrad said.
The officers stunned Conrad with a Taser and hauled him out of the water.
This dramatic arrest on Aug. 28, 2014, ended what may have been a nearly 20-year crime spree by Conrad in Ohio and New York. The arrest also began Conrad’s strange odyssey through the court system to answer for his past.
Conrad, now 45, was convicted in October 2015 in Summit County Common Pleas Court of the stabbing death of 40-year-old Amanda Russell but still hasn’t been sentenced. That is because in November 2014, while in the Summit County Jail for Russell’s death, deputies say he stabbed another jail inmate in the head several times with a sharpened plunger handle. He will go on trial for this offense at 9 a.m. Monday.
When Conrad’s cases are finished in Summit County, he has a charge pending in Cuyahoga County for a 2006 rape he was tied to through DNA. He also confessed to detectives in 2014 to a 1997 murder in Albany, N.Y. He hasn’t been charged yet for the New York shooting death, but two other men who were convicted of the crime and spent nearly two decades in prison were released early in July.
Many are wondering if Conrad’s latest trial in Summit County will be as unusual as his first, which included Conrad threatening to kill his attorney, briefly representing himself and then refusing to be in court. The prosecution presented the case to the jury with no defense.
If the court proceedings leading up to the trial are any indication, the new trial also will be interesting. Conrad is refusing to speak to his latest attorney and has subpoenaed a long list of convicted murderers and rapists who were in the Summit County Jail when the plunger stabbing happened.
First trial
Police identified Conrad as a suspect in Russell’s death within hours after her teenage daughter found her bloody body facedown in the backyard of the family’s Cuyahoga Falls home.
The couple had a tumultuous relationship that prompted Russell to seek a protection order in 2012. Detectives say an altercation unfolded between Conrad and Russell in the backyard of her Eighth Street duplex on the afternoon of Aug. 28, 2014, and Conrad stabbed Russell multiple times in the neck and torso.
When Conrad’s trial began in October 2015, he was representing himself, with longtime defense attorney Don Hicks on standby. Dressed in an orange jail jumpsuit, Conrad told jurors in his opening statement that Russell was a drug addict, alcoholic and “brutal liar.”
“You’ll be able to find out for yourself who the real Amanda Russell was,” he told them.
As testimony was about to begin the next day, Hicks sat — for the first time and only time in his decades-long career — closer to prosecutors than the defendant in the courtroom. Conrad had told other jail inmates that he would grab a deputy’s gun and shoot Hicks.
Conrad requested a discussion with prosecutors to negotiate a plea deal. Prosecutors offered a 34-year sentence in exchange for a guilty plea to aggravated murder and lesser charges. Conrad quibbled over the length of the sentence, though he acknowledged he likely will spend the rest of his life in prison.
“There’s no hope for me,” he said at the time. “In 20 years, I ain’t going to be alive.”
Conrad agreed to a 30-year sentence, but Russell’s family opposed the deal.
Defeated, Conrad asked Judge Paul Gallagher if he could return to the jail and skip the rest of his trial. Gallagher explained that this would result in a one-sided presentation of the evidence.
“I’m not giving you the right to defend me,” Conrad said.
Conrad signed a waiver to be absent from court, flipped off a newspaper photographer and went back to jail.
Conrad wasn’t in court when the jury’s verdict was read. He was found guilty of two counts of aggravated murder and one count each of felonious assault, violating a protection order and domestic violence.
Conrad will be sentenced for Russell’s murder after his new trial for the jail assault.
New trial
Conrad had been in the Summit County Jail for about two months when he got into a racially tinged fight with another inmate.
Conrad is black, while Dennis McClelland is white. Deputies said Conrad stabbed McClelland in the head on Nov. 11, 2014, with a “shank” or homemade weapon that he fashioned from a plunger handle. McClelland, now 37 and serving five years for the illegal manufacturing of drugs, was taken to Cleveland Clinic Akron General, where he was treated for lacerations. Conrad refused medical treatment, according to an incident report.
Conrad was charged with attempted aggravated murder, attempted murder and felonious assault.
Since this incident, Conrad has been segregated from other inmates in the jail. He has threatened to stab jail staff, so other extra precautions are being taken. His meals are passed through a slot in his cell door rather than the door being opened. He is handcuffed any time he is moved and escorted to court by two deputies — instead of one — and without any other inmates, said Bill Holland, a spokesman for the Summit County Sheriff’s Office.
During a recent pretrial, Conrad walked into court, spotted a Beacon Journal reporter and photographer and flashed a big smile. He then held up his middle finger.
Prosecutors offered Conrad a plea agreement that would involve him pleading guilty to felonious assault, with any prison time running concurrent with his sentence for the Russell case.
“I’m not taking their offer,” Conrad told Patricia Cosgrove, a visiting judge who was sitting in for Gallagher.
Conrad isn’t representing himself in his new case, though in the weeks leading up to his trial he stopped talking to Job Perry, his latest attorney.
Perry, at Conrad’s request, subpoenaed numerous inmates as potential witnesses who were in the Summit County Jail when the plunger assault occurred. All of them are now incarcerated at prisons across the state and were returned to the jail for Perry to question them. The list includes Deshanon Jammal Haywood, sentenced to life in prison for a quadruple murder; Paul Reed, serving a life sentence for the beating death of his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend; and Adrian Milbry Sr., convicted of sexually assaulting an 11-year-old child.
“We’re going to be putting every one of them on the stand,” Conrad said. “That’s why we are calling them back.”
Stephanie Warsmith can be reached at 330-996-3705, swarsmith@thebeaconjournal.com and on Twitter: @swarsmithabj .